[THROUGH A MUSSAR LENS | Alan Morinis ]
The central concern of Judaism is that you and I accomplish a personal spiritual transformation in our lifetimes.
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me on Rosh Hashana and you left [the judgment] in peace, I consider it as if you were created as a new being.”’
Imagine that! If you do teshuvah, it is as if you were starting your life all over again. What would it look like and feel like to be the new you that the Talmud says is the result of doing teshuvah? All the scars that you have picked up along this journey would be healed. You’d be relieved of the burdens you carry from the past, and no doubt that would put a new bounce in your step. Relationships will be repaired and restored. Most important from the standpoint of all the standard sources on teshuvah is that you would have taken steps to return to a close relationship with God, as implied by the literal definition of the word teshuvah (“return”).
Rabbi Avraham Yitzchok Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel (and a product of a Mussar yeshiva), however, adds that we gain something else from doing teshuvah:
With every aspect of ugliness banished from a person’s soul upon his internal commitment to teshuvah, whole worlds are revealed, in celestial clarity, in the midst of his soul. Removal of sin is like removal of a blinder from above an eye, such that the full field of vision is now revealed, a light from the breadth of heaven, earth and all they contain.
(Orot haTeshuvah 5:2 )
This is not how the outcome of the inner cleansing that is teshuvah is usually described and that is because Rav Kook is not just giving us the usual abstract concepts like “return to God” but rather is struggling to express in words the actual experience from within that a person who has done teshuvah can expect.
This is a difficult thing to grasp because what Rav Kook is describing is the experience of rising to a higher spiritual level. A little later in the book, he says, “teshuvah repairs one’s corruption and restores the world and this person’s life to its root, specifically by helping the inherent character to develop” (5:6). That is what Mussar is all about—helping you and me to develop our inherent character to a higher level. The work we do to overcome our impatience, stinginess, laziness, ingratitude or whatever aspect of our character is handicapping our lives and our growth (what I call a person’s personal spiritual curriculum) results in a step up the spiritual ladder.