In his classic work – Sha’arei Teshuva (Gates of Repentance) – Rabbenu Yonah writes that repentance is: “one of the great gifts that God has granted His creations, by preparing them a method to climb out of the depths of their misdeeds and to escape the snare of their sinful actions, thus saving themselves from destruction and removing His anger from them.” He lays out and explains the sources for repentance, most of which can be found in Parashat Nitzavim, e.g., “…and you return to the LORD your God” (Devarim 30:2), or “Then the LORD your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring’ (Devarim 30:6). After bringing these sources, he raises an interesting idea, which is based on a midrash in Kohelet Rabbah:
You should be aware, that when a sinner tarries in his repentance, his punishment becomes more severe with every passing day, for he knows that he is deserving of punishment and that he has a way of escaping it. The opportunity for escape is repentance – yet he remains committed to his disobedience and his evil ways. God’s anger does not frighten him, so his evil is even greater. (Gate 1:2)
Rabbenu Yonah does not begin by describing the missed opportunity of delaying one’s repentance, rather he chooses to emphasize the anger directed at the individual who refrains from repenting. The way he presents it, choosing not to repent is even more severe than the original sin, since “he has a way of escaping it.” Rabbenu Yonah explains this by means of a parable that makes it clear to us that this is much more complicated than it first appears:
And the sages of blessed memory said regarding this matter (Kohelet Rabbah 7:32):
This can be likened to a group of robbers who were placed in jail by the king. They dug an escape tunnel and made their way out, but one of them stayed behind. The chief jailor came and saw the tunnel that had been dug and the single individual who stayed behind, and he beat him with his stick. He said to him: Fool! The tunnel has already been dug and stands before you! Why didn’t you escape with your life!?
The prisoner who refused to escape with his partners by means of the tunnel that they dug is caught by the jailor who rebukes him, saying: “The tunnel has already been dug and stands before you! Why didn’t you escape with your life!?”
While this is a beautiful parable, it presents us with a number of difficulties. Digging the escape tunnel was certainly against the law. While we can all recognize that it is only natural for the prisoners to attempt an escape, the chief jailor’s job is to ensure that the prisoners do not escape, and not to encourage such behavior. It would make sense that the jailor would view the prisoner who chose to accept his punishment and serve his time as a hero, and reward him for his good behavior.
What happens in this parable is that the jailor throws off his professional demeanor as a man of the law, and he expresses a much more basic emotion – the instinctive humane voice that celebrates survival. It is with this voice that he turns to the remaining prisoner and rebukes him.
This paradox is exactly what Rabbenu Yonah is addressing with this parable; he is trying to raise the issue of how irrational repentance really is. We find that it is the jailor who clamoring for freedom for all. Similarly, it is God, the One who insisted that Man is responsible for his sinful actions, who offers an opportunity to escape. The idea of repentance is presented as a concept that holds together internal contradictions that are difficult to comprehend.
Rabbenu Yonah presents the entire system of Torah laws as a strange system of fences and restraints, whose walls can be broken with little effort, and with jailors waiting for the prisoners to realize that they have the ability to enter and exit the prison gates whenever they choose. It appears that in this system, values are not protected by law and order. Teshuvah – repentance – turns out to be a force of anarchy.
Sefer HaHinukh (Mitzvah 69) explains why the Torah does not just inform us of the punishments for a given sinful act, but insists on warning us that these actions are forbidden. It is not enough for the Torah to mandate capital punishment for murder, it also commands: “Do not murder.” Sefer HaHinukh explains this redundancy as follows:
“It is not enough for the Torah to lay out punishments without also including a warning.
This is the intention of the sages who repeatedly ask: We have heard the punishment – what is the source for the prohibition?
The point is, that had there been no warning that God forbids the act, and had it only said: Whoever does X is punished with Y, I might have understood that anyone who wanted to perform that act and was willing to accept the Torah’s punishment, without concern for the punishment he would suffer, would not be considered as having transgressed the will of God.
This would turn the commandments of the Torah into a type of negotiation. Someone who wants to perform an inappropriate act can pay a certain amount or agree to suffer a certain punishment, and then would be permitted to do what he wants.”
The punishments that appear in the Torah are not a “pricelist” for sinful acts. God does not desire that people “pay the price” for what they have done, rather He desires that they act according to the value system that He established. This explains the need for the apparent redundancy in the Torah (of warnings and punishments), but it also explains how the concept of repentance works. According to this approach we can well understand that there is no contradiction between God’s role as the One who manages the accounts of a person’s good and bad deeds and His desire to free us from the punishments associated with those accounts.
In her novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand describes how the world of law can crush an individual under its wheels and trample every burst of creativity and joy. She describes how values are destroyed so that the individual becomes a slave to rules with no meaning, so that obedience becomes the supreme value. She describes how bureaucracy can become the main thing, replacing the essential thing that it was supposed to serve. A world of extreme bureaucracy is a world in which placing blame becomes the main point of legal action.
Things are different in a world based on values.
Teshuvah – repentance – is not a call for anarchy that violates God’s rule in the world. God does not seek out those who are guilty, rather “He shows sinners the way” (Tehillim 25:8), and desires to find them innocent. From this perspective, the guilty individual is the one who has been jailed and chooses to remain there without taking the opportunity to escape – that is, the one who accepts the label “Thief” with which he has been tagged, and makes no attempt to return to normal life.
God wants us to aspire to see ourselves as righteous, as innocent, so that we aspire to repent. The true jailor in our story is the individual himself, who mistakenly sees the reflection of his sins in his dire situation, and is unable to believe in repentance. What each of us must understand – even those among us who have sinned – is that the opportunity for forgiveness is always available for us to take advantage of.