The Artistry Of Teshuva: Rav Kook On Teshuva (Part III)

We have spent the first couple weeks of Elul examining how Rav Kook approaches teshuva from an aesthetic and an ethical point of view. Today we will look a little bit at the practical measures, the how one engages in the practice of teshuva. It’s important to emphasize that Rav Kook sees teshuva as a totalizing process, one that is (ideally) always unfolding, always engaging us. There is no limit to teshuva, nor is it bound by time or circumstance.

Rav Kook sees the impulse to do teshuva and the initiative taken in pursuit of it to be the exemplar of human nature as a spiritual being. Because we do teshuva, as individuals and a collective we are engaged in the refinement of ourselves and of our universe; when we do teshuva we actively participate as partners with Hashem in creation. So Rav Kook both attaches great importance to the practical methods employed in doing teshuva, and also tends to very quickly return to the abstract and the theoretical. In this, too, there is a deliberate methodology – we find and implement the mechanisms that are best suited to activated the aspects of ourselves that are conducive to spiritual growth. In doing so, we are achieving a common good that transcends our own consciousness.

But we only attain that goal through properly correlating our actions to the spiritual needs confronting us. Rav Kook speaks, for example, of the importance of proper interpersonal conduct and in particular business ethics (he refers to this as study in depth the Choshen Mishpat portion of the Shulchan Aruch) as the purest and most efficacious path to true teshuva. He explains that, too often, the moral weakness that can be found in us is at this level of honesty, or of showing kindness and concern for the good of our fellow, so naturally we connect with our higher self by overcoming this tendency. Rav Kook also refers to baser appetites that lead us to eat forbidden foods or to seek physical pleasures that cause us to become more like animals and less like enlightened human beings. In all these cases he stresses that it is the unhealthy, unrestrained desire that leads us down, the greed and the moral corruption that lead us astray – and the only remedy for this is to develop our awareness of higher morality.

He says that the most effective method for one to awaken true teshuva in oneself, and by extension to perform the acts indicative of teshuva, is to shift our focus from the personal to the national or collective. At the same time, he explains, it isn’t possible to truly connect with the “national foundation” (yesod ha-leumi) of Israel unless one has already purified his or her soul by means of teshuva. Thus, just as we saw previously that in a universal sense we find ourselves unceasingly in a state of fluctuation between corruption and rectification, so too on a personal level we are constantly shifting between needing to do teshuva to interface with the higher consciousness of the collective soul and needing to make this connection with the collective in order to properly motivate ourselves to do teshuva.

For this reason, it is essential for us as individuals to perform the acts and the duties enumerated by our Sages as inherent in the process of teshuva, because it is through these acts that we train our minds and our spirits to participate in this dialectic and to advance it towards the desired outcome. That outcome, once again, is redemption – individual, national, and universal.

The act of engaging in teshuva, which is so essential to our achievement of our moral and spiritual goals as humans and as members of the community of Israel, is also very challenging for us in practice. By design, we are compelled to overcome the weakness in ourselves to “do battle,” so to speak, with our own worst tendencies. But in this difficulty also inheres tremendous unique power. By devoting ourselves to expending our vital energy to becoming better, and by making the world around us better, we effect spiritual processes of rectification which are far beyond our own comprehension.

Previously we discussed how Rav Kook (following the Sages) associates teshuva with the Divine Attribute of Bina (understanding), and how it is impelled by a visceral experience of the Attribute of Din (judgment). By doing so he ascribes another sort of dialectic or even paradoxical state of being to teshuva – that it relates integrally to Hashems’ tendency to harshly judge, and even G-d forbid to punish, in pursuit of perfect justice, but in doing so evokes His superseding power of kindness that overcomes all barriers and acts outside the construct of natural or even Divine law to situate us in the best possible universe for our delight and edification.

Rav Kook says it’s the smallest, pettiest temptations that tend to lead us away from holiness and into error, so our teshuva is most effective when we are methodical, systematic – improving ourselves and our behavior one little bit at a time. All of the evil in the world derives from our failure as individuals and as a collective to live up to our potential and to act in a manner becoming our stature. These little failures conspire to divide us not only from our better selves but from the Creator who imbued us with these higher qualities and desires that we embody them. When we separate ourselves by our actions from the Source of our being, we cause distress to ourselves and often to others who are affected by our behaviors and our attitudes. On a fundamental level, all the misery and suffering in our world stems from a failure on the part of the human race to connect purely and wholeheartedly with Hashem. The greater the barrier that separates us, the more we struggle to even sense the enormity of the loss or to understand the possibility of rectifying it.

This, then, is the power of teshuva. In every act of teshuva, no matter how insignificant or small it seems, there is a movement back (literally a return – teshuva) towards the essence of ourselves as we should be, and by extension a return to Hashem who heals all our injuries and all our sorrow. When we seek Hashem with sincerity, with conviction, and with the self-sacrifice embodied in the struggle to do teshuva, then we reawaken the sense of Him in ourselves and in the world. Once that force has been unleashed, there is nothing that it cannot achieve, and there is no despair in the world because, through teshuva, all things can be and will be restored.

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