Judge Dennis Davis
Rav Kook: The Meaning of “Teshuvah”

Judge Dennis Davis - Rav Kook: The Meaning of Teshuvah

- Good evening to everybody. This is the first of two lectures that I am been asked to give with regard to the high holidays, Yamim Noraim, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This one comes somewhat earlier than perhaps I would’ve intended, but I won’t be around next week, be travelling, and Trudie therefore asked whether I could do it tonight, the first of the two. The second will be done just before Yom Kippur when I propose, as I’ve done since I think lockdown began, to actually discuss with you by playing a series of hazonim and hazzanut dealing with the liturgy of Yom Kippur from Kol Nidre et cetera. That of course will be done later. Tonight, we really are dealing with the foundational concept of this period. Remember of course, for Jews, we are in Elul, the last month of the year. We blow the shofar now in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. And we are moving very rapidly, within the next 10 days, into Atzeret y Simchat Torah, the 10 days of penitence. So it’s appropriate to talk about the concept of Teshuvah, which of course in English is translated as repentance, but really isn’t repentance at all. And so what I’d like to do, if I may, is before I introduce you to our main guest this evening, who of course was the late Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of the Holy Land, whose work is enigmatic, but hugely interesting, let me just start off with a few basic principles, which I’m assume most of you know, I make no apologies for this, simply to say, let’s start with the first building blocks. So if we can have Lauren, the first of the clips please. So here’s the first, a simple- Oh, let me just get it- Sorry, I’ve now gone and oh, well, I’m trying to get it back.

I dunno why I’ve lost my text. But basically what I wanted to show you in this particular clip was the foundational point that on the Yamim Noraim, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we don’t actually atone for the sins which we’ve committed to each other. The festival itself only holds good in so far as our relationship with God is concerned. The High Holy Days, in effect, do no more than essentially relink our spiritual connections to God and that Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur expiate in relation to those sins. But we cannot, as it were, accept that simply because we rock up at schul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that all is forgiven in relation to ordinary people. In other words, in relation to our sins, which we have committed with regard to other people, here, according to our tradition, we don’t, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah do not expiate, sins against other people can only be atoned for once the wrong has been made right. Restitution has being paid for a financial crime, for example, forgiveness received from the victim. In other words, it’s really how we deal with our few, with our fellow human beings, that we attain this level of Teshuvah. And if we can now see the second clip, Lauren? The second clip is this. What constitutes complete Teshuvah? A person who confronts the same situation in which he or she sinned when he or she has the potential to do it again and yet abstains and does not commit it because of Teshuvah. I want to repeat this. It’s a very radical concept. What constitutes complete Teshuvah? We’re talking now about Teshuvah in relation to fellow human beings. A person who confronts the same situation in which he or she sinned when he or she has the potential to do it again and yet abstains and does not commit it because of Teshuvah.

This is a very radical concept because if you think about it, what this does is to reverse, as one of my mentors, Rabbi Steinhorn once told me, it reverses the concept of time. We are no longer imprisoned by the past. We are no longer, as it were, captured by that which we did because somehow, through this in earnest process of Teshuvah, confronted with the exact same situation by which we committed a sin to another, here we will do exactly the opposite. We’ll commit a mitzvah, we’ll do a good deed. We’ve actually changed the trajectory of our lives. We’re no longer the prisoners of the past. We’ve actually transcended that through the very creative process of Teshuvah. These are foundational principles of Judaism and they’re, it’s a remarkable principle when you think about it and I want to argue that it’s not just a radical principle in relation to our relationships inter say between people. I want to argue that it’s much more important than that. It’s a principle to, I think as I shall argue a little later, which actually applies to society at large. But it is why, going back to the first proposition that I’ve advanced, why on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we do not believe that simply going to schul and banging our chests and fasting on Yom Kippur expiates, any transgression that we’ve made to other people. That there’s that wonderful custom which takes place now between now and Yom Kippur, where we actually think about the people who we’ve defamed, who we’ve demeaned against, whom we’ve transgressed and we seek them out.

And we seek to apologise to them for what we’ve done, for the sins that we’ve committed towards them. So it’s a remarkable practise and it’s part of this process, radical process of essentially kind of existential renewal. And I think both of these points, which I’m making now, which are absolutely vital to the understanding of these days, and which I hope as I go through the work of Rav Kook that this will perhaps enrich your experience, those of you who are going to, as it were, celebrate, commemorate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that you will think about. So fundamentally what I’m arguing is that it’s the very foundational practise of the High Holy Days, Teshuvah. And it means a process of returning. Returning to our pristine quality from which we have deviated because of the sins that we’ve committed. It’s interesting in this particular regard, that the great Hasidic master Rav Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who sadly was murdered during the Holocaust, spoke about Teshuvah as a form of creativity. In other words, it’s a creative process by which we reconstruct our lives. And there’s a midrash about this, which I’d like to share with you about the creation of the world in which there’s an argument between a certain philosopher and Rabbi Gamliel, the leading rabbinical authority of his time, reflecting on the first verse of the Torah. The philosopher remarks, “Your God is indeed a great artist, but surely God found on hand suitable materials which were of help in creating.” Intrigued, Rabbi Gamliel asks, “In Genesis Rabbah, what are those materials?” And the philosopher replies, “Chaos, void, darkness, water, wind, and the depths.” Teshuvah leads us back into the very fabric of our lives where we can find the chaos, the void, the darkness, which essentially governs so much of our year, turning away from that, Teshuvah seeks to beckon us towards a more complicated, more nuanced and form of life where we actually no longer miss the mark arising from the dark and unknown corners of ourselves.

It is in short a fairly radical concept and it’s within that context that I want to turn to the work of Rav Kook. Now this is the book from which I’ve taken much. It’s called “Song of Teshuvah, Orot HaTeshuvah.” It was the favourite text that Rav Kook wrote and I’ll come to that in a moment. But before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about this remarkable person. He was born in Griva, a small Latvian townlet in 1865, oddly enough on the 16th day of Elul which is essentially where we are at the moment. It was clear from the beginning that he was a wunderkind and was clearly destined to become a great rabbi. During the formative years he came under the influence of the great Lithuanian Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, called the Natziv, whose years, 1816 to 1893. And he was the head of the Volozhin Yeshiva to which Rav Kook went. It’s interesting that the Natziv had two characteristics. He was in, very, very significant fighting, a certain controversy, intellectual fighting with the other form of approach towards Talmudic thought, which had been pioneered by Rav Chaim Soloveitchik, I think the great grandfather of Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, who when we speak about the Jewish community in America, I certainly want to give a talk because he’s perhaps the most central feature figure in modern Jewish orthodoxy. Rav Natziv had a very different view to the analytical Brisker Method of the Soloveitchiks, in which he was in continuous controversy. But even more important than that, his second characteristic was he was an absolute passionate supporter of the Zionist dream, of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in then Palestine. And that clearly rubbed off on Rav Kook for reasons we’ll come to in a moment. Now, after, in 1886, at the year of 20, Rav Kook leaves the yeshiva and takes up a position of the rabbi in the small Lithuanian community of Zaumel. And I’m probably pronouncing it wrongly, I do apologise, but nonetheless.

And it’s quite clear that in his early rabbinic days, he exhibited quite extraordinary characteristics. Let me give you an example. There was a Yom Kippur in his synagogue where, it was during a raging plague when fasting was really regarded as fraught with all sorts of physical danger. On Kol Nidre night, Rav Kook took his stand at the reading desk with food in his hand, and as a 20 year old, he recited the appropriate benediction and in the presence of his quite gobsmacked and startled worshipers, he ate, and bade them to do the same because the preservation of life was more important than the simple application of the ritual which would’ve placed their lives in jeopardy. It’s kind of a remarkable act for a 20 year old rabbi. And it’s sort of brought back to me, if I may be anecdotal for a moment, something that I was taught by one of my teachers, Rav Duschinsky, , may his memory be blessed, who of course was the Av Beth Din in Cape Town. And I would imagine that there are people on this call who remember him fondly, as I do. And I was learning with Rabbi Duschinsky and we came across, of course the foundational concepts of all Jewish thought, , God’s justice and God’s compassion from where everything else follows. And he illustrated, he was illustrating to me the concept of God’s compassion by telling me that once upon a time he had been the rabbi for the country communities in South Africa. And he went to a small town to look at the graves and at the end of it, an elderly woman invited him for lunch. And when he went there, the table was groaning with all form of Jewish delicacies. And he said to me, “You know, we were kind of quite a few hundred miles away from any major city and one had to wonder whether the food was kosher.” And he looked at me and said, “What do you think I did?”

And I said, “I dunno.” And of course he shouted at me saying, “You haven’t listened to me, like what God’s compassion is. You eat the food because you don’t demean the person. And if it’s not entirely kosher, it’s not such a big deal. Much more important that you preserve the dignity of the person.” It seemed to me that Rav Duschinsky came from that same school. And as I read in preparation for this lecture, the story about Rav Kook and Yom Kippur, it struck me of how distant that kind of orthodoxy is at the moment. How we’ve moved so far away, and in the concept of Teshuvah, how far we’ve moved away from the essence of the religion as these great thinkers thought to a sort of almost anal compliance with rules without thinking about the moral underpinnings thereof. But back to Rav Kook, if I may. So it was clear that he was in love with the Holy Land. It was very important to him. Clearly the Natziv had had a very significant effect on his thinking. And in 1904 he was invited to become the rabbi in Jaffa, which is what he did, and clearly made a significant impact. However, during the First World War, Rav Kook found himself in Germany where he was due to attend a conference of the Agudath Israel. He was unable to get back to the homeland and he therefore landed up in Switzerland where he stayed till 1916 when he came to London to act as rabbi to the Spitalfield’s Great Synagogue where he was for a couple of years. It’s interesting that during those months in 1917, when negotiations between the Zionist leaders and the British government were reaching their climax, Rav Kook was very central to the battle in favour of Zionism. A letter appeared in “The Times” on the 14th, 24th of May of 1917, under the signatures of the Presidents of the Conjoint Committee, denouncing Zionism as incompatible with the Jewish religion. It brought from Rav Kook a scathing reply in the form of a manifesto entitled “A National Treachery.”

It was read in many synagogues and it created clearly a profound effect within the community. Rav Kook was able at the end of the war to return to Palestine and entered Jerusalem on the third of Elul in 1919 to assume the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, sorry, of Jerusalem. Three years later, he was appointed as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, and continued there until his death in 1935. So we’re talking about a completely remarkable human being who, as I say, had devoted considerable attention to the concept of Teshuvah, as I say, that book “Song of Teshuvah,” which I’ve just shown you, is central to that. If we can get the next clip up. So if you look at this clip, this is the preface to the, or show the introduction to Orot HaTeshuva that Song or Lights of Penitence, if you like, published in 1925. And in the introduction, and this is what Rav Kook says, “For some time I’ve been struggling with an inner conflict and a mighty force impels me to speak about Teshuvah, about penitence. All my thoughts are focused on this topic.” Penitence, sorry, “Teshuvah holds a primary place in Torah and in life. All the hopes of the individual and of society depend on it.” So for him, the concept of Teshuvah was absolutely central to Jewish thought as a whole. And it’s not entirely surprising because he emphasised a text which is particularly important, a text which we, many of you will know, and which we all study, which was that Teshuvah was planned before the creation of the world. It’s for this reason that it’s the foundation of the world. The quest for the perfection of life is a phase of its manifestation according to its nature.

In other words, the belief is that the idea that a human being can repent, that, what I mean return really, I’m using, I should use that word more accurately. The fact that somebody can return is an absolutely central kind of rule of the cosmos. It’s, of our lives, of the universe, if you wish, or of our community on earth. That it’s one of the rules. It’s just like the rule of gravity. It was created before creation because it allowed human beings to essentially reverse the order and create a better society than perhaps they had started with or that they had ultimately created in an earlier phase. And it’s not therefore for nothing that in this particular context, if you read “Song of Teshuvah,” you’ll see that it was written at a time where there was a great controversy over evolution. Not only Darwinism, but the teachings of Herbert Spence and others in socioeconomic and biological evolution, were very much the rage at the time. And Rav Kook had the unique ability to actually, in a sense, look at the entire debate about evolution and argue something absolutely fundamental, which was that evolution is a spiritual process that takes place deep within every human being. “It’s a movement propelling us,” as he wrote, “forward, pushing us inevitably towards perfection, health and ultimately to the process of being able to return to a pristine life.” And therefore for him, in a sense, the theory of evolution was not something to eschew. It was something which was very central to his very thinking of the process of Teshuvah. Human beings evolve. They’re not just stuck in the mud. They’re not just stuck in a particular period. They’re able to evolve. They have the creativity to do so. Out of chaos, something better can happen. And as God created the world out of chaos, so can human beings transcend the- That’s exactly the idea of holiness, which he was adopting in relation to his theory. And it’s really quite remarkable when you think about that. This was written in the early part of the 20th century. Now if we can then look a little bit more at what he meant and if we can get the next clip up, that will be fantastic, Lauren. Here we get what he’s really on about. “Teshuvah is the great key to redemption.

Many things inhibit Teshuvah, but the main obstacle, particularly to collective Teshuvah, is the misconception of Teshuvah as atrophy of the soul, as the enfeebling and debilitation of life. This false image also impairs the Teshuvah of the individual. But more than anything, it hinders collective Teshuvah, the Teshuvah of the nation.” And so just let me pause there for a moment. When he’s talking about Teshuvah he’s not just talking about us as individuals. Because of his view that the centrality of Jewish life in particular had to be located in the Holy Land, Eretz Israel, it meant that to a large degree we had to look at the collective as well as the individual, that the process applied to both. And then he says, “We must disclose the secret that the genuine Teshuvah of the entire nation of Israel is a mighty, powerful vision that provides reserves of might and strength, imbuing all of our spiritual and pragmatic values with a lofty spirit of vigorous, surging creative energy from the power of the Rock of Israel. The living Teshuvah flows not from isolated, fragmented souls, but from the treasury of the nation’s collective soul, Knesset Yisrael. In this way, the united soul of Israel is prepared to return to its former strength, as in days of old.” So what for Rav Kook is vitally important here is not just the question of us individuals seeking, as it were, to come to grips with our own existential angst. It’s vitally important for him that there’s something more than this. That there is a process of collect, of the nation, of the idea that we as a nation essentially must look at our own national soul or the soul of our people and ask ourselves, “What in fact has gone wrong? How do we return to days of old?” I do not think I need to emphasise this, in the context in which we stand at the moment where there’s such great division within Eretz Israel at this particular point in time.

And where people like myself really, in a sense, who looked at the days of old, probably at the form of Zionism that Rav Kook- ironically of course, even though some of his supporters now are very right wing, his own view was that Israel, that would be the spiritual centre of the Jewish world. And more than that it would actually be an ethical world in which all of you, all of the inhabitants, would respect one another. It seems to me that his work really repays reading just from that particular point alone. And of course what he was also particularly interested in, was the issue of violence as a legitimate political tool. And our need to reflect on that. He said, “We all receive a small dose of Esav in ourselves.” Esav being, as it were, the personification of violence as a legitimate political tool. And he says, “Of course, what we are trying to be is Yaakov. We should be the man of peace who does not want to be identified with militancy, who does not want to be identified with violence as a legitimate political tool. And it’s interesting that Rav Kook was writing much of this as a result of his own experiences in the midst of the First World War. But again, it’s difficult to think of a more humanist, almost pacifist quote from any religious thinker. And the entire exile then being understood as an expression of the repulsion of war and of violence and of bloodshed and the attempt to create a world, a society, in which that did not occur. That was very much his vision. If we could then move to the next clip? But what I wanted to emphasise here was, again, this very fundamental point, that it’s no good just looking at this on an individual basis. Teshuvah is the great key to redemption. Many things inhibit Teshuvah. The main obstacle, particularly , is the misconception, as I say.

And what he was looking at is how do we actually now reach out to individuals? How do we reach out to all in society, to actually be able- and particularly young people, how do we reach them and get them to ultimately become exponents of Teshuvah? And I think what is really important about this particular passage is the following, is that it’s no good just moaning and groaning and trying to actually get people to adhere to banal ritual. It’s the question of what kinds of ideological project you put for them. How do you actually inspire people to believe that the tradition itself has within it the key, the foundational key to redemption for society as a whole? And it’s for this reason, if I can, if I really want to emphasise particularly a point that he makes, and I didn’t give you the quote, but let me read it to you. "The stubborn insistence on clinging to a single perspective and relying on it while still wrapped in ropes of sin that have grown habitual, whether in regard to deeds or opinions, is an illness that comes from being immersed in a terrible state of enslavement.” I want to emphasise this again, “The stubborn insistence on clinging to a single perspective and relying on it while still wrapped in ropes of sin that have grown habitual, whether in regard to deeds or opinions, is an illness that comes from being immersed in a terrible state of enslavement.” What did he mean? He said people have this tendency to stubbornly insist on remaining committed to unhealthy way of life because change is both painful and hard. He said, In other words, people prefer a difficult but familiar situation to something that’s new and unknown.

Many people stay at a certain level of employment even if they could better if they explored other avenues, is an example. It’s fascinating to me that he was so insightful. “When a person is young, sin as insubstantial as a thread,” he wrote, “but as he matures, it can bind him like a rope. A person’s wrong behaviour can become so habitual that he begins to view it as his custom. For instance, a person might claim that he has a custom of yelling at his children because when he was growing up, his parents yelled at him. Or he might be habituated to talking in schul.” He gave, as an example, all these cases. “Youthful thread of sin is thickened into rope and the person feels unable to break free therefore. Even worse than being trapped into a wrong way of acting is justifying, defending oneself, turning one’s behaviour into an ideal and one’s warped viewpoint into an ideology. Again, can we just think about that for a moment? This is somebody writing a hundred years ago. How many of us are in fact imprisoned in that kind of perspective? How many of us listening this evening, myself included, are unable to kind of break free from perspectives we have so that we can sufficiently engage in self refraction to say there may be another view out there? Indeed, if you want to really ask the fundamental question, "What is the central feature of democracy?” It has to be that we show dignity and respect to each other, even if we have different views, that we can accommodate views differently ourselves. And we do not take the view that only our view is correct and there’s none other. That the ability, as it were, to break free from wrong ways of acting and wrong ways of thinking and thinking that one’s view is the only one. He wrote, “This is a species of enslavement. No one is standing over such a person with a whip, but he’s enslaved to his or her habits and patterns of thinking.”

“The Halachos states,” he says, “That if a person swallows maror on Pesach without tasting it, he has not fulfilled his obligation. Rav Yaakov of explains this to mean that "If a Jew is living an improper life, yet that fact is not bitter to him, he’s not fulfilling his personal obligations.” In other words, it’s not just a question of a slavish fulfilment of the rituals. It’s the question of what they mean for you in essentially lifting your horizon so that you can actually see the extent to which you’re being enslaved by particular forms of conduct and particular forms of thinking. If a person goes through the motions of being religious but does not feel the warmth of the tradition, if he does not care about prayer or learning, feels no bitterness about being separated from the divine. If he’s not bothered by his sins, if he’s not bothered by the fact that he can only think in one way without any critical reflection at all, then Rav Kook said, “He is a slave.” For the Jews in Egypt being a slave was their way of life. It was a self-definition. They no longer saw themselves as Jews, as children of the patriarchs and the matriarchs, as an amazing people who were stuck temporally in a bitter servitude. said that during the period of slavery, no one ever escaped Mitzrayim. The word Mitzrayim means m'tzarim, straits. The Jews were trapped in the narrowness of their own conceptions, of their own attitude to their lives, of their own slavery. And so what I’m, I suppose I’ve been trying to say all along is that what is particularly important about this is that he has developed for me a concept of Teshuvah both of the individual and the collective, which is both radical and speaks to our times. He wrote, “That when a person is enslaved, he cannot imagine himself anywhere else, different than any other way.

One can talk to such a person about the most inspiring concepts in the world, but they don’t affect them. The Jews who were working in Egypt thought, "My grandfather was slave, my father was a slave, I’m a slave, my children’s a slave, that’s who we are.” My father supported x, my grandfather supported x, I therefore support x without any criticism at all. In short, no ability for self-reflection, no ability to ask ourselves, “Have we strayed from an ethical path, can we have the power of reflection to do something differently?”“ And that is the central feature of Rav Kook. He says, "For thousands of years the world, including even Roman and Greece, its most advanced civilizations, accepted slavery. But then there came the awakening of the Renaissance and the Reformation followed by the American and French revolutions. People realised that they had free will, that they could act on their own, that they could change. They declared that freedom was worth fighting for, even worth dying for. Here you’ve got the point that on the evolutionary perspective that he adopted, the world can be a better place and generally will be a better place, even if it goes through hiccups. And accordingly, he said the Exodus was the springtime of the world. Exodus marked mankind’s first realisation that a people could arise to freedom of slavery. It was the beginning of all revolutions. It was the beginning of the ability to say, "I do not have to be a slave for the rest of my life and the rest of my children’s lives.” In short, what I suppose I’ve been arguing in relation to Rav Kook is that I think he presents for us a particular perspective of Teshuvah, which is radical and speaks both to us as individuals and to the broader community. Let me give you an illustration of what I have in mind coming from my own country, South Africa. I will talk about this in much greater detail when we come to the series on South Africa, which will be presented shortly.

But could I just share with you the notion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? The idea that to a large degree, we set up this commission in order to look at our past, to come to terms with that past, to ask people to come forward and actually state in clear terms what it is they’d done. What had they done as it were to perpetuate the crimes of apartheid? What had they done to torture others, to dislocate families, to destroy lives? And the notion was that the entire nation would. be able to hear these statements because ultimately, if you go back to the concept of Teshuvah that I spoke about, please understand that the first statement is an acknowledgement. And that’s what Rav Kook’s really saying. You can’t break free of your ideological straits unless you actually come to terms with what it is that you’ve done and what you’ve thought. And for South Africa, the fundamental point was we had to come to terms with our past. We had to come to terms with the notion that this was an evil past, which essentially enslaved millions of South Africans because of their race, denying them the inalienable rights that each and every human being should have. But it wasn’t just a question if we were going to, as it were, break free from the past, that we’d acknowledge the past. The whole idea of Truth and Reconciliation is that once we have acknowledged the truth, one can engage in the path of reconciliation. One can actually say, “Yes, I was an oppressor and our society were form of oppressors. We can’t continue like this. We’ve got to actually change the trajectory of the society and embrace all.” And the reconciliation meant actually to have the energy of the past in order to ensure that the future would be different.

And the tragedy of South Africa is this, that, yes, we learned quite a lot about what happened under apartheid, no doubt about it. But what we did not learn or what we did not take into account to a large extent was the fact that was the first stage. The second stage is ultimately to utilise the power and the energy from that insight in order to ensure that faced with the same situations today, we would behave in an entirely different way to that which we behaved before. Now, I’m not talking about individuals, please understand that. I’m talking about the collectivity of which Rav Kook was referring, and I’m trying to universalize this. And when, for example, in South Africa, what is it, about 10 days ago, 77 people died in a building which ultimately should have been condemned, in which this, the city should have actually ensured that these people were in a less vulnerable position. They died because they were poor, because they were vulnerable, and yes, because they were black. And I thought to myself, we haven’t learnt those lessons. And yes, we’ll be angry for a week and then we’ll carry on. We have not changed the trajectory of time. We have not moved from the past into the future. Oh yes, many who in a sense were the subject of these practises in the past and are now in power, seem to have forgotten that as well.

But we should not be naive enough to believe that that doesn’t happen. And so it seems to me that as we come to the process of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, whether it be in South Africa, whether it be in any of the countries in which we live, it seems that there’s so much that has to be done in order to harness the power of what Rav Kook was speaking about. And so what I’m really saying, I suppose in many ways, is that this particular book of his, which he speaks about, in which he says quite bluntly that, “The foundation of life that is about Teshuvah, it is about the ability of individuals to find holiness everywhere, to remove the barriers which prevent it, both in our own lives and societal lives. That there is a form of evolution in which society can progress from sinful to far more ethical. If we did not believe that, then in fact we really would be in a very hopeless state. And so it seems to me that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, if you read it through the lens of Rav Kook, is a remarkably radical set of challenges posed to us, both in our individual lives and in those of society. And that really is what I wanted to say. I’ll see if there are any questions or comments, I’ll be very delighted to answer them.

Q&A and Comments:

I have from Michael, "In the comes just before implication, that someone has wronged another person must honestly acknowledge the wrong he has done before he can expect to be forgiven.” Yes, yes, of course we- There’s no obligation on the person who’s been sinned, simply to reach out. Of course it’s wonderful if they do, but there is an obligation, a moral obligation, a religious obligation, to actually do it the other way around.

And when Alan says, “Please confirm that forgiveness from someone you have sinned against encompasses all human beings, not Jews.” Of course, that’s true. That’s what I’ve been saying, Alan. I don’t believe it’s only about Jew to Jew. Of course, Rav Kook was speaking about the Holy Land, and by the way, he had some interesting views about the notion of attaining peace in the Holy Land for all, not just Jews, which is very, in contrast, some of the people who’ve incorrectly followed him.

Q: Yona asks a very basic question. “You might have covered it during the first minute, what is meant by redemption? The term geulah and the doer of that geulah occurs frequently, but it seems undefined.”

A: Let me just, if I can, “Neither geulah for the individual or for a people. It seems to me there’s generally used, it’s a late second temple acquisition from the non-Jewish world.” Alfred writes that way. Well, what I think we’re talking about here in relation, it’s not so much redemption, but as long, it’s a return, it’s a return to something different. It’s a return to, it’s an attempt to, sorry. It’s a fundamental belief that we are capable of human beings as doing great and moral deeds. That we don’t, for all sorts of reasons, including our obstinacy, including the ideology that we swallow, including the perspectives that we get from early on. And our ability to break free from those essentially does create a notion of redemption, meaning the ability of society to move from where it is to where it could be. And so the idea that someone like Rav Kook said, “Evolution is particularly congruent with the Jewish tradition” was interesting to me because he means meaning it in a spiritual way, which is particularly profound and important. Thank you very much Susan. Yeah, sure, thank you very much.

So that’s really what I wanted to discuss with you this evening. And I, well, I hope if I may, just by way of conclusion, just say one or two further things, which is what I really wanted to say was if you go back to my beginning of my talk and the idea that the idea of Teshuvah is foundational to the and if you take it seriously, then it seems to me it’s extremely meaningful. It gives us the ability, and I was just looking for one final quote if I can find it.

As I usually, oh, yes- “It’s important to understand that Teshuvah seeks to avoid punishment. So, which is really not the point. It’s not the point that we actually undermine the person who’s committed the sin. It really is not just about remorse, that’s a negative feature. It’s the ability to understand that one can delve into one’s soul, identify goodness which has been hidden therein and therefore accordingly able to do more than just that. More than just stop, but actually do something profoundly moral where previously one didn’t.” Seems to me a profound lesson. I wish you all a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and hopefully the lessons of Rav Kook will play heavily with all of us, as whether we go to schul or whether we don’t, and whatever shul we go to, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we take these concepts seriously.

Goodnight to everybody.