Can I tell you about a confession that didn’t work?

Picture doing everything right. You feel it, really feel it, not the performed version. You say the words. You mean them. “This happened because I drifted from God.” Honest. Unflinching. The kind of admission that, if a friend said it to you, you’d think: okay, they get it, they’re going to be fine.

And God’s response is to keep hiding His face anyway.

I find that genuinely unsettling, and I think it’s supposed to be.

Because if I walk into Elul assuming teshuvah means “feel bad about what I did, resolve to do better, move on,” and here’s a case where someone does exactly that and it still isn’t enough, then I’m missing something. What is it?

The Confession That Wasn’t Enough Here’s the scene. Bnei Yisrael sin, tragedy hits, and their response sounds, honestly, like a pretty good cheshbon hanefesh: “Halo al ki ein Elokai b’kirbi metza’uni ha’ra’ot ha’eileh”, “Is it not because God is not in my midst that these evils have found me?” (Devarim 31:17). They own it. They name the cause.

And the very next pasuk? God says He’ll keep hiding His face.

The Ohr HaChaim can’t let this go either. He asks it plainly: they admitted their sin, so why the continued hester panim? The answer the Chatam Sofer gives, as Rav Aharon Kotler brings it down, is the kind of insight that once you hear it, you start seeing it everywhere in your own life.

Look really closely at what they actually said. They confessed to “ein Elokai b’kirbi”, God isn’t with me. But the pasuk itself tells us what’s really going on underneath: “ki fanah el elohim acheirim”, because they had turned toward other gods. That turning, the lean, the drift, the quiet reorientation of the heart that happened long before anything visible went wrong, never made it into the confession. They apologized for the fruit.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)