Starstruck

Rabbi Yitzhak Frank gave a lecture on Aramaic grammar at Pardes this week.

The casual reader of this blog could be forgiven for failing to leap out of his chair in excitement after reading the above sentence. I, however, was simply giddy when I walked into the beit midrash and saw Rabbi Frank standing there in flesh. I’ve kept my cool with personages orders of magnitude more famous than this scholar, but then again, none of them have been authors of books that I have occasion to consult with such regularity (with the possible exception of Wallace Shawn). The Frank dictionary, which explains the usage of the most common words and phrases in the Talmud, has been an almost indispensable tool in my studies for the past two years.

His lecture covered some of the basics of Aramaic grammar, which are often overlooked or misunderstood by even advanced students of the Talmud. This rather dry topic had me squirming with excitement. As someone whose ability to parse biblical passages is rooted in a strong understanding of Hebrew grammar (Thanks, Rabbi Posner!), I have found it frustrating to muddle through Aramaic texts with little sense of what form or what tense each verb is in. Though most of Rabbi Frank’s lecture was review for me, I was glad to get some ideas for how to go about learning and teaching the subject from the man who literally wrote the book on Aramaic grammar.

What I Learned at Pardes This Week #7: Standards of Evidence

This week in my Talmud class, as we approach the close of Chapter Four of Tractate Sanhedrin, we were looking at the talmud’s discussion of the warning given to witnesses in dinei nefashot, or capital cases. Among other injunctions, the mishnah states that witnesses are warned not to testify based on conjecture or hearsay. The first thing the Gemara does in commenting on this mishnah is to bring a baraita , that asks exactly what “conjecture” means.

On some level, it seems obvious what conjecture is. If I see Tom hit Joe really hard in the head with a hammer and then Joe drops down dead, I can testify that I know Tom killed Joe. On the other hand, if I hear hear Tom say that he has it in for Joe, and then two weeks later Joe turns up dead, it would be pure conjecture for me to say that Tom killed Joe. But there are all sorts of cases that might fall somewhere in betwen, and the Talmud is concerned with exactly those sorts of liminal cases.

According to the baraita, when we warn a witness not to testify based on conjecture, we say “Perhaps you saw the accused chase the victim down the street into an abandoned building. You ran after them and found the accused with a sword in his hand dripping with blood and the corpse of the victim dripping on the ground. If that’s all you saw, you didn’t see anything.” At first glance it seems hard to imagine a more clear-cut case. It seems obvious that the person with the sword in his hand killed the other guy. But for some reason, this isn’t strong enough evidence to convict someone, according to the rabbis.

There are two ways to look at it. It’s possible that the rabbis think that it’s obvious the person did it, but they are looking for a pretext to throw out evidence in a case where conviction would carry a mandatory death penalty. But it’s also possible that the rabbis see this as a case of very strong, but nonetheless circumstantial evidence. After all, isn’t it just conceivable that the suspect was chasing the victim without the intention of murdering him, and then the victim triped and fell on his sword, and just before the witnesses walked in, the suspect pulled the sword out of the victim’s body to try and save him?

Among the mishnaic authorities, there is disagreement about whether or not this same standard applies in dinei mamonot, or civil cases The gemara brings the parallel case of a camel, which is described as ocher, meaning either “rutting,” “biting” or perhaps “frothing a the mouth” which is found with another camel dead at it’s side. In this case, one anonymous opinion holds that, just as in a capital case, we cannot assume that the rutting camel is responsible for the death of the other camel, while another tana, Rabbi Acha, says we regard it as a known fact that the one camel killed the other (making its owner liable for damages). If we assume the cases are analogous, then Rabbi Acha, who allows conjecture in a civil case where nothing more than money and possibly the life of a camel is at stake, regards the prohibition against conjecture as stemming not from any doubt about the conjecture-based testimony, but from a simple reluctance to impose the death penalty. On the other hand the anonymous tana who states that we can’t conclude that the camel in question is the killer, would seem to support the notion that there is at least some level of real doubt about conclusions based on conjecture, which would apply equally well in a capital as in a civil case.

In the end, Jewish law doesn’t allow conjecture in either capital or civil cases. This supports the latter read that even the slightest level of inference cannot be relied upon as evidence, and anything short of actually witnessing a crime with one’s own eyes is circumstantial.

What I Learned at Pardes This Week #6: The secret meaning of Noah’s name

Earlier this week, in Judy Klitsner’s Bereshit class, we were looking at the issue of Noah’s naming. When he names him, his father Lemech explains the name, saying “this one will give us relief from our work and the toil of our ands from the land which the Lord cursed.” While the name Noah (נח) is superficially similar in sound and spelling to the word for “he will give us relief” (ינחמנו), the words are not actually related etymologically. Noah comes from the root נ-ו-ח / N-W-X, which means rest, while the word for “will give us relief” comes from the root נ-ח-ם / N-X-M, meaning comfort. So although the words sound the same, they are not etymologically related. So what do we do with the apparent contradiction between linguistics and the biblical text?

Our teacher presented us with three possible solutions to the problem, two from the medieval commentators Rashi and Ibn Ezra, and one of her own.

Ibn Ezra

The commentaries of Ibn Ezra are so rational and worldly that it is almost surprising to find them included in the cannon of classical biblical commentators. On the verse in question, he offers a variation of his oft-repeated trope that the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. The words sound the same, and they have similar meanings- that should be good enough for us as readers. After all, this is far from the only place in the bible where the explicitly stated reason for a name fails to stand up to strict linguistic scrutiny. In other words, it’s just not worth worrying about.

Rashi

Contrasted with Ibn Ezra, Rashi has a rather rigorous idea of the Torah’s perfection, and refuses to accept the idea that there is any dissonance at all between the linguistic reality and the stated meaning. According to Rashi, the verb ינחמנו doesn’t mean “He will comfort us”, but rather “He will bring rest from us”, so that the מ in the word is not part of the root, but rather part of the suffix, and in fact the root of the expression is נוח N-W-X after all, just like Noah’s name. So Rashi manages to harmonize the meanings, but in order to do so, resorts to proposing a grammatical form that fails to make idiomatic sense and doesn’t seem to have strong precedent elsewhere in the bible.

Klitsner

Our teacher, not satisfied with either Ibn Ezra’s cool dismisal of the problem or Rashi’s rather creative solution, suggests instead that the dissonance of meaning in text is a deliberate literary choice, giving the reader a dual sense of Noah’s role. On the one hand he is the means of humanity’s salvation from divine wrath, a true comfort (נחמ N-X-M) while on the other he only manages to save his own family leaving the rest of the world to perish, providing mere rest from punishment (נוח N-W-X), a respite without full relief.

In general, I like Klitsner’s underlying nmethodological assumption that difficulties and contradictions in the text of the bible serve a literary purpose, which lead her to look for a double meaning in this verse. However, I am not convinced by her conclusion in this case of what that double meaning is. “Comfort” and “Rest” are too close to one another in meaning to support the contrast in significance that she seems to be drawing between them.

My humble opinion

It was only at the next meeting of our class, when were were looking at the problematics surrounding the statement “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on earth and His heart was saddened” in Genesis 6:6 (e.g., “Does God have human emotions like regret?”, “If God is omniscient, shouldn’t he have forseen the consequences of previous actions that lead to this?” – questions beyond the scope of this post), that Lemech’s strange explanation of Noah’s name became clear to me. Noting the fact that the word meaning “and he regretted” in 5:29 (וינחם / Vayinaxem) comes from the root (נחם / N-X-M) which had given us so much trouble when it came up in the context of Noah’s name, it occured to me to look at the two verses side by side. They turn out to have striking parallels.

Compare Genesis 5:29

This one will PROVIDE US RELIEF (ינחמנו / Yenaxameinu) FROM OUR WORK (ממעשנו / mima&aseinu) AND FROM THE TOIL (ומעצבון / umei&itsevon) of our hands, from THE SOIL (האדמה / ha’adamah) which the Lord had cursed.

with Genesis 6:6

And the Lord REGRETTED (וינחם / vayinaxem) that HE HAD MADE (עשה / &asah) MAN (האדמ / ha’adam) on earth, and His heart WAS SADDENED (ויתעצב / vayit&atsev).

Each verse contains the roots נחם / N-X-M, עשה / &-S-H, אדמ / ‘-D-M, and עצב / &-Ts-B. Moreover, if we leave out the root אדם / ‘-D-M (“man” and “soil”, respectively) the roots appear in the same order, in both verses. This, together with their proximity in the biblical text (only 9 verses apart), tells me that they must be commenting on each other. Lemech cites relief (נחם) as the source of Noah’s name, a word linguistically unrelated to Noah, even though the actual root of rest (נוח) would have conveyed essentially the same meaning, because נחם / N-X-M serves as a little hyper-link to the issue of God’s regret at the creation of humanity.

This explanation solves not only the textual problem of Lemech’s etymological error, but it also solves another more conceptual problem, namely, that Lemech’s prediction for Noah’s future seems to correspond to the story that follows only vaguely and obliquely. He predicts that Noah will bring relief from our work and the toil of our hands, when in point of fact, both the the biblical text and in the reality we know, humanity still knows no relief from the work and toil of our hands.

In light of the correspondence between Genesis 5:29 and 6:6, we see that this dissonance of meaning, like the linguistic dissonance we looked at earlier, serves a literary role. Noah does provide rest/relief, as Lemech forsees, but it is not rest or relief from “our work and the toil of our hands”. Rather, it is a respite and relief from God’s regret (נחם / N-X-M) and sadness (עצב / &-Ts-B) at having made (עשה / &-S-H) man.

After fleshing this out for myself, I still need to consult with my teachers to find out if I’ve stumbled upon a hiddush (a novel insight), if I’m merely reinventing someone else’s wheel, or if there’s some glaring flaw in my reasoning that I’ve overlooked.

What I learned at Pardes this week #5: Hillel, Shammai and Uncle Vanya

This week, in my Talmud class, we looked at a couple of classic sugyot in the Gemara, one of of which, in the first chapter of Tractate Eruvin, addresses the issue of the conflicts between the rival schools of Hillel and Shammai.

Before the Montagues and the Capulets, before the Disestablishmentarians and the Antidisestablishmentarians, there were Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. As every student of Talmud knows, the Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagreed about almost everything. There are 316 machlokot (disputes) between the rival schools recorded in the Talmud; in all but six cases, Beit Hillel ultimately prevails.

According to Eruvin 13b, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel were disputing for three years, each claiming that the law followed their school. Finally, at the end of three years a heavenly voice proclaimed “Both these and those are the words of the living God. However, the law goes according to Beit Hillel.” The Stama, the anonymous redactor of the Gemara, immediately raises the obvious question: if both Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai represent “the words of the living God,” why did Beit Hillel become the normative opinion? The Stama answers its own question by telling us that it was because Beit Hillel were pleasant and humble, and used to teach both their own opinions and those of Beit Shammai, and not only that but they would teach the opinions of Beit Shammai before they taught their own opinions. In other words, nice guys finish first, at least in the Talmud.

However, after affirming the general principle that the law follows Beit Hillel, the Gemara provides a counter-example.

For two and a half years, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai had a debate in which Beit Shammai argued that mankind would have been better off had they never been created, while Beit Hillel argued that on balance, it was better for mankind that they had been created. In the end, after two and a half years of debate, the Sanhedrin put the issue to a vote and decided, surprisingly, in favor of Beit Shammai. They ruled that indeed mankind would have been better off had they not been created in the first place, but now that we have been created, one should “examine one’s actions”. There’s an ambiguity in the text (at least as the medieval commentator Rashi reads it) whether this means to examine the deeds of the past with the aim of achieving repentance or whether one should carefully consider all one’s present actions in order to make the best possible choices here and now.

The Sanhedrin, in upholding the opinion of Beit Shammai, while offering their caveat, seem to be saying that while it is undeniable that life is nasty, brutish and short, that human beings are on the whole disappointing creatures, morally bankrupt, making a mess of every opportunity that is handed them, nonetheless one must not sink into nihilism or despair. We must make the best of what we are given, and strive to rise above our own limitations and the inevitable disappointments that life hands us.

The resolution of this machloket reminds me of the end of Uncle Vanya. At the end of Chekhov’s play, Vanya and his niece Sonya, are left alone together, both of them disappointed in love and in life. Vanya sees no point in going on living, but throws himself into trivial, mundane work in order to distract himself from the despair he feels at the prospect of the long, empty, hopeless years ahead of him. Sonya comforts him with the thought that even if they have no hope for themselves in this life, they can work hard, make the best of the disappointing lot that has fallen to them, and console themselves with the hope of a reward in the hereafter.

What I learned at Pardes this week #4: yet another definition of p’shat and d’rash

My bible teacher, Judy Klitsner is in the states for some speaking engagements, so her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Klitsner, who teaches bible at a moderate Modern Orthodox women’s yeshiva is teaching our class on Sefer B’reshit (the Book of Genesis) in her absence.

One of the many interesting insights that Rabbi Klitsner offered on his first day in our class was a framework for defining p’shat and d’rash. These two terms are so essential to serious study of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) that avoiding them would seem as impossible as studying Chemsitry without having reference to the idea of electrons and protons. Yet essential as they are, it’s hard to find agreement on their exact definitions.

P’shat is often defined as the simple, straightforward reading of the biblical text, contrasted with d’rash, an interpretation that departs from that simple meaning. Rabbi Baruch Feldstern, with whom I studied Tanakh last year, disagreed strongly with the above definition of p’shat as simple, pointing out that some verses just don’t have a simple interpretation. There might be a simple meaning to a verse like “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Ex. 20:13). However, a verse like “And God said to Moses, ‘I will be that I will be’, and He said further ‘thus will you say to the Israelites: “I will be sent me to you.”‘” (Ex. 3:14) is far too dense and ambiguous, and too rich with theological implications to yield a “simple” meaning.

People also often refer to p’shat as the literal meaning of the text, an equally inaccurate definition. Take a verse like “Do not lift up a false name. Do not join hands with a wicked [person] to be a witness of violence.” (Ex. 23:1). If one were to read this verse literally, it would yield biblical injunctions against carrying an inaccurate name tag and against holding hands with a bad person while witnessing a violent crime. Though amusing as an interpretation, this is not p’shat. The p’shat meaning of this verse is not literal, but idiomatic: don’t spread false rumors and don’t cooperate with a guilty party to act as a false witness.

Rabbi Feldstern used a very nice definition of p’shat in lieu of the above: the meaning of the verse as it would have been understood by its original audience.

On Thursday, Rabbi Klitsner offered another definition of p’shat, probably compatible with Rabbi Feldstern’s, which I quite like. He suggests that p’shat is an interpretation that takes into account

• Lashon (the meaning of the words themselves)
• Takhbir (syntax)
• Dikduk (grammar)
• Heksher (context)

while any interpretation that ignores one or more of the above, is d’rash. Personally, while I like this definition of p’shat, I respect d’rash as an exegetical field too much to define it simply as the departure from p’shat. I would suggest that an interpretation that ignores context or syntax, not as a deliberate exegetical choice, but out of carelessness or ignorance, would be bad p’shat rather than good d’rash.

What I learned at Pardes This Week 3: Tefilin

One of the strangest and yet most everyday of mitzvot (commandments) is that of laying tefilin. Every day Jewish men (and in some liberal communities, women too) tie little leather boxes containing pieces of parchment with biblical verses written on them around their left arms and their heads.

Nowhere in the bible does it say “thou shalt tie little leather boxes containing biblical verses to thine arms and wear them on top of thine head.” However, four times (twice in Exodus and twice in Deutoronomy) the bible says something along the lines of “and they shall be a sign upon your arm and a reminder between your eyes,” which the ancient Sages understood as a commandment to write the passages of Torah containing that phrase on pieces of parchment, put them in leather boxes and wear one on the arm and one on the head.

In my Halacha (Jewish law) class, we looked at the biblical sources for tefilin as well as some midrash halacha (Rabbinic legal exegesis) on the mitzvah of tefilin. I knew that the p’shat or plainsense contextual meaning of the verses wasn’t about leather philacteries, but I’d never paid too much attention to what these verses were actually talking about before. In Exodus, we are commanded to make a sign upon our hands and between our eyes, first of the Passover sacrifice, or possibly more generally exodus from Egypt, and then of the practice of consecrating every firstborn animal to G-d, and of redeeming every first born son. In Deutoronomy it seems it’s G-d’s word and G-d’s law more generally that we are instructed to have always on our arm and between our eyes.

At first it seems like an arbitrary departure for the Rabbis to interperet this idiom, which clearly means “pay constant attention” absurdly literally (hyperliteralism is one of my favorite Rabbinic exegetical tricks), and to take the verses out of context and treat them as if they were self-referential. In fact, I’ve heard Reform rabbis who don’t believe in putting on tefilin argue exactly that point, that the whole premise of this practice is absurd. I used to think the only available counterarguments was the Orthodox trope that the ancient Sages’ understanding of tefilin is part of an unbroken oral tradition that went all the way back to Moses, a hallowed and time-honored explanation but one that doesn’t satisfy the modern liberal practitioner.

However, my halacha teacher was able to show that the Rabbis’ understanding of these verses is not merely based on formal textual exegesis, but that the textual explanations they bring to the verses reflect a desire that the tefilin we wear should be physical tools for fulfilling the explicit biblical commandments in those verses to keep G-d’s word before one always. The issue isn’t whether or not the bible was “really” referring to a commandment to wear leather phylacteries. The real question is whether or not laying tefilin daily helps us fulfill the original intent of the biblical commandment.

What I learned at Pardes This Week (#2)

In my halakha (Jewish Law) class this past week, we looked at a piece of gemara in which one rabbi asserts that an averah (sin) which is done for the sake of heaven (lishmah) is superior to a mitzvah (a good deed) that is done not for the sake of heaven. It is then countered that if one does a mitzvah not for the sake of heaven, one will eventually end up doing it for the sake of heaven, and so the gemara concludes that an aveirah for the sake of heaven is equivalent, but not superior, to a mitzvah that is for the sake of heaven.

What is a sin that is done for the sake of heaven? The two examples that gemara deals with are (1) Tamar in the Book of Genesis, who sleeps with her father in law (really big aveirah) to prove a point and (2) Yael, who commits adultery with the enemy general during a war in order to kill him.

It’s clear that these are aveirot for the sake of heaven, but what is a mitzvah that isn’t for the sake of heaven? I think I did a mitzvah that wasn’t for the sake of heaven last night. There were a couple of girls from my program who were nervous about Yom Kippur services. For Jews who don’t go to synagogue regularly, Yom Kippur is very challenging, because the holiday has the longest and most complicated liturgy of the year, and yet it is the precisely the one holiday when Jews who don’t go to syngagogue and are not versed in the traditional litury show up at shul looking for a profound religious experience. The result is that instead of having a meaningful experience on this holiest of holy days, people find themselves lost, confused and frustrated. So I sat down with these two women and helped them go through their Yom Kippur prayerbooks in order to map out the different services and familiarize themselves with the prayerbook in advance of the holiday. But the truth was, I wasn’t really doing this because it was a mitzvah, or because it was the nice thing to do. I was doing this because these were two beautiful women asking me to help them with something. If it had been two men asking for my help instead of two women, would I have been as ready to spend two hours going over the liturgy with them? I’m not so sure.

I also learned another gemara yesterday in a different context that shed light for me on the idea of a mitzvah that isn’t for the sake of heaven. The rabbis in Israel sent a message to the rabbis in Babylonia warning them to be careful with regard to three things: personal hygiene, a study partner, and the poor. If these Torah scholars had to be warned to be careful with these things, it seems clear that there is a danger when one engages in Torah study too intensively, of neglecting these areas, namely one’s own personal needs, the needs of the people one comes into contact every day, and the needs of the broader community. Those who engage in Torah study or any meritorious activity without attending to themselves, their personal relationships and the greater good, provide a striking example of a mitzvah that is not for the sake of heaven.

What I learned at Pardes this week (#1)

When I first left for Israel, and perhaps even more so when I decided to come back for a second year, many, if not most, of my friends and family back home simply couldn’t understand why I would want to come here to spend my days studying dusty old ancient texts. To be frank, after spending spending time this summer away from these old books, with secular friends and family, whom I had missed terribly all year, I started to wonder why I wanted to come back, too. After my first week of classes at Pardes, I remember though.

One week in, many of my classes have only met one time, but I’m very excited about the learning I’m going to do this semester. In the hope that if I am able to share just a little of what I’m learning here, perhaps my friends and family back home will better understand why I’ve abandoned them to dedicate two years of my life to Jewish text study, I have decided to try to post something about my learning each week. Without making any promises, I hope to do this as regularly as I can.

Four mornings a week, I have a class on the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin. In brief, the Talmud (or Gemara) is a collection of arguments and annecdotes by rabbis from approximately the 3rd through 6th centuries, structured as commentary on the Mishnah, the authoritative rabbinic law code, compiled around the year 200. Tractate Sanhedrin deals primarily with judicial procedure. This week, we read chapter four of Mishnah Sanhedrin, before beginning to look at the Gemara on that chapter. Most of the chapter is a pretty dry discussion of the procedural differences betwen capital cases and civil cases, which was primarily interesting for showing that the system seems to be set up to make it as difficult as possible to convict someone of a capital crime.

The chapter concludes, though, with a description of the warning read to witnesses before they testify. It includes a pair of midrashot (exegeses) on the biblical story of Cain and Able, which highlight first the immeasurable consequences of killing someone (since not only the victim, but also any potential children they might have had, and the descendants of those children to the end of time are killed along with them), and second the sheer brutality of murder (a description of Able’s blood splattered on rocks and sticks).

This mishnah is also the source of the uber-famous line that since the whole world is descended from one person, “anyone who destroys a single life is as if he destroyed the whole world”. This warning would seem to highlight to witnesses and jurists not only how terrible murder is, so that they should not balk at condemning a murderer to death, but also on the other hand just how precious each life is, so that they should be very careful not convict someone wrongly.

The mishnah then, perhaps suprisingly, reminds us that the bible tells us we are all descended from Adam in order to teach that no one should say “my dad’s better than your dad.”

Given what we know about how the justice systems in even the most democratic societies treat different classes and races of people differently, it is shocking and yet supremely appropriate that an 1,800-year-old text about criminal judicial procedure should conclude with a reminder that we all deserve equal treatment at the hands of the law. Whoever said we needed to wait for the Enlightenment thinkers to teach us that “all men are created equal?”

Sweet Apricots!

My chevruta and I were in the Beit Midrash, studying a section of Gemara dealing with the obligations of a husband to his wife when we came across the phrase משמשין מטותיהן. In a hurry to finish the section before our next class, my chevruta quickly translated the phrase as “Sweet Apricots”. This seemed odd, but the Gemara had been saying something about Persian customs, and they have apricots in Persia, so it sounded good to me.

“Sweet Apricots!” we both crowed, perhaps a little too loudly for the dignity of the Beit Midrash. Without a second’s pause, the voice of Yaffa, our teacher, called back from across the room. “No! Not sweet apricots!”

The phrase actually means “using their beds” (i.e., having sex), something that at least according to one Rav Yosef in the Gemara, the Persians were in the habit of doing with their clothes on, and that Jews have to do naked.

In any case, “sweet apricots” is my new favorite euphemism for the dirty deed.

What I Learned in Yeshiva This Week: T’shuvah

I decided to start this blog so I could share some of my life here with you my dear friends and family back in the U.S. (or wherever else you may live), but when push comes to shove, I spend all day studying in yeshiva and I don’t really have a bunch of crazy adventures to tell you about. So, I’m trying an experiment, and instead of waiting to write a blog-post until I have some travelogue-worthy tale, I will go ahead and simply share a little something of what I learned today.

At this time of year, Jews all over the world are talking about, thinking about and doing t’shuvah. What is t’shuvah? The word is often translated as repentance, but that doesn’t quite capture it. T’shuvah comes from a root meaning to return, and it connotes the idea of turning away from sin and returning to one’s true values, to the best version of oneself, as well as the idea of figuratively returning to the scene of the crime, to at the very least take note of ones mistakes and misdeeds, but ideally also to confess, make amends and seek forgiveness. Books have been written about t’shuvah, and my goal here is not to explicate every nuance and facet of the concept – I don’t have the knowledge to do that even if I wanted to. Instead I want to focus on one little fun fact about t’shuvah.

In his discussion of the laws of t’shuvah, the 16th century authority, Moshe Isserles wrote that an uncertain sin requires more t’shuvah than a certain one. In other words, the thing I did that I know was wrong requires less repentance than the thing I did that may or may not actually have been wrong. Thinking of T’shuvah as repentance, as an attitude towards our actions, this doesn’t make much sense: how could I repent more for something that may or may not have been wrong than I do for something that was clearly wrong? If, however, we think of t’shuvah as a process of self-appraisal and reckoning, the truth of his statement is self-evident.

If I already know what I did was wrong, I must on some level feel bad about it and it won’t take all that much self-reflection to get me to the point of repentance, at which I can make a sincere apology and move on with my life fully intending not to repeat the same mistakes. On the other hand, if I can half convince myself that what I did was okay, I have a lot of work to do to before I can get to the point where I honestly and wholeheartedly repent for what I did.