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  4. Hashem Sefasai Tiftach – Getting Out of Your Own Way

Hashem Sefasai Tiftach – Getting Out of Your Own Way

אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶךָ – My Master, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praises… (Psalms 51:17)

Mental orientation

In the physical space we inhabit, the preferable standard orientation for prayer is to face the direction of Jerusalem and the Beis HaMikdash. Across the world, shuls are conventionally designed this way, with the congregation facing Jerusalem. It makes sense; where we are in the physical or spiritual universe is relative to a fixed point, Jerusalem, the seat of the sacred.

If you’re somewhere unfamiliar and not sure which way Jerusalem is, the law allows you to simply direct your heart to heaven; your intention bridges the gap between physical reality and spiritual aspiration, and the prayer is just as good and counts just the same; . When you know where to go, head that way, and if you ever get disoriented, turn your heart to Heaven.

People make mistakes and lose their way. But the funny thing is, wherever you find yourself in the physical or spiritual universe, however off course, it’s actually not hard at all to course correct; you just have to turn the right way, and now you’re on the right track again, and God was never far away – כִּי לֹא תַחְפֹּץ בְּמוֹת הַמֵּת, כִּי אִם בְּשׁוּבוֹ מִדַּרְכּוֹ וְחָיָה, וְעַד יוֹם מוֹתוֹ תְּחַכֶּה לוֹ, אִם יָשׁוּב מִיַּד תְּקַבְּלוֹ.

The first step of making amends can be as simple as turning in the right direction.

Legs Locked

Amida literally means standing; the convention for the Amida is to stand upright with feet together for the duration of the prayer. The Rashba explains that keeping our legs locked symbolizes our dependence on the Creator, that we are stuck and totally helpless on our own, and that we move only with God’s assistance.

Context

(!ed does this belong in intro section on being honest about prayer?)

Understanding life’s complexities often hinges on grasping context, orientation, or perspective, which serve as foundational tools. Rather than defaulting to universal responses, life’s intricacies and nuances demand a more relative approach.

For example, our ancestor Avraham was renowned for his characteristic of kindness, which is why binding his son as a sacrifice presented a profound ordeal. The challenge wasn’t simply the act of sacrifice but the fundamental conflict it presented to Avraham’s character as well. In stark contrast, for most of Avraham’s Ancient Near East contemporaries, human sacrifice was perfectly normal and would present no challenge whatsoever.

Our actions, choices, and decisions are deeply influenced by our unique contexts, a principle that extends into the realm of prayer. It prompts us to consider not only the words we speak but also to deeply reflect on our identity, location, the Divine presence we address, and the intentions behind our prayers, highlighting the significance of context in shaping our spiritual expressions and choices.

אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ – Hashem, open my lips, and my mouth will tell your praises

אֲדֹנָי

It’s a foundational tenet of monotheism that there is one deity, the absolute and indivisible One God – Hashem Echad. The existence of God is enormously consequential to how we experience life in multiple ways. In particular, it means there exists a higher authority and that our lives unfold within the context of larger unseen forces working towards their own purpose in the universe, far beyond our comprehension. It means our lives play out on a gigantic canvas and that we matter.

While we can understand what it might mean for us that God exists, we are extremely far removed from what God is; about 60 percent of human genes have a recognizable counterpart in a banana! We may think a human is vastly different from a banana, but we are not, and we have many overlapping functions, like consuming oxygen.

The Ramchal explains that the nature of God is simply and entirely beyond our grasp, but we can readily understand how we experience God’s interactions. So, although there is one God, God also has many names, each describing a particular aspect or expression of God as experienced by humans in a given moment. But what we experience isn’t exactly what it is, only what it’s like; when we feel anger or pride, they are separate and distinct traits, but God isn’t human, so he doesn’t experience emotions as humans do. God isn’t moody or volatile; God doesn’t change. 

So while different expressions or interactions come from different places in humans, in God, they somehow originate from the same place, so much so that the Tachanun prayer quotes from Tehilim – בְּרֹגֶז רַחֵם תִּזְכּוֹר – in anger, remember compassion. This would be laughable to say to an angry person, an oxymoron almost, and yet it’s something we can ask God for, to remember compassion amidst anger. Because, for God, they come from the same place. 

In multiple places the Torah asks us to emulate God – אַחֲרֵי ה׳ אֱלֹקיכֶם תֵּלֵכוּ / וּבוֹ תִדְבָּק / לָלֶכֶת בְּכָל דְּרָכָיו / לָלֶכֶת בְּכָל דְּרָכָיו וּלְדָבְקָה בוֹ / וְהָלַכְתָּ בִּדְרָכָיו. It’s one of Judaism’s broadest and all-encompassing guiding principles, following God’s ways: imitatio Dei. God visited Avraham when he was sick, so we should visit the sick. God buried Moshe, so we should bury the dead. God is kind and merciful; we should be kind and merciful. But while aspirational and noble, it doesn’t entirely paint the complete picture. God is angry and jealous at times, so maybe we should get angry and jealous at times! The Ran explains that we can’t emulate God’s anger or jealousy because they are simultaneously imbued with love and compassion in a way we cannot emulate; we can only emulate what we can grasp. We know what love and compassion look and feel like, so those are the ones we copy.

אֲדֹנָי

YHVH describes God’s timeless and eternal being, and ELKM describes omnipotent power. Both are complex philosophically and a little remote from our daily lived experience, but אֲדֹנָי is the simplest – mastery. When Avraham was recovering from his circumcision and went out to look for guests, God sent three angels in the guide of men, and Avraham ran to greet them, showing them great deference and reverence, calling them his masters.

Rashi explains that mastery has a sacred and profane aspect, and different applications can illuminate different contexts. Are we slaves to the Master of the universe? It doesn’t feel that way. What’s compelling you to be observant right this minute? What will happen if you stop? If we can stop being observant right now and not get struck by lightning or cancer, are we enslaved? But if the sacred aspect is remote, the profane aspect certainly isn’t. Do we feel there is an external force that influences our lives? אֲדֹנָי is the most common usage and also the most genuine that exists in the sacred and the profane. Before understanding how to engage with God, the Almighty Master and Creator of the universe, we intuitively understand how to relate to God, the Master of health, the Master of children, and the Master of business. That universal access point is אֲדֹנָי

שְׂפָתַי

The simple meaning is lips, but it also means boundaries; when a baby Moshe could no longer be concealed by his mother, she left him on the banks of the Nile river – וַתָּשֶׂם בַּסּוּף עַל־שְׂפַת הַיְאֹר.

Our lips are the threshold that divides the interior body from the exterior and are the only external body part of our body made of the inside of our bodies – try running your tongue through your cheek and across your lips – your lips are a part of your mouth, not your skin. As the threshold between interior and exterior, our lips control and convey what is happening inside – or not. When our lips are closed, they form a rigid boundary, and there is no telling what the person is thinking or experiencing; you are limited to what’s happening facially and superficially at the surface. Perhaps we open our prayer by asking that our lips not be boundaries to what we’d like to say – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Imagine an educated and accomplished banker or lawyer, well-heeled and successful. If the market collapses and unemployment skyrockets, firms shut down and lay people off. Like everyone else, this poor man loses his job, and there are no jobs. But he hears the local municipality is hiring trash pickers. He shows up to the interview, gets the job and a nice high-visibility uniform, and gets a nice trash-grabbing tool, so he doesn’t have to bend down each time. Content that he has a job and conscious that he’s better off than most, he does it for a week. He takes a break and stands by the road on the sidewalk, leaning by a lamppost, watching the cars go by. A few minutes go by, and suddenly, a car is speeding way too close to the curb, and our friend has to leap out of the way to avoid getting injured. He picks himself up and dusts his uniform when, to his dismay, he sees his trash picker lying a few feet away, smashed to pieces in the commotion. In utter despair, the man falls to his knees and screams through tears with a heartrending look to the heavens, “Come on, God! Can I catch a break, seriously!? Please, please, God, help me fix my trash picker!” 

The story is quite obviously absurd. God can fix your trash picker, but God can get you a new one, help you find another job, or turn the entire economy around from depression to boom times. But the joke’s on us because we all regularly make this exact mistake! We have lists of things we think we want, all the outcomes we’re banking on, and every single one of those is a boundary we are putting up – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח

If you’ve ever seen a horse and carriage on the street, you’ll notice the horse’s harnesses always have blinders. These blinders are critical for road safety; they reduce visual distractions from the horse’s peripheral vision, enhancing the horse’s concentration and focus on the road straight ahead. Sometimes, focusing on the task ahead is imperative, but it’s not universally applicable. But there are plenty of times you must take the blinders off to think and see bigger than the problem!

In our prayers every morning, we thank God for opening our eyes, but that, too, is about so much more than physical sight; it’s about perspective and mental and emotional sight as well. When we put up our mental blinders and boundaries, we restrict ourselves from ever thinking bigger than the problem right ahead – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח

When your uncle asks what you want for your birthday, is the correct answer a pizza or a Ferrari? The right answer would depend on so many things, including how wealthy your uncle is and how generous he is. When asked what you want for your birthday, a Ferrari is wrong because the giver is limited. God has no limits, no boundaries; we do – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

If God were a genie in a magic lamp granting you three wishes, it’s the same effort to grant a wish for a Porsche as a potato. Now, God isn’t a genie, and God isn’t Santa Claus. But the point is, the difference between a Porsche and a potato isn’t in the giver; it’s in the recipient, in us, specifically in our boundaries, and all the things holding us back – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

The Gemara teaches that even when the executioner’s sword is on your neck, you still mustn’t give up hope that somehow things will turn around; when Moshe faced execution under Pharaoh, his neck turned miraculously hardened like stone. If we open ourselves up to the notion of taking down our boundaries, we’ll find that the bounds are endless – שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ – and my mouth will tell your praises

Like any language, there’s many ways to say something, and the word we use to describe the speech also describes something about the way it is said – like speaking, shouting, whispering. The word used for the speaking here is a harsh form of speaking, like telling an uncomfortable truth. Rashi on Ko sagid says dvarim kashim kgidim. It’s speech that has a certain sense of harshness to it. But the harshness isn’t directed at God; it’s at ourselves.

There are times we are a little too feel-good about God and religion (“Oh, you know why your wife has cancer and you lost your job? Because Hashem loves you!”). Sometimes, the truth and reality are harsh; they don’t always feel so good. It’s a harsh truth that God is not just the Master in general and my Master in particular – אֲדֹנָי. It is painful to admit that we are not completely in control and that, actually, we are almost entirely helpless.

Genetics drives a substantial part of healthcare predispositions and outcomes. Financial markets drive a substantial part of business fortunes. The family you are born into enormously impacts your character traits and emotional and mental composition.

Anyone with a smidge of self-awareness and intellectual honesty will readily admit that timing and luck played enormous roles in their successes. But the inverse is true as well; when we hear that someone loses their sanity or something tragic happens, is it something they did to themselves? Does anyone seriously think there is a 1:1 linearity between people suffering and their sins? You’d have to be incredibly cruel or immature to think so. They are called the less fortunate for good reason – it’s not a euphemism.

It does not feel good to lack control, and we develop sophisticated mental models to provide the illusion of feeling in control of our lives. Not being in control is something that happens to others! Someone else gets sick, someone else’s business is struggling, someone else’s marriage is facing difficulties… The harsh truth is targeted at ourselves, who think we have it together because your life is only ever one phone call away from going completely off the rails.

It takes nothing to ruin our health. The first substantive Bracha of the day for most of us is probably the blessing after the bathroom – אֲשֶׁר יָצַר:

אֲשֶׁר יָצַר אֶת הָאָדָם בְּחָכְמָה וּבָרָא בוֹ נְקָבִים נְקָבִים חֲלוּלִים חֲלוּלִים. גָּלוּי וְיָדוּעַ לִפְנֵי כִסֵּא כְבוֹדֶךָ שֶׁאִם יִפָּתֵחַ אֶחָד מֵהֶם אוֹ יִסָּתֵם אֶחָד מֵהֶם אִי אֶפְשַׁר לְהִתְקַיֵּם וְלַעֲמוֹד לְפָנֶיךָ – who formed humans with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollows. It is obvious from the presence of Your glorious throne that if even one were to rupture, or if even one were to be blocked, it would be impossible to exist and stand in Your presence for a moment…

How many viruses are one mutation away from a global pandemic that never happens? The bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Spanish Flu killed more people than the World War it followed. In recent memory, COVID lockdowns brought the world to a standstill, causing severe social and economic disruption around the world, and many lost loved ones.

It articulates clearly and concisely how it takes almost nothing to wreck our health. It takes virtually nothing to get into a deadly car wreck. Every time we face oncoming traffic, how do we know the driver across the painted stripe won’t get a surprise text message and be distracted for the one moment he needs to adjust the wheel by half a degree to avoid a collision? Of course, if we lived that way, we’d lose our minds – you’d never let your family leave the house! But if we peel back the illusion, we recognize how the entire canvas of our lives and everybody we love hangs on very fine threads, and they can unravel in a second. 

The grip you have on your life is a shorthand illusion you need to function properly, but it’s not the complete picture. The world is a big and wild place; we cannot tame it, and we cannot tame God. We live in a complex and non-linear world, and it’s scary and painful to admit we’re not in control – וּפִי יַגִּיד.

But once we have that orientation, the first thing we do after acknowledging our place and standing in the cosmos is to bow down.

We are quite puny, even in physical terms of space and time, which requires a painful and shocking cognitive shift in awareness. You are a delicate bag of organic matter on a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void of an incomprehensibly enormous universe, and all the things we love and cherish live equally tiny existences in the cosmos, and yet the tiniest thing could knock over your entire universe – וּפִי יַגִּיד.

Orientation in the universe

To be clear, we are not nihilists – we are anti-nihilists, and our lives matter. Humans matter, human life matters. But despite the folly of human conceits, we are not the self-important demigods we would like to believe we are. We are rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding, and quite puny in physical terms of space and time, which requires a painful and shocking cognitive shift in awareness.

Pale blue dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
— Carl Sagan

Three Steps

As we start the Amida, we take three steps back and then take steps forward, returning to our starting point. It might symbolize stepping away from the domain of the profane and stepping into the domain of the sacred. The Rashba explains that keeping our legs locked demonstrates that we can only move with God’s permission, so perhaps taking three steps backward and then forward, ending up right where you started, reflects something similar: that we are stuck without God.

It could mean taking a step back from where we were, gaining perspective, and then returning to our place with a new context, a recurring theme by now, the clarity and consciousness we need to face our challenges correctly and properly. By returning to where we were before, perhaps we are acting out what we hope to get from our prayer, seeing that God was right where I was, only I wasn’t where He was. I didn’t need to go anywhere to find Hashem, but I had to step away momentarily to see that God was always there. The Mona Lisa is heralded as the most significant artwork a human has produced; if you stuck your nose to the canvas, you wouldn’t be able to see the masterpiece for what it is. It’s cordoned off to the optimal vantage point, twenty feet away. Sometimes, you need to step back for a moment to gain perspective.

In the three steps we take back and then forward, we can feel stuck, unable to move forward, struggling, or overwhelmed. We might be back where we started, but we are tuned in now, turned to God, and our hearts are attuned.

Perhaps it also reflects that once we are attuned, we realize we haven’t moved at all, but if our hearts are tuned to Heaven, God comes to us.

Looking

R’ Menachem Mendel of Rimanov was traveling one day and encountered a young boy crying. He stooped down and asked the child what was wrong. The child tearfully explained that he’d been playing hide and seek with his friends, but no one came to find him. Even worse, they kept playing until it was time to go home, and no one noticed he was gone.

In the phase of history, we are currently in, God is hiding. But are we looking? What’s it like for God to hide and for us to not look? How many people in the world are looking for God?

And yet, hide-and-seek only exists with proximity; if we are questioning the absence of the Infinite, then we are already assuming its presence. The very moment the heart confronts the absence, it has encountered an irreducible trace.

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening

The Torah describes how amidst the thunderous cataclysm at Mount Sinai, the mountain was enveloped in progressive fields of darkness:

וַתִּקְרְבוּן וַתַּעַמְדוּן תַּחַת הָהָר וְהָהָר בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ עַד־לֵב הַשָּׁמַיִם חֹשֶׁךְ עָנָן וַעֲרָפֶל – And you came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick fog. (Devarim 5:11)

The Mishna Berura suggests that in the way Moshe had to break through these distortions to climb the mountain, we take three steps to walk through the three distortions symbolically. R’ Twersky suggests that we build distortion fields in our lives, barriers around ourselves to the divine, preventing us from seeing more in different ways.

Darkness blinds most of humanity, who don’t know there is anything to look for. But it’s easy to dispel darkness – you need to shine a little light, someone to show you the way, and then you see.

Cloud blinds us by obscuring things – it’s not dark, so you can still see faintly, but not in detail. We can recognize something out there, but we don’t quite see what it is, and we get lost for lack of clarity and focus, noticing but not recognizing things as they truly are. People can search for a lifetime, failing to realize they passed what they were looking for a long way back.

Fog blinds in a more sinister way. If you’ve ever driven in fog, you know to turn on your lights so people know you’re there. But the trouble with fog is that it doesn’t just mask what’s there; it also catches and reflects the light, and so while turning your lights on lets people know that someone is there, they actually can’t see anything distinct at all, only a blurry halo of light; because the fog doesn’t just distort what’s there, it also distorts the light, and the light ends up contributing to the poor visibility. Sometimes, the Torah and its ideas can be blinding – people with the light, yet it’s distorted—refracted and twisted, bent and corrupted light.

We all experience these kinds of blindness in our own lives; we all compartmentalize our Judaism. Even if it’s not like we keep every other Shabbos or Kosher on Thursdays, we are all complacent about things. Whether it’s blessings before or after food, praying, or praying with a minyan, we are all complacent about things we shouldn’t be complacent about, and that’s the blindness or distortion in our lives. But even more nefariously, there are mitzvos and ideals we aren’t complacent about, the things we take extremely seriously, and ironically, those can blind us to our shortcomings more than anything!

Retracing your steps

Perhaps taking three steps is the act of looking for God. If you’ve ever realized that you lost something, you search through the house til you find it, and unless interrupted, you’ll go back to where you started when you realized it was missing. But now you’ve found it. And when we find it – אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

All that matters is that you try

What’s fascinating is that source of the open words of prayer were spoken by King David at his lowest point. He’d married Batsheva under morally problematic circumstances and could no longer experience prophecy. In this rock bottom moment of absolute failure, he begged God to open his lips – אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח.

There is an irony to David praying to pray, but it illustrates that there is no such thing as being unable to pray. King David honestly and truly felt that way – but he was wrong. He didn’t feel worthwhile, and he prayed to get there again.

It is of the highest significance that the archetype we channel to open our prayers is of someone who feeling bad and sad, rightly or wrongly. Bring your ugly feelings to your prayers, too – that’s the source of these words. Your thoughts and feelings are the rocket fuel that animates the words with life and meaning – they’re hollow and empty if you don’t infuse them with spirit and emotion.

Whose prayer does God listen to?

If you think need righteous and holy saints to pray for you and bless you, you might be surprised because the Torah plainly states otherwise.

In the story of Yitzchak’s life, the Torah recounts how his mother, Sarah, identified the older Yishmael as a corruptive influence on the young Yitzchak, and she sent Yishmael and his mother, Hagar, away from the family home.

The Torah tells how Hagar and Yishmael wandered, lost in the wilderness, until they ran out of water, and Yishmael slowly dehydrated. Knowing no one was coming to the rescue and with certainty that her son would die suffering, she cried out in complete and utter despair.

Completely and utterly miraculously, the Torah tells how Hagar received a vision of a nearby oasis, and she rushes to get the water she needs to save her son.

This seems to conform with our conventional understanding of prayer; the desperate mother crying for her suffering child.

But the Torah does not give credit to Hagar. An angel speaks with her and tells her that everything is going to be okay because the Creator has listened to the prayer – but Yishmael’s, not Hagar’s – כִּי שָׁמַע אֱלֹהִים אֶל קוֹל הַנַּעַר.

The story never ascribes an action or a word to Yishmael; he is a passive object in the story, the object of his mother’s prayers, the person acted upon, and not the actor.

A mother’s tears for her dying son did not move the heavens. But what moved the heavens was the voice of a dying boy, and he never even said a word! Perhaps, in his suffering, he cried or sighed, not even significant enough for the Torah to record it as an action he took.

That literally invisible moment of pain or sadness is what drives the entire story and goes on to shape history, and perhaps it should shape our understanding of prayer.

There are no requirements to pray properly; you just have to mean it, and you don’t have to be anyone or anything special. You can just be a kid, and you can just cry because it hurts.

The Midrash imagines the angels arguing against divine intervention to save Yishmael because of the atrocities his descendants would commit, but they lose the argument because God evaluates things differently. God answers the boy based on where he is and the facts and circumstances as they are – בַּאֲשֶׁר הוּא שָׁם.

The story of Yishmael teaches us that prayer isn’t confined to ritualized formalities, and maybe that’s partly why we read this story on Rosh Hashana.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. You don’t need to know how to pray or understand the words.

Our sages conclude from the stories of our ancestors that God loves righteous prayers, righteous prayers, not prayers of the righteous.

You don’t have to be perfect to generate a perfect prayer. Our daily prayers affirm that God is close to the people who call on Him truthfully – קרוב ה’ לכל קוראיו, לכל אשר יקראוהו באמת. It is not beyond any of us to ask for help and truly mean it.

A sinner can feel cast aside, they’ve lost their way, walked the path away from God. But the funny thing is, wherever you are in the physical or spiritual universe, if you ever get lost, it’s actually not hard at all to course correct; you just have to turn the right way, and now you’re on the right track again.

The conclusion of one of the most moving parts of the prayers unambiguously says that even a person who sinned their entire life can still repent on his deathbed –כי לא תחפץ במות המת, כי אם בשובו מדרכו וחיה ועד יום מותו תחכה לו, אם ישוב מיד תקבלו.

Teshuva is not far

One of Judaism’s signature beliefs is in our personal ability to make amends – Teshuva. 

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this belief.

In sharp contrast, Christianity does not have a framework for humans to make amends; humans are born and remain in a state of sinfulness as a result of the corruption of original sin, which is the theological basis of Jesus’ death as an atonement.

Teshuva is a fundamentally different worldview. 

Teshuva and the personal abilities of atonement and forgiveness are groundbreaking because, in the ancient world, humans lived in fear of their gods. You would try to do right by them in the hope that they would do right to you; you don’t offend them, so they don’t smite you. The relationship people had with their gods was explicitly transactional and, from a certain perspective, what we might call abusive. 

But in a framework where atonement and forgiveness exist, God isn’t looking to catch you out at all, and the new possibility exists for a very different relationship – not just master and servant, but now something more like parent and child.

Why do we believe we have the ability to atonement and earn forgiveness?

Quite simply, we believe we can make amends because the Torah consistently not only emphasizes that God is not impartial; but that God is biased towards creation – וּבְטוֹב הָעוֹלָם נִדּוֹן /  עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה.

The priestly blessing explicitly talks about God’s preferential treatment; Rashi explains it as a wish for God to literally smile at us – יָאֵר ה’ פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וִיחֻנֶּךָ, יִשָּׂא ה’ פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ.

As the Shem mi’Shmuel explains, God’s compassion amplifies the steps we take to make amends – ועֹשֶׂה חֶסֶד לַאֲלָפִים. 

The Torah speaks plainly about how compassion will drive God to personally gather up every lost soul and return and restore them from wherever they are:

 וְשָׁב ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶת–שְׁבוּתְךָ, וְרִחֲמֶךָ; וְשָׁב, וְקִבֶּצְךָ מִכָּל–הָעַמִּים, אֲשֶׁר הֱפִיצְךָ ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, שָׁמָּה. אִם–יִהְיֶה נִדַּחֲךָ, בִּקְצֵה הַשָּׁמָיִם מִשָּׁם יְקַבֶּצְךָ ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, וּמִשָּׁם יִקָּחֶךָ – God will return your captives and have compassion for you; and will return and gather you from all the nations, wherever God has scattered you. (30:3,4)

Rav Kook teaches that the first promise is about a physical return to Israel, and the second promise is that God will also return us from the outer edge of the spiritual universe – קְצֵה הַשָּׁמָיִם. The Sfas Emes teaches that Hashem makes this promise regardless of whatever it is that brought us there to that spiritual wilderness – whether it’s upbringing, bad choices, or poor self-control – none of it matters – מִשָּׁם יְקַבֶּצְךָ / וּמִשָּׁם יִקָּחֶךָ.

The High Holy Day prayers prominently quote Ezekiel telling his audience, and us, what it will take to avert harsh judgment:

וְהָרָשָׁע כִּי יָשׁוּב מִכּל־חַטֹּאתָו אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה וְשָׁמַר אֶת־כּל־חֻקוֹתַי וְעָשָׂה מִשְׁפָּט וּצְדָקָה חָיֹה יִחְיֶה לֹא יָמוּת. כּל־פְּשָׁעָיו אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לֹא יִזָּכְרוּ לוֹ בְּצִדְקָתוֹ אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה יִחְיֶה. הֶחָפֹץ אֶחְפֹּץ מוֹת רָשָׁע נְאֻם אֲדֹנָי אלוקים הֲלוֹא בְּשׁוּבוֹ מִדְּרָכָיו וְחָיָה – Moreover, if the wicked one repents of all the sins that he committed and keeps all My laws and does what is just and right, he shall live; he shall not die. None of the transgressions he committed shall be remembered against him; because of the righteousness he has practiced, he shall live. Is it my desire that a wicked person shall die?—says the Lord God. It is rather that he shall turn back from his ways and live. (Ezekiel 18:21-23)

As R’ Jonathan Sacks notes, there is no mention of sacrifice, no mention of a temple, no magic ritual or secret; it’s never too late to change, God will forgive every mistake we’ve made so long as   we are honest in regretting it and doing our best to make it right.

As the Izhbitzer teaches, there are no mistakes, and the world has unfolded up to this moment as intended; which, quite radically, validates sin retroactively, although it should be clear that this teaching has zero prospective or forward-looking value. You are where you are supposed to be today, you were supposed to make that mistake; and now your task is to move forward from it. God is willing to let go of our mistakes; we needn’t hold on so tight.

As R’ Simcha Bunim of Peshischa points out, there’s nothing surprising about humans making mistakes and doing the wrong thing. The big surprise is that we don’t take advantage of our ability to atone and make amends every day – כִּי הַמִּצְוָה הַזֹּאת, אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם לֹא-נִפְלֵאת הִוא מִמְּךָ וְלֹא רְחֹקָה הִוא. לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא / כִּי-קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד, בְּפִיךָ וּבִלְבָבְךָ, לַעֲשֹׂתוֹ.

The conclusion of one of the most moving parts of the prayers unambiguously says that even a person who sinned their entire life can still repent on his deathbed –כי לא תחפץ במות המת, כי אם בשובו מדרכו וחיה ועד יום מותו תחכה לו, אם ישוב מיד תקבלו.

It’s literally not possible to alienate yourself from the Creator Who permeates Creation. As R’ Akiva taught, God Himself cleanses us – וּמִי מְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם, ‏אֲבִיכֶם שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַיִם, ‏… ‏מַה מִקְוֶה מְטַהֵר אֶת הַטְּמֵאִים, אַף הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מְטַהֵר אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל.

It’s not even difficult! Our sages authorize a wicked man to marry a woman on the condition that he is righteous, on the basis that he might have had a moment’s thought about changing for the better. The Minchas Chinuch notes that this potential thought doesn’t include the confession and follow-through required for complete rehabilitation, but the Rogatchover and the Brisker school suggest that the mere thought alone of doing better removes the designation of wicked from a person – because God is biased.

By designing creation with a framework that includes atonement, forgiveness, and Teshuva, God freely admits bias towards the children of creation. In fact, our sages say that a repentant can achieve what saints cannot.

God invites the children of creation to come home – שובו בנים שובבים. There is no need to hold yourself to a higher standard than God.

If you think you can probably be doing a little better in certain respects, you might be right and it could be time to raise your standards. 

It’s not hard, and it’s not far away. Creation has been designed for you to make amends, has been waiting for you to make amends.

Teshuva can be as simple as turning to face the right direction.