Three Paths of Teshuvah

Three Paths of Teshuvah

On the eve of Yom Kippur, we are accustomed to speaking of teshuvah as the possibility of returning.

To repair what we have damaged. To ask forgiveness from those we have hurt. To restore something to its proper place.

But what happens when it is no longer possible to return? Can there still be repair?

There are things that can be repaired, and there are things that cannot. As Ecclesiastes says:

“What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.”

And elsewhere:

“Consider the work of God: for who can make straight what He has made crooked?”

There are words we have spoken that cannot be taken back. There are people we have lost. There are relationships that have changed. There are decisions that have created a new reality. Time itself does not turn backward.

In such situations, is teshuvah still possible? And if so, what kind of teshuvah can it be?

I have been thinking about this in light of S. Y. Agnon’s story, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight — 1912.

Menashe Hayyim and his wife, Kreindel Tcharni, lose their livelihood. Menashe Hayyim sets out on his wanderings and, in the course of his journey, sells the letter of recommendation that had been given to him. After some time, word arrives that he has died. His wife, believing herself to be a widow, marries another man and builds a new life.

And then Menashe Hayyim returns.

At first sight, this should be the moment when everything is put right. The dead man is alive. The husband has returned. We might expect that the “crooked” will indeed be made “straight.”

But Menashe Hayyim understands that there is no longer any way back.

If he were to declare, “I am Menashe Hayyim. I am alive,” he might recover his name and his place in the world, but in doing so he could destroy his wife’s life and the new family that has come into being.

And he remains silent.

It seems to me that this is where his deepest teshuvah begins.

Rav Kook, who read the story while it was still in manuscript, was deeply impressed by it and told Agnon that it was “a truly Hebrew story, flowing from the channels without any barrier.”

It is interesting to read the story in the light of Orot HaTeshuvah.

For Rav Kook, the quintessential man of faith and mystic, teshuvah is not merely remorse for sin. It is a force of life. The human being can renew himself. The will can be made straight. Even out of a crisis, new life can be born.

But for Agnon, the modernist writer, teshuvah is a more difficult matter—if it is possible at all—and it takes more complex forms, shaped by human effort and by the limits of the deepest human psychology.

In Menashe Hayyim, the will is indeed made straight — but life itself is not made straight.

He becomes a person capable of renouncing himself for the sake of another, but this cannot restore his wife, his home, or his former life to him.

And perhaps this is why the name of the protagonist is so remarkable:

Menashe Hayyim.

Menashe — from the language of forgetting, as Joseph says:

“For God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house.”

And Hayyim — life.

At the end of the story, Menashe Hayyim must choose between the two parts of his name.

So that others may live, he agrees to become Menashe — to be forgotten.

He is alive, but the world must believe him to be dead.

And he does not attain, in the simple sense, a new life. His teshuvah does not bring him back to the life he once had. It brings him to the possibility of accepting the judgment.

Here I am reminded of the famous statement that Max Brod attributed to Kafka. When he asked Kafka whether there was hope beyond this world, Kafka replied:

“There is hope, infinite hope — but not for us.”

Three possibilities stand here side by side.

For Rav Kook, teshuvah can penetrate life itself and renew it.

For Kafka, perhaps redemption exists, but it lies beyond our reach.

And Agnon stands in the painful place between them:

Perhaps life can no longer be redeemed, and yet teshuvah may still be possible.

“And Menashe Hayyim thought how easily that deed might never have been done, and in his hoarse voice he chanted to himself a verse from Psalms: ‘You return man to dust, and say: Return, O children of man.’

When Menashe Hayyim saw that the watchman was greatly alarmed, he raised his arm and said: Truly did our Sages say that this world and all that is created in it descend to Sheol. But Heaven forbid that one should complain against His ways. As the holy Shelah wrote: Know, my children, that the keys are entrusted into the hands of man. There is a hidden mystery in this, for truly the outer keys and the inner keys are placed in human hands.

And well did our Sages of blessed memory say in the Midrash: Happy is the person who withstands his trial, for there is no person whom the Holy One, blessed be He, does not test. He tests the rich man… and He tests the poor man, to see whether he can endure and accept suffering.

Menashe Hayyim finished speaking, and both of them understood who the woman was who had come to erect a tombstone for Menashe Hayyim: she was Kreindel Tcharni — Kreindel Tcharni, the wife of Menashe Hayyim. From that moment on, Menashe Hayyim spoke no more, but strengthened his heart in God with the little strength that remained to him.

At times he would leave his place and go to the fence of the cemetery, to look from afar at the grave of that beggar, that false Menashe Hayyim, who had enticed him into sin, taken his wife from him, and cut off his name from Israel forever. And a fire burned within his bones.

Day by day his body wasted away, until his soul departed and he died.

The watchman, who knew the story we have related above, erected the tombstone for the man to whom it rightfully belonged, and gave a name and a remnant in Israel to Menashe Hayyim the Kohen, who had died childless.

And when the Day of the Throne came, Kreindel Tcharni stood at Menashe Hayyim’s grave, and her tears fell upon his dust. May his soul be bound in the bond of life.”

Perhaps this is one of the deeper meanings of the eve of Yom Kippur.

We stand before the Holy One, blessed be He, and we cannot always say: I will put everything back in its place.

Sometimes we simply do not have that power.

But we can say:

What I can no longer change, I can learn to bear differently.

I cannot erase the person I was — but I can choose the person I will be from now on.

And then Agnon’s title takes on a new meaning:

“And the crooked shall be made straight.”

Perhaps this does not mean that all the crooked paths of our lives will become straight.

Perhaps sometimes the path remains crooked.

But the person who walks that path can become straight.

And perhaps this is the teshuvah we can ask for on the eve of Yom Kippur: not that the Holy One, blessed be He, return us to a world in which nothing has ever been broken, but that He give us the strength to stand truthfully before Him within this broken world — and from within it, to choose life anew.

RAV DOCTOR ROBERTO ARBIB