Dear TBZ Community,
Last Shabbat during services, on the first day of Sukkot, I shared with our community a beautiful teaching by Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, also known as the Kedushat Levi.
The last week’s Torah reading for Sukkot included all the holidays, and commanded us to take the four species and bless them on the first day.
וּלְקַחְתֶּם לָכֶם בַּיּוֹם הָרִאשׁוֹן
You shall take for yourselves on the first day (Leviticus 23:40).
The Kedushat Levi asks: First day of what?
And he answers: It is the first day that our sins are counted.
But we just did Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Weren’t our sins counted then?
In the Talmud, in the tractate of Yoma 86b, we learn the following teaching in the name of the 2nd century scholar, Reish Lakish:
אָמַר רֵישׁ לָקִישׁ: גְּדוֹלָה תְּשׁוּבָה שֶׁזְּדוֹנוֹת נַעֲשׂוֹת לוֹ כִּשְׁגָגוֹת,
וְהָאָמַר רֵישׁ לָקִישׁ: גְּדוֹלָה תְּשׁוּבָה שֶׁזְּדוֹנוֹת נַעֲשׂוֹת לוֹ כִּזְכִיּוֹת,
לָא קַשְׁיָא: כָּאן מֵאַהֲבָה, כָּאן מִיִּרְאָה
Reish Lakish said: Great is repentance, as intentional sins are counted for him as unwitting transgressions, (…).
Is that so?
Didn’t Reish Lakish himself say: Great is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for him as merits, (…)
This is not difficult: Here, when one repents out of love, sins become like merits; there, when one repents out of fear, sins are counted as unwitting transgressions.
In the first part, Reish Lakish tells us that the greatness of teshuvah (return, repentance) is that intentional sins become unintentional. When we do teshuvah, that which we did intentionally, out of our evil impulse, gets transformed into something unintentional. And this has implications for the punishments and how what we have done is understood.
But in the second teaching, the transformation is even greater. Teshuvah has the capacity to transform our sins into merits!
The Gemara asks: How can that be?
It says, la kashya, it is not a problem. It is not difficult to understand. There are two kinds of teshuvah: teshuvah that we do from fear (יִּרְאָה yirah) and teshuvah that we do from love (אַהֲבָה ahavah).
Teshuvah transforms intentional sins into unintentional ones when teshuvah is done from fear. Teshuvah transforms sins into merits when it is done from love.
The Kedushat Levi then offers a teaching that says that during the month of Elul, and between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the teshuvah we engage in is teshuvah from fear. On Sukkot, we enter into teshuvah from love.
The mitzvot (commandments) of Sukkot: the building of the sukkah (hut), the shaking of the lulav (date palm, myrtle, and willow that are bound together; along with the etrog or giant citron, they are the four species we hold and shake), and the opening of our homes for hachnasat orchim (welcoming guests) together embody this teshuvah of love. The first day of Sukkot is the first day that our sins can be transformed into merits.
The Kedushat Levi says:
“After Yom Kippur we are involved with such mitzvot as sukkah and lulav. We give to the needy as generously as God has blessed us. We love serving God in joyous and good-hearted ways. This is repentance out of love (…) So, on this holiday, when we come to rest in God’s shade , performing mitzvot and good deeds out of Love of Y-H-V-H, God begins counting our sins. He wants to know how many merits we are earning in the process of exchange! He doesn’t count them prior to Sukkot, when only fear is in the air…” (Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid’s Table, by Arthur Green, with Ebn Leader, Ariel Evan Mayse and Or N. Rose, pages 187-188).
We are about to finish the holiday of Sukkot, entering its last days of Hoshana Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah. We will pray for rain. We will dance with the Torah. And then we will enter the year, the regular, not festive days; days that open up the possibility to live in the ongoing act of teshuvah of love.
And on Simchat Torah, we will do something that is itself a practice of beginning again. We will finish reading the Torah and, without even pausing, return to its beginning.. We will read the final words of Deuteronomy and then immediately return to the Bereshit, Genesis: “In the beginning.”
There is something deeply fitting about this as we enter the new year. We do not begin again because we have forgotten what came before. We begin again carrying everything we have learned, everything we have experienced, everything we have gotten wrong, and everything we have done well. We return to the beginning with the possibility of seeing the story differently and living it differently.
Perhaps this, too, is teshuvah: the willingness to begin again. To return. To open the Torah again, to open our lives again, and to ask what is possible from here.
On Rosh Hashanah, I offered a teaching about what it means to do teshuvah every day. In it I shared:
There is a rabbinic teaching from Rabbi Eliezer in the tractate of Shabbat 135a in the Talmud. And if you were here last night, you may recognize this teaching. Rav Leah quoted it in her sermon! We did not realize until after we had written our sermons that we were drawn to the same teaching.
רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר אוֹמֵר: שׁוּב יוֹם אֶחָד לִפְנֵי מִיתָתֶךָ.
Rabbi Eliezer said: “Do teshuvah one day before your death.”
His students immediately ask:
אָמְרוּ לוֹ תַּלְמִידָיו: וְכִי אָדָם יוֹדֵעַ אֵיזֶהוּ יוֹם יָמוּת?
“But how can a person know on which day they will die?”
And Rabbi Eliezer replies:
אָמַר לָהֶם: וְכָל שֶׁכֵּן, יָשׁוּב הַיּוֹם, שֶׁמָּא יָמוּת לְמָחָר; וְנִמְצָא כָּל יָמָיו בִּתְשׁוּבָה.
“Precisely. Therefore, do teshuvah today, lest you die tomorrow, and in this way all your days will be lived in teshuvah.”
I love the honesty of this teaching.
Rabbi Eliezer is not asking us to figure out the future. He is asking us to live faithfully in the present – to become the people we want to be now, precisely because we do not know what tomorrow will bring.
Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but it is much richer than that. It means returning: returning to the person we are capable of becoming, returning to our deepest values, returning to God, returning to one another, and returning to ourselves.
As we leave Sukkot and enter the ordinary days of the year, can we hold onto living in this kind of practice? Can we continue to practice teshuvah not only from fear, but from love?
Can our teshuvah be the powerful, transformative practice that helps us transform sins into merits, curses into blessings, suffering into joy?
May we enter these days with the courage not to wait, the openness to return, and the possibility of transforming even what we have done wrong into something that can bring us closer to one another and to the people we are capable of becoming.
Shabbat shalom & chag sameach,
Rav Claudia