In his masterwork, Sha’are Teshuva (Gates of Repenetance), Rabbenu Yonah writes that the possibility of teshuva – repentance – is “one of the great gifts that God granted to His creations, for he prepared for them a path to raise themselves from their lowly actions and escape from the trap of their sins, to salvage their lives from the grave and remove His anger from them.” He lists and explains the sources for the concept of teshuva, many of which appear in our parasha, e.g., “…and you will return to the LORD your God…” “Then the LORD your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring to love the LORD your God.” He then continues by writing an interesting idea that is based on Midrash Kohelet Rabbah:
The punishment of a sinner who tarries with his repentance becomes more severe with every passing day,
Because he is aware of the anger that is turned against him, and he has a way of escaping it.
The path to escape is teshuva,
And yet he remains a rebellious sinner.
The choice to flee from the upheaval is in his hands,
But he appears to be unfrightened by God’s anger and wrath, so his sin is so much greater.
(Gate 1:2)
Rabbenu Yonah does not focus on the fact that the sinner is missing out on an opportunity to repent, but on the anger and wrath that the unrepenetant sinner brings upon himself. He presents the refusal to repent as an even more severe sin than the original sin itself, since “the choice to flee from the upheaval is in his hands.” Rabbenu Yonah continues by offering a parable that shows how much more complicated this concept is than it first appears:
The Sages of blessed memory said with regard to this (Kohelet Rabbah 7:32) –
This can be compared to a group of robbers who were locked up in prison by the king.
They dug an escape tunnel and broke out of prison, leaving one robber behind.
The jailer came and discovered the tunnel with one prisoner remaining, and he beat that prisoner with his stick.
He said to him: You fool! The escape tunnel was available to you! How is it that you did not take the opportunity to escape?!
This is a beautiful parable, but it raises a serious question. Escaping jail is against the law. This is true even though we recognize that every prisoner would like to escape from prison, and we understand why that is true. Still, the jailer cannot condone their actions, given that they have added an additional crime to their previous ones. For this reason, the jailer should not be punishing the remaining prisoner for remaining behind. He should recognize that this prisoner is now following the law and is willingly accepting his punishment, and honor that decision.
Nevertheless, in our parable the jailer throws off his responsibilities as a man of law and expresses a more natural, instinctive sentiment – survival. This is why he turns to the prisoner in shock and surprise at his decision to remain behind.
This is the paradox that Rabbenu Yonah is trying to share by means of the parable.
It is the jailer who calls for freedom. Similarly, it is the Holy One blessed be He, Who originally placed the sinner in a dark cell in order to suffer for his actions Who offers him a way to escape. Teshuva is the unexpected twist in this story. It is presented as an opportunity that creates contradictions so severe that unexpected role changes take place. The jailer takes on the thought process of the average man-in-the-street who no longer thinks like a uniformed “man of the law.”
Rabbenu Yonah presents the laws of the Torah as a set of rules involving gates and fences that can easily be breached and with jailers waiting for the prisoners to realize how easily they can escape – that they can march in and out of the jail gates according to their wishes. This is a set of rules whose values do not appear to be protected by laws or societal norms. The possibility of teshuva makes it all appear to be anarchistic.
The Sefer HaHinukh (Mitzvah 69) explains why the Torah repeats prohibitions by both teaching that it is forbidden and also stating the punishment. It is not enough to say that the punishment for murder is death, but it also teaches “You shalt not kill.”
It is not enough for the Torah to state the punishment without warning that the act is forbidden.
This is the recurring teaching of the Sages: We have learned the punishment, but what is the source of the prohibition?
This is because without a Godly statement that the act is prohibited,
If it only said “someone who does X will receive the following punishment,”
It could then be understood that someone who is willing to incur the punishment would be allowed to do that action.
And that that action would not go against the will of God, making commandments a type of business negotiation,
So that someone who wants to do something will pay a certain “price” and it would be permitted to him.
The punishments in the Torah are not a “pricelist” in exchange for sinning. God has no interest in being “paid” in exchange for a sinful act. His desire is for people to behave according to the value system that He established in the Torah. This is why commandments need to be repeated, and this explains the concept of teshuva. This perspective makes clear that there is no contradiction between God’s role as the auditor Who keeps track of all of the good deeds and bad deeds and His desire for us to escape from our degraded situation with His help.
In her book Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand describes how a world that works according to the letter of the law can erode individuality and destroy creativity. The book depicts how values are trampled, how the individual can become a slave to rules, and how obedience becomes the only supreme value. "They did not care if he came to the meeting on time or did not arrive, or that an unprecedented holocaust would damage their tracks, but they made sure that they would not be the ones held responsible for it." She describes how bureaucracy can become the essence, replacing the values it was supposed to serve. A world of extreme bureaucracy is a world in which the imposition of guilt becomes the object of legal action. In a world based on values, things are different.
Teshuva – repentance – is not an anarchistic value that weakens God’s rule in the world. God does not want to find people to blame. “Good and upright is the LORD; therefore He shows sinners the way” (Psalms 25:8). He wants to find everyone to be righteous. From this perspective we can understand that the prisoner who remains in jail is at fault. He should have taken the opportunity to escape! The individual who accepts that he is labeled a thief – and perceives himself that way – is at fault because he should have tried to repent and return to normal life.
God wants us to aspire to see ourselves as righteous, as pure, so that we will desire to repent. The true jailer in this case turns out to be the individual himself, who recognizes his sins and his unfortunate situation, but is unable to believe in the redemptive possibilities of teshuva. Every person – even a sinner – must understand that the escape tunnel is open before him, at all times.
