“Return, O Israel, to God your Lord; for in your sin have you stumbled.” (Hosea 14:2)
It is a well-known teaching of the Rabbis (Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 7b; Exodus Rabbah, Mishpatim 30:9) that God observes all of the commandments of the Torah. How then does He observe the commandment to repent, to do t’shuvah?
God fulfills this commandment when He repents of the evil that He has rendered, God forbid, to His people Israel, or that He has decreed will befall them. This is God’s repentance, His t’shuvah as it were, as it is written, “And God repented of the evil that He spoke of doing to His people.” (Exodus 32:14) What is meant by the word “repented” in the context of this verse? It means that God had, as it were, “regret,” which is always the precursor of repentance.
But when God’s repentance is only for that which He has already done, or for what He has decreed, then the Jewish people remain, God forbid, in the same desperate straits as always. If God regrets and repents only of the evil that He was going to add, God forbid, to their already precarious predicament, they remain in the same very poor condition they were in before the troubles began.
We read in Psalm 90:13, “Return O God, how long? Have regret concerning Your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness. . . .”
What we really mean when we say “Return O God” is “God, please repent.” Then we add the phrase “. . . how long? Have regret concerning Your servants.” What we mean is “For how long will Your regret extend only as far as the decrees You have brought upon us or are thinking of bringing upon us?” For even without new decrees, we still remain in the same poor condition.
And so we end by adding the phrase “Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” We mean “This is the repentance that we want of You, so to speak. Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness. . . .”
But this is exactly the kind of repentance required of us, likewise. For when a person repents only of a sin, whether it was committed, God forbid, in thought, in word, or in deed, he still finds himself back in the state he occupied before he committed the sin, when he was not engaged upon any great spiritual journey. So what if he is merely relieved of this particular sin? The chief principle of repentance, however, is “Return, O Israel, to God your Lord.” Lest you think that contrition for your sins is all you need, the prophet cautions that the repentance must continue all the way, until you reach God, “. . . for in your sin have you stumbled.” Only then will you be completely elevated, in holiness, purity, and worship of God.
In the last Mishnah of Tractate Yoma (8.9) we learn; R. Akiba said: “Lucky are you, Israel! Before whom are you being purified? And who is it that purifies you? Your Father in heaven.”
In the holy book Arvei Nachal, in a commentary on the final chapter of the book of Numbers (Massei) in a discourse on the martyrdom of R. Akiba, a responsa of the Maharam, of blessed memory, is quoted: “We have a tradition, bequeathed to us mouth to mouth, that anyone martyred for the sanctification of God’s name feels no pain at all.”
The author of the Arvei Nachal explains that when a person is consumed with passion and the desire to die for the sanctification of God’s name, all his senses are elevated beyond the physical plane of existence into the highest realms, the world of thought. Everything becomes clothed in thought. The person’s feelings and sensations are muted, his physical body is silenced and divested of all sensations, and all that he experiences is pleasure.
The same applies to all the sufferings of a Jew, though it remains true that pain is difficult to bear—and may God have mercy and ease our pain. Nevertheless, a person who is suffering needs to remember that the pain is washing away his sins and purifying him so that he can draw closer to God. The more deeply he enters into this thought and the more tightly he binds himself to it the lighter grow his pains, and his suffering becomes easier to bear.
What is more, when something occurs below it activates a sympathetic action above. When we enter so deeply into the thought that the pain ultimately brings us closer to God, to the point where we can no longer feel pain any more, then God does the same. He binds Himself to us, to the point where His feelings of wrath and retribution also disappear and His ire toward us is fixed. When this happens, all suffering turns into true salvation and redemption in every aspect.
Now we can understand the quote from R. Akiba in the Mishnah above. R. Akiba said: “Lucky are you, Israel! Before whom are you being purified? And who is it that purifies you? Your Father in heaven.”
R. Akiba himself was martyred for the sanctification of God’s name, and all his life he cherished thoughts of willingly dying in order to sanctify God’s name. At the time of his death, he said (Berachoth 61b), “All my days I have been at pains over this verse in the Sh’ma (Deut. 6:5) ‘Love God your Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.’ I asked myself, ‘When will I ever have the opportunity?’ ”
Therefore, in the Mishnah quoted above, R. Akiba is saying or means to say “Even in your suffering you can rejoice, O Israel! When you remember before whom are you being purified, then your physical sensations will be nullified, and you will not feel the pain. And even more than this: when you rejoice this way, He becomes your “Father” in heaven, and like a father who nullifies his anger for the good of his child, so God will do everything for your sake. And consequently all the judgments will be nullified, as we explained above, and you will be truly saved and you will rejoice, O Israel.”