Below
is teaching of Chaplain (Rabbi to be) Adam Ruditsky in conjunction with the
book Preparing for the High Holidays
רפואה
מן התורה
There are sin’s that can be atoned for
immediately and other sins can only be atoned for over the course of time (Maimonides, Laws for Repentance, Mishnah Torah)
When Israel was about to cross the Jordan
and enter the land that God promised their ancestors, 2 1/2 tribes elected to
remain east of Canaan and create their homesteads. While Moses and the
Elders permitted their desire, the men of those tribes first had to cross the
Jordan and enter the land in support of the rest of Israel who sought to settle
is the land of their inheritance. What
does that have to do with the forgiveness of sin that also seems to the work on
many different levels all at once?
Forgiveness does not mean the eradication of consequences, and the forgiveness of sin does not always mean that you always wake up and “feel” forgiven. Forgiveness is a journey in many ways and you
might not be able to “settle” until other business is dealt with first, just
like Israel and the land above. The fact
is that if we rest on the morals of forgiveness we might miss a very important
truth; we continue to fall short. Please
do not read that as an indictment of some kind, that would be the wrong way to
take it. What it is saying is that
repentance and forgiveness are a process, it can take time. Sometimes we have
to fix something first, like asking forgiveness from another person on Yom
Kippur, or sometimes we have to forgive ourselves before we can feel forgiven
by God. As the Kohelet wrote in
Ecclesiastes 7:2, “it is better to go into the house of mourning than go to a
house of feasting.” Well, perhaps that
is because in our case we have to be someplace that allows us to better hear that needed inner voice of correction.
It takes a lifetime to complete the process
of t’shuva.
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