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Returning Home

Over 20 years ago, Rev. Robert Trache invited me to co-teach a three-day seminar for Jews and Christians at an Episcopal retreat center in North Carolina. We selected half a dozen classical religious ideas that we would present from Jewish and Episcopal perspectives to the interfaith group. Most of our subjects were predictable and simple. But when Rob wanted to include Jesus, I initially found myself at a loss—until I remembered teshuva.

Teshuva is usually translated as "repentance" but it also can mean "answer," "apology," and, above all, "return"—as in going back to who you meant to be, returning home, returning to your source. Teshuva is the dominant theme during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the early fall. But teshuva is also possible and commanded throughout the entire year. And that is where Jesus comes in. If I’m not mistaken, you can read any of the following statements about teshuva and substitute "(believing in) Jesus Christ" without making any but grammatical errors.

Teshuva is the gesture of returning to God, of going home, or going back to your ultimate source.

Teshuva is the letting go of your arrogance, waywardness, and sinfulness and placing your trust in God.

Teshuva is being filled with joy. It is the soul’s fulfillment and perhaps even its apotheosis.

Teshuva is a pre-requisite for the creation of the world. God could not make the world stand until God added to it the possibility of teshuva.

Without teshuva, the world could not endure.

Teshuva is the easiest thing in the world; all that is necessary for the process of teshuva to begin is for the thought to occur to you.

Teshuva is also the means of the world’s salvation. To fully return to God would repair all creation and bring the Messiah.

Teshuva is the possibility that even the most degenerate sinner can be reunited with God. Indeed, according to tradition, God loves someone who has strayed and made teshuva more than someone who has never sinned.

Finally, in the words of the Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, "The perception of truth is the basis of teshuva."

Jewish spirituality teaches that the world endures because of this ever-present yearning and gesture of returning. In the words of the Talmud, "Returning home is the hardest thing in the world, for to truly return home would mean to bring the Messiah (Yoma 86a-b). Returning home is also the easiest thing, for all it has to do is occur to you to return home and you have already begun."

As Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great mystics of the twentieth century, taught, "Through returning home, all things are reunited with God--Returning home is, in essence, an effort to return to one’s original status, to the source of life and higher being in their fullness; without limitation and diminution, in their highest spiritual character, as illumined by the simple, radiant divine light." (Orot HaTeshuva, 4:2; 12:9)

You might say, in the language of computers, that making teshuva is the equivalent of clicking the reset button on your computer, the one that promises "Restore Default Configuration." This going back to our source is a great longing that flows through and animates all creation. Through apology, repair, and attempting to heal damage done, we effectively rewrite the past. What was once some thoughtless or even wicked act, when set within the present constellation of meaning, becomes the commencement of an even greater healing.

Perhaps this is why Jews are bidden to make teshuva not just on Yom Kippur, but on every Sabbath, because through it we are able to heal and perfect the past week and join God in saying of all creation, "Behold it is good."

Obviously, accepting Jesus is more than doing teshuva and doing teshuva is more than accepting Jesus. But the parallels go on and on. To be sure, in Judaism, the rich, corporeal, and personal christological legend is absent. Judaism, here as in so many other instances, teaches Jews to go it without any imagery, form, or mythos. But the urge, the gesture, and the goal for Christians and Jews are surprisingly similar.

In the family album or in one of those little frames that stands upright on an end table in your mother’s apartment is a photograph of you when you were a child. You have come a long way since those days in many beautiful ways and in a few disappointing and perhaps even shameful ones. If you were given a time machine, is there anything you would like to tell the child in the photo who once was you? Just looking at who you were seems to awaken the possibility that you could go back to that time and, if not relive your life, at least begin again.

This is the beginning of the return. Teshuva. And Jewish spirituality is a way to do that with every breath.

Excerpted from Rabbi Kushner's forthcoming book Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians, Jewish Lights Publishing © 2001. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091. Jewish Lights Publishing

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has been the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Ell in Sudbury, Massachusetts, for over 25 years, and is Rabbi-in-Residence at Hebrew Union College's Jewish Institute of Religion. A frequent commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, he's also the author of several award-winning books.