We studied Parashat Shofetim, the Torah portion known as Shofetim, or, Judges.
As a reminder, we find ourselves in the final book of the Torah, Devarim (Deuteronomy), where Moses is delivering his final speeches on the eve of their entering into the Promised Land without him. In particular, this week’s parashah had him holding forth about four important offices that will help lead the people: judges, kings, priests, and prophets. In laying out regulations regarding the office of the prophet, he names which prophet-like acts are forbidden, including “inquiring of the dead” as being a prohibited practice.
This seemingly bizarre proscription led us to some important spiritual reflections. A passage in the Talmud (the sacred compendium of Jewish stories, wisdom, and law) teaches that the great sage Rabbi Akiva would cry when he reached this verse. Why? Because there was a tradition that those who fasted and slept in a graveyard could indeed inquire of the dead if they wanted to. Rabbi Akiva believed that if it was possible to fast and inquire of the dead, an impure spirit, all the more so it should be possible to fast and have “a pure spirit” settle upon us. But Rabbi Akiva believed that the collective “iniquities” of the people separated them from God and therefore from the possibility of having a “pure spirit” rest upon them. And so he wept when he would read this verse.
It prompted for a us a conversation about how and when we experience alienation from God, whatever that means to us, and when and how reconciliation with God is possible. The answer to the latter question is, according to traditional sources, always.
Rabbi Joseph Solevetchik, writes that “when someone sins they create a distance between themself and God,” and that “the whole essence of the precept of repentance is longing, yearning, pining to return again. Longing develops only when one has lost something precious. Sin pushes us far away and stimulates our longing to return.”
This “longing to return” is the birthplace of teshuvah, repentance. There are times in our lives when the presence of God feels small, if existent at all. In part, the purpose of the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, is to wake us up to the pining, the longing that lays deep within our souls, and to help make clear the path to return.
And as a different Jewish teaching makes clear, that path is always available. Teshuvah, repentance, the teaching offers, is like the sea, not like a mikveh (ritual bath), in. Sometimes the mikveh is closed; the sea never is.
So, too, with teshuvah and reconciliation with the Divine.
