Teshuvah as a Way of Life

By Jodi Schwartz
University of Washington
KOACH Intern

Towards the end of every summer in Jewish circles, that pesky little word, teshuvah (repentance), starts to wiggle its way into our vocabulary.

Many picture teshuvah as the process they seem to repeat every year as Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur approach. It begins with reflecting on the year that is ending and looking up to see a cloud of guilt looming overhead. As we have been so-trained, this is followed by friends with whom we have fought and family members that haven’t spent enough time with. We exchange words that help to quell the feelings of impending doom and self-deprecation, and suddenly are reassured that we will be inscribed lavishly and in gold gel-pen in this year’s edition of the Book of Life. It’s a once a year, ba-da-bing ba-da-boom process that allows us to retain a clean slate for the upcoming 12 months.

However, it seems our sages have a different approach to what teshuvah should be.

Rabbi Eliezer teaches, "Repent one day before your death". His students asked, "But how can you know when you are going to die?" and Rabbi Eliezer replied that since we don’t know, we should repent everyday.

It would be illogical to assume that we are expected to repeat the abovementioned process every day, so it seems that Rabbi Eliezer is teaching us something essential about how we look at teshuvah.

If we were to repent fully for our transgressions each day, it would not be as long of a process since reasonable people do not generally transgress several times in a day. And even if they did, if we were to do teshuvah every day, our behavioral radar would be constantly in the forefront of our minds, making us aware of what we would need to repent for the next day and causing us to make different decisions based on those evaluations. In short, we would become hyperaware of each course of action we would take, resulting in generally pristine behavior.

Now, the Tanakh recognizes, "there is no man who does not sin" (1 Melakhim/Kings 8:46), so we are not expected to be in a constant state of repentance and therefore perfection—but I believe that Rabbi Eliezer is trying to bring us to a new level of self-awareness, one in which we are evaluating who we are and who we want to be, not only in the season of the High Holidays, but throughout the year.

So this year, not only do I wish that we should all be inscribed in the Book of Life, but that we also are able to look within ourselves on a regular basis to maintain a level of teshuvah of which Rabbi Eliezer would approve. Shanah Tovah!

Jodi Schwartz is a senior at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is involved in Hillel and brought KOACH to her campus last spring. She is studying psychology and in her spare time enjoys painting, cooking for crowds and watching How I Met Your Mother.

[Posted 9/28/11]