The comedian Emo Philips, once voted the author of the funniest religious joke of all time, shared the following joke which exposes an ironic facet of this season of repentance. For the record, this is not the joke that was voted the funniest religious joke of all time; I need to save some material for a future drasha.
“When I was a child,” Philips said, “I prayed to the Lord for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn’t work that way. So, I stole a bicycle and prayed for forgiveness, and it worked!”
This is funny because we know that it did not work. One who sins with the intention of immediately repenting, the Mishnah says, has not effectively repented.
הָאוֹמֵר: אֶחֱטָא וְאָשׁוּב, אֶחֱטָא וְאָשׁוּב — אֵין מַסְפִּיקִין בְּיָדוֹ לַעֲשׂוֹת תְּשׁוּבָה. אֶחֱטָא וְיוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר — אֵין יוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר
One who says, “I will sin and repent and then sin again and repent again” – will not be granted the opportunity to do teshuvah. One who sins with the knowledge that Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – will bring…atonement – will not receive atonement on Yom Kippur.
Teshuvah does not operate through magical words that erase the consequences of our actions in the absence of genuine remorse.
And yet, Emo Philips’ flawed theology is probably closer to our way of thinking than we would like to admit. When we apologize, do we apologize out of genuine regret for our actions or do we apologize because we do not want to face the consequences of our actions? Think about the classic non-apology of a politician or public figure: “I’m sorry that you misunderstood my words and were offended. I regret that you were too stupid to correctly understand my benign intentions.”
But in the Torah itself, and the work of this season, the line between guilt, sin, and repentance is not straightforward. We are responsible for the consequences of our actions, even those made without any intention to harm. And the work of teshuvah entails assuming responsibility even when we have no reason to admit guilt. The Torah, in fact, seems to invest a lot of attention on the consequences of accidental sins. A personality molded by the Torah takes responsibility for all of our impacts on the world, whether or not they were intended.
Our liturgy, throughout the year and especially in this season, is filled with laments for the absent Beit HaMikdash which played such a pivotal role in our ancestors’ response to sin. But lost in that yearning is an awareness that, at least for me, the dominant korban would be the Korban Hattat, the sin offering brought in the aftermath of committing an unintentional or accidental sin. One korban per accidental sin.
Psalms (19:13) poses the question, echoed each day in our Selichot:
שְׁגִיא֥וֹת מִֽי־יָבִ֑ין מִֽנִּסְתָּר֥וֹת נַקֵּֽנִי׃
Who can be aware of errors? Clear me of unperceived guilt.
But, at least in the time of the Beit Hamikdash, there was an assumption that we could, at least in retrospect, become aware of our errors, and then be cleansed of the stain of the harm we did not know that we caused.
Vayikra, Chapter 4 introduces the korban hatat:
דַּבֵּ֞ר אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵל֮ לֵאמֹר֒ נֶ֗פֶשׁ כִּֽי־תֶחֱטָ֤א בִשְׁגָגָה֙ מִכֹּל֙ מִצְוֺ֣ת ה אֲשֶׁ֖ר לֹ֣א תֵעָשֶׂ֑ינָה וְעָשָׂ֕ה מֵאַחַ֖ת מֵהֵֽנָּה׃
When a person unwittingly incurs guilt in regard to any of the LORD’s commandments about things not to be done, and does one of them….
There are variations of the korban hatat depending on who makes the mistake: the details vary by who errs — the kohen, an individual, or even the whole community following the mistaken instructions of their leadership. Later, in Sefer Bamidbar, the Torah returns to the korban hatat and, again, explicitly explains that the korban hatat is brought as part of the teshuvah process for someone who has sinned accidentally.
וְכִ֣י תִשְׁגּ֔וּ וְלֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֔וּ אֵ֥ת כׇּל־הַמִּצְוֺ֖ת הָאֵ֑לֶּה אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּ֥ר ה אֶל־מֹשֶֽׁה׃
“If you unwittingly fail to observe any one of the commandments that the LORD has declared to Moses…”
Later in that same chapter, the Torah contrasts an accidental sin with a brazen, intentional sin :וְהַנֶּ֜פֶשׁ אֲשֶֽׁר־תַּעֲשֶׂ֣ה ׀ בְּיָ֣ד רָמָ֗הwho receives a direct punishment and is not eligible for the expiation of the korban hattat.
Perhaps most extreme of all is the Torah’s legislation for an accidental killer whom the Torah protects from the vigilante justice of his victim’s family, and who the Torah nonetheless labels as a “rotze’ah” a murderer.
This all exists in tension with our common understanding of morality, responsibility, and guilt. Perhaps due to our innate sense of fairness, perhaps due to the influence of Immanuel Kant, our default is to judge the morality of actions by their intentions. And the Torah does bear this out. There are no punishments in the Torah in the absence of malicious intentions or a rebellious desire to sin.
So what is the Korban Hatat about?
Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffmann, the great rabbi and posek of early twentieth century Berlin, addressed this question in his commentary to Vayikra. A truly compelled or unavoidable action does not warrant a korban at all, and an intentional sin is subject to whatever punishment the Torah allocates. A shogeg, an unwitting sin, is an intentional action undertaken without full knowledge (for example, writing a letter on Shabbat while thinking that it’s Tuesday, or plucking a flower on Shabbat without knowing that it is forbidden to do so). That middle ground, acting intentionally in the world but with a real gap in awareness, is the danger zone of missing vigilance. Rav Hoffmann explains that we bring a Korban Hatat because we should be vigilant about ourselves, our surroundings, the rules of the Torah, and our interactions with the world, and the sort of carelessness that can enable an accidental sin is the result of a mindset that demands repair, rectification, and a religious response.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great rabbi of late 19th century Frankfurt, explains that the word Korban cannot be translated as an offering or a sacrifice, since we give nothing to God that God needs. It is rather an act of drawing close, from the root Kuf, Resh Bet. This is a fitting response to the distancing from God that characterizes going through the world with casual indifference to whether or not we are violating the mitzvot of the Torah.
Elie Wiesel famously said, “the opposite of love is not hate it is indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it is indifference.”
I know a woman whose parents, both Holocaust survivors, abandoned their observant lifestyles after the war as a sort of protest against God. They could think of no greater way to channel their anger other than by rejecting the mitzvot. If God had abandoned their families to destruction, they would not give God their allegiance or obedience. And it was their great hope that their only child would continue their battle against God into the next generation. But she could only do this if she received a robust Jewish education so that she would know precisely which mitzvot she was rejecting. And so they sent their only daughter to yeshiva day schools where, in an act of betrayal, she took God’s side in this multi-generational argument. Today she is a matriarch of a large engaged Jewish family.
In retrospect, it is not surprising that someone raised by parents who cultivated an anger at God, might repair her relationship with God. Someone raised in a home indifferent to God, indifferent to Torah, and indifferent to mitzvot will be so far away that any relationship will be so much harder to create.
The Torah wages a battle against indifference through the obligation to bring a Korban Hatat in the aftermath of a sin undertaken in a state of shogeg, accidental unawareness.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik developed a taxonomy of repentance in which transgression, guilt, indictment and punishment are interrupted by atonement or, “ kaparah.” The kaparah can be the result of a korban; the Torah explicitly teaches that Kaparah is the goal and outcome of the Korban Hatat. And, this season’s culmination on Yom Kippur entails a promise of kaparah as well. Like many words in Biblical Hebrew (and probably other languages too), words for abstract concepts often derive from words for concrete phenomena. Noah’s ark is protected from the water with kofer, it’s a kind of sealant. Kaparah is what protects us and seals us off from the punishment of our sins.
But Rav Soloveitchik noted that the Torah also contends with a need for taharah, for purification as an alternative goal of the teshuvah process. Purification responds to the consequences of sin that are entirely orthogonal to the axis of sin, guilt, and punishment. You can think of it this way: kaparah can be compared to an acquittal in a criminal case, or being released from prison after having served out a sentence, taharah is analogous to the expunging of one’s criminal record altogether.
Consider an individual who has become disqualified as a witness due to his poor character and sinful behavior. The Talmud is explicit that merely traversing Yom Kippur, and its promise of kaparah, is not sufficient to restore him to his status as a reliable witness. Or consider the accidental murderer. He was never subject to judicial punishment because he never intended to harm anyone. But his entire life is uprooted by the consequences of his mistake.
And this is where I think the Torah’s approach to accidental sin becomes relevant to the work of teshuvah and can represent a way for us to live in the world with a real sense of responsibility (and without crippling guilt).
We are often very good at distinguishing between what we meant to do and what we actually did. But the absence of malicious intent, the absence of any intentions whatsoever, may absolve us from guilt and punishment, but they do not absolve us of responsibility for the impact of our words and deeds in the world.
Teshuvah is not about guilt. Teshuvah is about responsibility.
Responsibility means not only determining whether or not my intentions were benign but also caring to find out what actually happened.
Our strained relationships with friends and family and community cannot be repaired if we fixate on whether or not we deserve to be forgiven instead of asking what we need to acknowledge or what we need to fix.
We must not manufacture guilt where there is none. But we do need the humility to recognize that our intentions do not tell the whole story. We can mean well and still cause harm. We can act without malice and still leave something broken behind us. And we can fail to recognize a responsibility precisely because we were so certain that we intended nothing wrong. This pattern is endemic to humanity and the Korban Hattat is the Torah’s way to help us break out of a dead end cycle where we absolve ourselves of responsibility to avoid feelings of guilt that we do not know how to process.
We have lived through a time in history in which many of us have encountered things we did not expect, consequences we did not anticipate, and experiences that have changed the way we understand the world around us. Some of us have changed our minds about things. Some of us have not. Some of us are more certain; some of us are less certain than we were one, two, three, or four years ago.
This is my fourth year celebrating Rosh Hashanah with you and Ohev Sholom and, looking back we can see that these years were filled with wonderful and joyous celebrations, great growth for our community, and significant accomplishments and milestones for so many of our families. These years were also marked by great tragedy, and loss, and global events whose impacts will shape the world that our children and grandchildren will inherit. I cannot go into the new year with naive confidence that everything will be OK. And it is terrifying to contemplate all the ways in which things might not be OK.
As someone who exercises leadership within this community, it can be paralyzing to feel the burden of the fate of this congregation and its future on my shoulders. I have only the best of intentions but I know the results are far from perfect. Since I began serving as a rabbi, I try to pick one tefilah over the Yamim HaNora’im, often it’s Mincha on Rosh Hashanah, and I tell the gabba’im and the ba’al tefilah not to wait for me to finish the silent amidah, and to go ahead and announce whatever pages need to be announced so that I can have an opportunity to take as long as I need to express, in words, all of my hopes for myself, my family, for all of you and our community, and for the entire world. And I need a lot of time too in order to confront my guilt over the mistakes, missed opportunities, and careless oversights of the past year.
I don’t think I am in a very different place than you since all of us exercise leadership in some ways within the spheres where we have influence. We always mean well but the consequences of our choices and actions are not always good. We have to find ways to avoid allowing our good intentions to absolve ourselves of responsibility for the harm we accidentally cause. And we need a way to move forward with confidence into the new year when we have no confidence that our best laid plans will have their desired impact.
The Korban Hattat teaches us that the absence of malicious intent does not mean the absence of work to be done. The Korban Hattat teaches that drawing closer to God, in failure as in success, can generate a sense of responsibility for our impact on the world. Assuming responsibility as a part of a teshuvah process imposes a burden to try to make good for the harm we have contributed to or caused. But ultimately, it is only that sense of responsibility that can give us the strength to persevere in hope even in the absence of naive confidence.
I wish us all a year in which our confidence does not come from believing that our plans will always work, but from knowing that when they don’t, we will have the integrity to take responsibility, make repairs, and begin again.
Ketiva u’Hatimah l’Tovah.
