Below is the teaching of Chaplain (soon to be Rabbi) Adam Ruditsky in conjunction with the book Preparing yourself for the High Holidays.
רפואה מן התורה
Have you
forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, the wickedness of the kings of Judah,
and the wickedness of their wives, your own wickedness, and the wickedness of
your wives, which they committed in the land of Judah and in the streets of
Jerusalem? … (Jer. 44:9)
Yep, that is a heavy
indictment to say the least, and it’s really to bad we find it in the
Tanakh. But there is value to be gained by
looking behind the words themselves. Maimonides in his Mishnah Torah (Laws of Repentance -Hilchot T’shuva) says, that when a person is faced with the potential once again to to fall short from the same situation, will they act upon that sin again?
The “wickedness” that Jeremiah speaks of above was on going, the people
and nation continued to embrace unhealthy and non-Torah based ways of living, embracing
practices that were against the ethics of God and like-values. The result; they were attacked and lost their
land to a foreign king, exiled to a land that was not their own as strangers, having no sense of security or hope of return in the future. Now while that may be that story, our own
stories tell us that we each are victims of our own choices. The natural
evolution of growth in Torah asks us not to forget the past and make better
choices for the sake of the future.
Engaging in better self-awareness sets the stage for self-betterment in
general.
Complete
acts of T’shuva help complete the self
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