Return, Ascent, and Bloodied Wings: How Teshuvah Can Help Us Transition to What Comes Next
By: Michael Rosenberg
Tags: High Holidays, Rebuilding, Teshuvah, Judaism, Rosh Hashanah

Return, Ascent, and Bloodied Wings: How Teshuvah Can Help Us Transition to What Comes Next Michael Rosenberg Sep 6·11 min read

Well, here we are, standing on the cusp of 5782. A year ago we were, communally, in the depths of despair. For some of us, the worst had come the previous spring and early summer; for others, autumn was itself the nadir of our experience as our personal and communal losses were compounded by the spiritual loss of a High Holidays like no other, as we celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur alone, or if you were lucky, with your family at home, or perhaps, for those fortunate enough to be in communities able to support such measures, in backyard minyanim.

I admit that when I began thinking about this derashah, I imagined a more optimistic tone — it seemed like we were really heading out of this pandemic and back to something like normalcy. But now, in late Elul, our situation is murkier. Depending on where you live and your personal risk aversion, you might indeed be feeling like life is getting back to normal, but you just as likely may find yourself returning to the measures that we thought we were moving past. In some ways, the hardest part of this phase of whatever it is we’ve been doing is that murkiness — not really knowing where we are.

But we know — or at least, we hope — that we are in some kind of moment of transition, a movement from what was, from where we are, to where we hope we are going. I want to think with you tonight about what it might look like, whenever we move from this stage of our collective history, what it might look like actually to make such a shift. I want to think about that question because that is, in a fundamental way, what this season of repentance, of teshuvah, is about.

At its core, teshuvah is the work we do to move from a place we don’t want to be — a place where our insecurities and fears push us to act in ways that are beneath us — to the place we long to be, a place in which we are more fully living out our ideals and commitments. Teshuvah provides a model for how we might transition from the unredeemed state we’re in to a redeemed world — or, at the very least, a somewhat-more redeemed one.

But what is teshuvah, and how does it work to move us from one place to another? How does it get us from here to there? I want to think with you tonight about three distinct models of teshuvah. Each model presents us with different ways of thinking about our past, present, and future, and each model challenges us to think about what it means to improve and transform ourselves.

The first model is rooted in the very term itself. The word teshuvah comes from the Hebrew root for “return.” Although teshuvah, then, is a movement, it is, counterintuitively, a movement backwards — to return is to turn back. Consider how Rav Avraham Yitzhak Hakohen Kuk, the first chief Ashkenazi rabbi of British mandatory Palestine, describes it: “The primary teshuva, that which immediately lights the darkness, is when a person returns to their self, to the root of their soul.” (Oros haTeshuvah 15:10). We are returning to where we already were. Teshuvah in this model is not an act of making progress, but rather a motion of undoing; it is actively peeling off the layers of ethical muck and spiritual decay that have glommed onto our beings, and getting back to the who that we used to be.

The beauty of this approach to teshuvah is clear. The work is serious, to be sure, but it is not a journey into uncharted waters; it does not ask me to be someone I never have been. Rather, I’m asked to return to who I am, to who I, in truth, always have been.

Like, I imagine, many of you, I’ve spent so much of the last 18 months longing for this kind of teshuvah — When will we go back? When will things be the way they were, back before the stain of COVID, before the distortions of this pandemic?

But when we stop to consider what that would actually mean, it’s not as appealing as it initially seems. Do we really want to go back to how things were? Were we really so happy with how we treated ourselves and each other? Were we so successful in our attempts to be present for friends and family while working insane hours, that we can’t wait to get back to our old schedules? Were the business trips and conferences we attended so transformative that we want to return to the global costs of travel en masse? The dystopia that has been the last year and a half may cast a rose-colored glow on our pre-pandemic lives, but I suspect I’m not alone in realizing that teshuvah in the sense of return to how we were before this breach is not what I’m actually looking for.

Perhaps that’s why the Rambam describes the process of teshuvah in terms that have nothing to do with the meaning of the word. Rather than defining teshuvah as a backwards motion, the Rambam describes the kinds of acts that teshuvah demands. Among other things, the person repenting should “distance themselves from the matter in which they sinned, and change their name, as if to say, ‘I am another, I am not the person who did those things,’ and change all of their actions for the better…” (hilkhos teshuvah 2:4).

The late-20th/early-21st century thinker and rosh yeshiva, Rav Shagar, points out that here and elsewhere, when the Rambam describes the process of teshuvah, he completely ignores the past — there’s no sense of return, even in a partial sense, to what was. Rather, the person who wants to improve, the baal teshuvah’s orientation, is entirely future-facing: how can I change my life to be the kind of person I want to be, irrespective of the failure I may have been until now? The past cannot be changed; therefore, I need not relate to it, let alone strive to return to it; rather, for the Rambam, the only question that matters is: What now?

I want to note two critical consequences of the Rambam’s future-facing teshuvah. The first is the rejection of regret as a religiously meaningful emotion. Consider how Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik describes the difference between other religious models of repentance, and his understanding of teshuvah:

The former, he writes, “views repentance only from the perspective of atonement…A deep melancholy affects his spirit. He mourns for the yesterdays that are irretrievably past…the deeds that have vanished like shadows, facts that he will never be able to change…But such is not the case with halakhic man! Halakhic man does not engage in weeping and despair, does not lacerate his flesh or flail away at himself…Halakhic man is engaged in self-creation, in creating a new ‘I’.” (Halakhic Man, trans. Kaplan, p. 113)

There is no point longing for a past that will never again be, nor in regretting the mistakes we made in that past. Rather, we think about what we will do now, going forward, what world we will build, what version of our own selves we are creating.

That is a vision of repentance that, for me at least, is at one and the same time appealing, and unrealistic. Perhaps the Rambam and his followers would say that this is only a result of my own weakness, but I’m not able to break so fully from the past as to feel no emotions of regret, nor do I know that I would want to.

But I want to consider the second major consequence of this shift in thinking about teshuvah. Because for the Rambam and his followers, critical to the process of teshuvah is that you simply can’t move forward when you’re looking backwards. Or, to be more precise: You can’t truly assess, and therefore reject, your past mistakes, until you’ve already become the person you want to be. So long as you are lingering in your past behaviors, then all you can ever do is make tweaks here and there. Without radical change — without a personal paradigm shift — you’re always viewing your past self with your past eyes. Only when you truly make the break, and become someone new, can you look back on your actions and say, “That was wrong; I understand why I did it, and I now have the insight to be better.” That, according to Rav Shagar, is why the Rambam cites as the source for the process of teshuvah the penultimate verse of the haftarah for the second day of Rosh Hashanah: ואחרי שובי ניחמתי — “after I returned, I regretted.” You can only regret your past actions after you’ve done teshuvah, once you’ve become the person you want to be going forward.

The Rambam’s insight to teshuvah makes clear that we can’t assess our pasts — whether our individual flaws, the pre-pandemic past, or these last 18 months — without first breaking free of that past, without first deciding who we want to be and what we want the world to look like, unchained by our previous habits of mind and body. Otherwise, the new world we build will always be tied down by the old one, no more than a slightly improved version, and not a true break with the past on our way to redemption.

I’ve already said that for me, and I imagine others, the Rambam’s rejection of regret makes this vision challenging if not impossible. It’s also worth lingering over another negative consequence of the Rambam’s teshuvah: What happens to the old you, the person who actually did do that thing? The Rambam articulates a vision of teshuvah that demands the destruction of your past self.

Let me say at the outset: The Rambam’s vision of teshuvah in no way shape or form advocates literal violence towards one’s own self, God forbid. It does, however, in symbolic and metaphorical ways, require the undoing of one’s previous sense of self. It is a model that endangers our psyches. It also sets an impossibly high bar for what it means to do better — we cannot, in truth, utterly separate the who we want to be, from the who that we have been. The Rambam’s model of teshuvah asks us to shed parts of ourselves that, however imperfect, make us who we are.

And so, we’re stuck:

A return to how we were is not in fact desirable.

A movement to something completely new, radically disconnected from our past, is impossible and dangerous.

Now, at this point in a High Holiday sermon, I’m supposed to move to the middle path, a compromise between teshuvah as return and teshuvah as radical destruction and rebuilding. In this case, that might sound something like the Democrats’ slogan back in 2020, “Build back better.” But to be honest, this is a fairly pareve vision that says, Let’s get back to where we were, but with some tweaks.

The third path I want to lay before you is not a compromise — it is not a mix, some return, some progress — but a different vision entirely of what it means to come out of and through trauma.

The details for this third way of thinking about teshuvah come from a perhaps unexpected source: The sacrifices that a metzora, someone afflicted with a trauma-inducing kind of disease, must bring following their recovery, as part of their ritual purification. On their surface, these laws are not about teshuvah, but rather, about ending ritual impurity. But the Rabbis understood the metzora’s disease to be a reflection of spiritual failing; exiting that physical state is then yet another kind of spiritual repair.

The metzora’s purification process also gestures toward teshuvah by echoing in important ways the rituals of Yom Kippur. Leviticus 16 describes how the high priest, on Yom Kippur, takes two goats; one is slaughtered as an offering to God, the other becomes the scapegoat, sent out to the wilderness to bear Israel’s sins. Keep that in mind as I read the Torah’s description for the metzora’s purification:

4 the priest shall command that two living clean birds and cedarwood and crimson yarn and hyssop be brought for the one who is to be cleansed. 5 The priest shall command that one of the birds be slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel. 6 He shall take the living bird with the cedarwood and the crimson yarn and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water. 7 He shall sprinkle it seven times upon the one who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease; then he shall pronounce him clean, and he shall let the living bird go into the open field.

Like the high priest on Yom Kippur, the metzora must bring two of the same kind of animal. And as with Yom Kippur, one of those is killed, while the other is sent out, sent “into the open field.” But unlike on Yom Kippur, this ritual has an additional wrinkle. The goats of Yom Kippur represent two radically distinct fates: one is sent to God, and the other carries our sins into the wilderness, and never the twain shall meet. But the metzora’s birds are intertwined and interdependent. The priest takes the living bird and dips its wings into the blood of the slaughtered bird before sending it out to the open field.

The ritual is bizarre. I mean, imagine taking this living bird, which presumably is not going to be so accommodating, grasping it firmly to dip its wings into the blood of its slaughtered sibling, and only then sending it off to fly away.

Years ago, I heard a life-changing interpretation of this seemingly insensible ritual from my teacher, Rabbi Gordon Tucker. These are Rabbi Tucker’s words:

“Not to be able to fly after an encounter with death gives death the victory. And death cannot be allowed to ground life. But to fly away unscathed is not to conquer death, but rather to ignore it. It is to be untouched by it, to be untaught by it.” Rather, says Rabbi Tucker, “it is precisely the birds that travel to and through the skies with those stained wings who are the wisest birds in the world.”

That is to say, the blood-stained bird that flies away, on to live their life, but always, forever marked by the blood of the slain bird, makes exactly the journey that the metzora themselves must make. Not to ignore the past, but neither to be chained to it. As with the Rambam’s vision of teshuvah, the brush with death, the experience of trauma changes you forever. And yet, the blood on the wings does not deprive this bird of its prior identity. It is not a completely new creature, as the Rambam might desire, nor is it what it once was, as Rav Kook described. It is, rather, a being transformed.

Such is the kind of transition that the next months and years will demand of us. If we try simply to return to how things were, then we will have learned nothing from this experience. And at the same time, if we allow this communal experience of trauma to undo everything about who we are and who we have been, then we cede our autonomy and become a cluster of fundamentally fickle, unstable identities. Our challenge is to figure out how to continue the lives we had before, even as we look constantly at the blood stains on our own wings — the marks of those we’ve lost, and of those whose lives are forever changed by their brush with Covid; the mark of the communal breakdowns of the last two years, and of the realization that we are not all speaking the same language or even living in the same reality.

We will come out of this experience with blood-stained wings; we will also fly.

Shanah tovah.