If we want to understand the interaction between behavior and inner experience with reference to the Hebrew Bible and its Jewish elaboration, it is necessary to beware of the modern one-sided valuation of inner intention and to pay more attention to behavior, which includes both external actions and verbal performance, while inwardness is often invisible to observers. Jewish understanding of the Bible thus necessitates some familiarity with rabbinic legal and philosophical thought over the past two millennia. This can best be done by examining the discussions among classic Jewish thinkers.

Exploring Concepts of Repentance

To think about our question requires knowledge of some basic ideas regarding repentance.

Repentance for sin is central to Judaism. Apart from being a divine commandment, it is an existential necessity: “If you, O Lord, kept a record of our sins, who would stand?” (Psalm 130)  “Return O Israel to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your sin (Hosea 14)”; “Return to me and I will return to you” (Zachariah 1:3) are only two among many summons to repent and renew our relationship to God.

The Hebrew verb la-shuv, from which the rabbinic noun for repentance, teshuva is derived, means to turn. It means to turn away from sin, as in Ezekiel 33:11: “Turn away from your evil ways.” It also means turning to God: “Return to me for I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 44:22). In our lives, there are moments when repentance is about rejecting evil and moments when the stress is on reconnecting with God.

It is necessary to beware of the modern one-sided valuation of inner intention and to pay more attention to behavior.

Sometimes what we regret and forswear is not so much sin itself as its baleful consequences, whether to our happiness, our health, our social standing, or its effect on those we love. The ideal repentance is driven by the desire to live wholesomely and obediently in the presence of God. However, the true or deepest motivation for repentance is not always visible to the eyes of man, not even to the penitent himself or herself. The rabbis distinguished between repentance deriving from fear and repentance deriving from love, the former mitigating the consequences of sin, the latter transforming one’s actions totally.

Repentance is also biblically mandated, that is, commanded by God. One who repents is obeying a divine commandment, just as one would in fulfilling any of the other commandments. The textual basis in the Torah for this obligation is open to discussion.

It may be useful to focus on Maimonides’ “laws of repentance” in his twelfth-century Mishneh Torah code, as his work is widely studied and influential. Analyzing his formulations may help us to focus on the relation between the external acts tied to repentance and the inner change that accompanies and defines repentance.

Maimonides’ source for the biblical commandment of repentance is Numbers 5:5f. This passage describes the offerings brought by various offenders for stealing and swearing falsely. Together with the sacrifices and the prescribed monetary penalty, confession of sin is part of the atonement. In the preface to the treatise, where Maimonides lists the biblical commandments, he identifies repentance entirely with the act of confession. This could be taken to imply that verbal acts, and not merely intention, are essential to fulfill the divine command.

In the body of his text, Maimonides, like other medieval authorities, lists several normative components of repentance. The formula of confession in Maimonides includes acknowledgement of the sin before God, expression of regret and shame and resolve not to repeat one’s sin. Later in the opening chapter of the tract on repentance he emphasizes that expressing verbal repentance, without intending to forsake the sin, invalidates the performance. It would thus appear that repentance is an expression of inner life, not merely an external action.

This is not the place to explore the rabbinic analysis of this apparent tension between Maimonides’ prefatory remark about confession and the more inward account he offers later. One popular solution, identified with my revered mentor Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, is pertinent to our question. Rabbi Soloveitchik held that repentance, like several other commandments, has both an inner and outer dimension. The inner meaning of repentance is turning away from sin and turning to God. An individual who has made that move, even if he or she has not verbalized it, is a penitent person.

Biblical Repentance as Revealed in the Torah

At the same time, the Torah insists that fulfilling the commandment to repent specifies an externalized confession; one is obligated to put into words, as part of one’s dialogue with God, one’s past, one’s regrets, and one’s resolve for the future. This is one insight into the interplay of feeling and action in the process of repentance.

Let me turn your attention back to the verse about confession in Numbers 5. At first blush, it does not seem to define the general act of repentance; rather it seems to be a detail, albeit a significant detail, defining the sinner’s offering of the sacrifice. If that is the source for the commandment of repentance, as it is according to Maimonides, one must conclude that he did not have at his disposal a more straightforward, inner-oriented prooftext for the divine command to repent. That means that in some biblical texts—specifically Numbers—the inner aspect of repentance is inseparably intertwined with the verbal performance. Why might this be so?

One reason that the Torah insists on the externalization of verbal confession is that pious velleities, when not accompanied by actions, are usually spiritually cheap. Regrets and resolutions that are not pronounced verbally usually are not fully formed. Proper repentance requires us to bind our thoughts and feelings to actions and to spell them out in real words said to God, not only via interior monologue. In preaching repentance, the rabbis say that God did not remit the punishment of Nineveh because He saw their sackcloth and fasting, but because “He saw their deeds, that they had turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10). The necessity of behavioral change is reinforced by the need to express the desire to change through verbal and practical performance.

The rabbis say that God did not remit the punishment of Nineveh because He saw their sackloth and fasting, but because “He saw their deeds, that they had turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10).

In Deuteronomy 30:5ff, Moses states that “you shall return to the Lord your God.” The verse can be read two ways: either as a command or as a promise. Nahmanides, a towering authority in thirteenth-century Spain, held that both possibilities are intended. In the context of Moses’ outline of the eschatological future, God assures Israel that their eventual repentance is divinely ordained. For Nahmanides, however, the Torah also implies the imperative: repentance is here presented as a commandment.

In contrast with Maimonides, this view defines the commandment to repent independently of the actions specified in atonement ritual and associated actions. Maimonides cites the verse “and you shall return” in chapter 7 of the laws of repentance, interpreting it as a promise. Although, as we have seen, he derives the command to repent from Numbers 5, the fact that he mentions the Deuteronomy promise in the context of his legal treatise is worthy of notice.

To revert to Jonah, it is not only that God accepts the repentance of Nineveh, an exercise of mercy that Jonah is not wholly happy with. God also feels concern, as it were, for his creatures, as He intimates to the prophet in the rhetorical question that closes the book: “You were concerned for the gourd for which you did not toil. . . . Shall I not be concerned for the great city Nineveh?” The point here is not only that God accepts repentance but also that the reconciliation between sinful human beings and God is, in some sense, integral to the entire relationship of Creator and creature.

Our discussion of repentance has concentrated on the dialogue between human beings and God. When one has offended another person, repentance requires the attempt to propitiate the injured party. Of course, every sin against others is also a sin against God. Repentance thus includes confession and resolution before God. But halakha (Jewish law) mandates that these gestures of repentance must be conjoined with the effort to mend fences with one’s neighbor. Again, feelings of regret and remorse gain their religious validity through their integration in the world of action.

It seemed unlikely that many educated and acculturated Jews would take God seriously enough to build their lives around prayer, study of Torah, faithfulness to the commandments, and raising their children to make religious commitment the center of their lives. In a world of broad and practically useful education, it was even less likely that a younger generation would devote years of their lives to studying the Torah on a high level. Application to the abstruse pages of the Talmud might still be seen among the old Eastern European trained rabbis, whom American Jews needed for their ritual expertise but who lacked the education or even the English vocabulary to transmit their way of life and learning.

Today, Orthodox institutions are alive and even thriving in America. In the day schools, the study of Torah constitutes a significant part of the curriculum. The same is true in the yeshivot attended by many Orthodox young men, most of whom are not planning to be professional rabbis/educators, and in the seminaries for young women. The Talmud and surrounding Jewish literature are valued not only because they can guide Jewish practice, but also because they reveal God’s will. For those who seek theological growth, there are philosophical works, rooted in the Torah, that address the human condition from an explicitly Orthodox perspective, using the language of general philosophy, theology, and other humanistic disciplines.

Joseph Soloveitchik: Polymath and Devout Jew

Part of this development and much of its uncompromising intensity is due to the immigration of refugee rabbis and lay people, survivors of the Holocaust, who refused to resign themselves to the withering away of religious commitment. One immigrant rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik, who arrived in the United States in 1932, before the Holocaust, was the scion of one of the greatest rabbinic dynasties in Eastern Europe and heir to the family’s pioneering advances in Talmudic analysis, while he had also mastered contemporary philosophy, science, and religious thought at the University of Berlin. For over fifty years he tirelessly taught Talmud at Yeshiva University, in Boston, and in other venues. He lectured and wrote on philosophical and theological topics, along the way founding one of the first Jewish day schools in Boston, and serving as the highest authority on Jewish law for the hundreds of rabbis he ordained. His name has become synonymous with total devotion to the all-encompassing life of Torah while also mastering “secular wisdom” and displaying concern for the world outside the Jewish hall of study, together with the ability to propagate that vision among those students willing and able to pursue it.

In the following remarks I hope to go beyond Rabbi Soloveitchik’s iconic status to sketch some of his most important ideas in context and their contribution to Jewish thought and general religious consciousness.

The central place of Halakha, living according to Jewish law, as codified in the Talmud and subsequent rabbinic literature, is well known. The study of that law is the central preoccupation of Jewish intellectual life. That study is not confined to reaching conclusions regarding practical matters of ritual and civil law. The study of Torah as divine revelation is an end in itself; it is regarded as the primary road to the knowledge of God. However, classical Jewish philosophy, medieval and modern, generally concentrated on questions shared by the non-Jewish philosophical tradition and worked primarily through the biblical sources. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903 Byelorus–1993 Boston), more than any other thinker, shifted the center of Jewish philosophical reflection to the detailed practice of halakha and to its sources.

The Education and Work of Joseph Soloveitchik

Three intellectual disciplines converge in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. First and foremost, he was rigorously trained in the Brisk (=Brest-Litovsk) method of Talmudic investigation pioneered by his grandfather, R. Hayyim Soloveichik. This “analytic school” sought to uncover the conceptual foundations underlying rabbinic legal texts, that is the various views stated in the Talmud and the major medieval commentators and codifiers. This tendency formalized and systematized the kind of reasoning prevalent in the study of halakhic civil, criminal, and family law, applying it to ritual law, kashrut, the sacrificial cult and so forth. Some form of the Brisker school is now dominant in “Lithuanian” and Lithuanian-style yeshivot. Most of R. Soloveitchik’s teaching and writing was devoted to this discipline. He is especially noted for applying it to “experiential” commandments such as prayer, mourning, festival joy, repentance, and the like.

After many years of intensive rabbinic study, the young R. Soloveitchik did his PhD at the University of Berlin. His thesis, on neo-Kantian philosophy of science, serves as backdrop to some of his writing on the methodology of Halakha. In Halakhic Man (Hebrew 1943), he depicted the Torah scholar as a type of theoretical scientist somewhat akin to “cognitive man,” who is interested in formulating and testing objective principles correlated with concrete experience. The Halakhic Mind (drafted at same time in English, published 40 years later) presents an epistemological framework in which Judaic principles are correlated with the subjective data of religious experience. Halakha provides the most objective and reliable guide for the analysis of Judaism.

And You Shall Seek From There, drafted in Hebrew in 1940’s, published 1978, explores the relationship with God implied by these two works. R. Soloveitchik here analyzes two poles of religious existence: on the one hand, the quest for God via “natural consciousness,” which includes the variety of philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and mystical avenues; on the other hand, “revelational consciousness,” when God confronts human beings by revealing His will to them. At the highest level, the human quest for God and revelation come together in imitatio Dei, the imitation of God and cleaving unto God by identifying with His will. At this stage, the faithful and creative student of Torah overcomes the tension between the desire for autonomy and the otherness of the commanding God.

Another major influence deriving from his philosophical studies is that of phenomenology and the theological movements of the time: these include Kierkegaard, Otto, Barth, Emil Brunner, and Max Scheler. Many of R. Soloveitchik’s writings present typologies of religious personalities and attempt to define their essential characteristics. Perhaps the best known is Lonely Man of Faith (1965), which contrasts Adam I (“majestic man”) as portrayed in the creation story of Genesis 1, with Adam II (“man of faith”) who appears in the complementary story of Genesis 2. The former is a scientific-technological type, in the image of God the creator, who strives to enhance his dignity by dominating the world practically and cognitively through an ethic of triumphant achievement. The latter seeks communion with God and with other human beings that is rooted in the ontological experience of loneliness and singularity and responds to divine imperatives. Despite the irreconcilable tension between them, both types are mandated by God. The individual and the community oscillate between the commitments engendered by each role. In the contemporary utilitarian-pragmatic world, the man of faith experiences not only the loneliness inherent in his ontological nature, but also a sense of loneliness deriving from his specific historical situation.

In 1932 R. Soloveitchik immigrated to Boston, where he was active in various rabbinical roles and where, together with his wife, he founded the Maimonides School, which pioneered the combination of first-rate academics with a substantial curriculum of Torah studies. In 1941 he succeeded his father as senior teacher of Talmud at Yeshiva University, where he became known as “the Rav.” For the next 45 years he commuted weekly between Boston and New York, teaching a heavy schedule in both cities. By the 1950s he was chair of the Halakha Commission of the Rabbinical Council of America, which made him the highest authority for the “modern” Orthodox, largely university-educated rabbinate in North America. He gave periodic discourses in his role as Honorary President of the Religious Zionists of America. In the early 1960s there was a strong movement in favor of his being elected Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, but he declined to stand for the position, on the grounds that he was a teacher and did not want to become involved in politics. The illness of his wife and her death in 1967 had a profound impact on his inner life, though he continued his work unabated for many years until his retirement in 1985 due to ill health.

In his last active years, R. Soloveitchik overcame some of the reservations characteristic of his family tradition regarding publication. After his death many more manuscripts were published by the estate. Many disciples and auditors published their notes or tape transcriptions. These unofficial productions differ in quality and reliability. Some of the elite students concentrated on the Talmudic lectures, to the exclusion of the theological and philosophical output. Other admirers attempted to publicize their version of his communal and ideological teachings. Due to the complexity of R. Soloveitchik’s thought and the variety of disciplines in which he worked, it may have been inevitable that divergent, selective images of the man and his work would circulate widely.

Halakhic Discipline, Zionism, and Vatican II

R. Soloveitchik’s primary legacy is his productivity as a major Talmudist of the Brisker school, together with his attempt to portray the intellectual and existential premises of the halakhic discipline and the way of life based on it and his many essays on the phenomenology of religious life. At least two aspects of his public engagement, his Zionism, and his view of interfaith relations, are subjects of ongoing interest.

As noted, R. Soloveitchik came to identify with and advocate religious Zionism. Many of the loudest voices in religious Zionism are inclined to eschatological interpretations of Zionism, viewing the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel as a harbinger of ultimate redemption. R. Soloveitchik, by contrast, justified the value of Israel primarily in terms of the security and welfare it can provide the Jewish people.

This emphasis may very well have practical implications as well. R. Soloveitchik and those closest to his way of thinking have looked askance at what they see as a tendency toward placing the State beyond criticism and overreliance on military might. Despite his enthusiasm for Jewish settlement in the land of Israel, R. Soloveitchik ruled that it was halakhically permissible for Israel to withdraw from parts of the land taken in the Six Day War if this would indeed bring about peace. Likewise, when Christian militias under Israeli aegis allowed massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon (1982), he demanded an Israeli commission of inquiry to examine possible Israeli responsibility. These views are still in the minority among Israeli religious Zionist politicians and activists but have gained a wider audience with the immigration to Israel of rabbis educated by R. Soloveitchik.

The advent of Vatican II in the early 1960s was attended by debate on Jewish participation in interfaith dialogue. R. Soloveitchik formulated his position in “Confrontations” (1964) and subsequent guidelines. His view, in brief, was that the intimate theological dogmas of different faith communities, such as the singularity of the Jewish people or the Trinity, make their experience incommunicable, and that organized dialogue was liable to do violence to authentic religious existence, especially when one side represented the majority culture and the other side a minority. At the same time, he advocated seeking common ground regarding social and ethical concerns, even while acknowledging that such positions cannot be untangled from the particularistic doctrines of each community. This approach was adopted by the RCA. R. Joseph Soloveitchik himself lectured, on occasion, to Christian audiences on subjects of shared concern.

If we want to understand the interaction between behavior and inner experience with reference to the Hebrew Bible and its Jewish elaboration, it is necessary to beware of the modern one-sided valuation of inner intention and to pay more attention to behavior, which includes both external actions and verbal performance, while inwardness is often invisible to observers. Jewish understanding of the Bible thus necessitates some familiarity with rabbinic legal and philosophical thought over the past two millennia. This can best be done by examining the discussions among classic Jewish thinkers.

Exploring Concepts of Repentance

To think about our question requires knowledge of some basic ideas regarding repentance.

Repentance for sin is central to Judaism. Apart from being a divine commandment, it is an existential necessity: “If you, O Lord, kept a record of our sins, who would stand?” (Psalm 130)  “Return O Israel to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your sin (Hosea 14)”; “Return to me and I will return to you” (Zachariah 1:3) are only two among many summons to repent and renew our relationship to God.

The Hebrew verb la-shuv, from which the rabbinic noun for repentance, teshuva is derived, means to turn. It means to turn away from sin, as in Ezekiel 33:11: “Turn away from your evil ways.” It also means turning to God: “Return to me for I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 44:22). In our lives, there are moments when repentance is about rejecting evil and moments when the stress is on reconnecting with God.

It is necessary to beware of the modern one-sided valuation of inner intention and to pay more attention to behavior.

Sometimes what we regret and forswear is not so much sin itself as its baleful consequences, whether to our happiness, our health, our social standing, or its effect on those we love. The ideal repentance is driven by the desire to live wholesomely and obediently in the presence of God. However, the true or deepest motivation for repentance is not always visible to the eyes of man, not even to the penitent himself or herself. The rabbis distinguished between repentance deriving from fear and repentance deriving from love, the former mitigating the consequences of sin, the latter transforming one’s actions totally.

Repentance is also biblically mandated, that is, commanded by God. One who repents is obeying a divine commandment, just as one would in fulfilling any of the other commandments. The textual basis in the Torah for this obligation is open to discussion.

It may be useful to focus on Maimonides’ “laws of repentance” in his twelfth-century Mishneh Torah code, as his work is widely studied and influential. Analyzing his formulations may help us to focus on the relation between the external acts tied to repentance and the inner change that accompanies and defines repentance.

Maimonides’ source for the biblical commandment of repentance is Numbers 5:5f. This passage describes the offerings brought by various offenders for stealing and swearing falsely. Together with the sacrifices and the prescribed monetary penalty, confession of sin is part of the atonement. In the preface to the treatise, where Maimonides lists the biblical commandments, he identifies repentance entirely with the act of confession. This could be taken to imply that verbal acts, and not merely intention, are essential to fulfill the divine command.

In the body of his text, Maimonides, like other medieval authorities, lists several normative components of repentance. The formula of confession in Maimonides includes acknowledgement of the sin before God, expression of regret and shame and resolve not to repeat one’s sin. Later in the opening chapter of the tract on repentance he emphasizes that expressing verbal repentance, without intending to forsake the sin, invalidates the performance. It would thus appear that repentance is an expression of inner life, not merely an external action.

This is not the place to explore the rabbinic analysis of this apparent tension between Maimonides’ prefatory remark about confession and the more inward account he offers later. One popular solution, identified with my revered mentor Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, is pertinent to our question. Rabbi Soloveitchik held that repentance, like several other commandments, has both an inner and outer dimension. The inner meaning of repentance is turning away from sin and turning to God. An individual who has made that move, even if he or she has not verbalized it, is a penitent person.

Biblical Repentance as Revealed in the Torah

At the same time, the Torah insists that fulfilling the commandment to repent specifies an externalized confession; one is obligated to put into words, as part of one’s dialogue with God, one’s past, one’s regrets, and one’s resolve for the future. This is one insight into the interplay of feeling and action in the process of repentance.

Let me turn your attention back to the verse about confession in Numbers 5. At first blush, it does not seem to define the general act of repentance; rather it seems to be a detail, albeit a significant detail, defining the sinner’s offering of the sacrifice. If that is the source for the commandment of repentance, as it is according to Maimonides, one must conclude that he did not have at his disposal a more straightforward, inner-oriented prooftext for the divine command to repent. That means that in some biblical texts—specifically Numbers—the inner aspect of repentance is inseparably intertwined with the verbal performance. Why might this be so?

One reason that the Torah insists on the externalization of verbal confession is that pious velleities, when not accompanied by actions, are usually spiritually cheap. Regrets and resolutions that are not pronounced verbally usually are not fully formed. Proper repentance requires us to bind our thoughts and feelings to actions and to spell them out in real words said to God, not only via interior monologue. In preaching repentance, the rabbis say that God did not remit the punishment of Nineveh because He saw their sackcloth and fasting, but because “He saw their deeds, that they had turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10). The necessity of behavioral change is reinforced by the need to express the desire to change through verbal and practical performance.

The rabbis say that God did not remit the punishment of Nineveh because He saw their sackloth and fasting, but because “He saw their deeds, that they had turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10).

In Deuteronomy 30:5ff, Moses states that “you shall return to the Lord your God.” The verse can be read two ways: either as a command or as a promise. Nahmanides, a towering authority in thirteenth-century Spain, held that both possibilities are intended. In the context of Moses’ outline of the eschatological future, God assures Israel that their eventual repentance is divinely ordained. For Nahmanides, however, the Torah also implies the imperative: repentance is here presented as a commandment.

In contrast with Maimonides, this view defines the commandment to repent independently of the actions specified in atonement ritual and associated actions. Maimonides cites the verse “and you shall return” in chapter 7 of the laws of repentance, interpreting it as a promise. Although, as we have seen, he derives the command to repent from Numbers 5, the fact that he mentions the Deuteronomy promise in the context of his legal treatise is worthy of notice.

To revert to Jonah, it is not only that God accepts the repentance of Nineveh, an exercise of mercy that Jonah is not wholly happy with. God also feels concern, as it were, for his creatures, as He intimates to the prophet in the rhetorical question that closes the book: “You were concerned for the gourd for which you did not toil. . . . Shall I not be concerned for the great city Nineveh?” The point here is not only that God accepts repentance but also that the reconciliation between sinful human beings and God is, in some sense, integral to the entire relationship of Creator and creature.

Our discussion of repentance has concentrated on the dialogue between human beings and God. When one has offended another person, repentance requires the attempt to propitiate the injured party. Of course, every sin against others is also a sin against God. Repentance thus includes confession and resolution before God. But halakha (Jewish law) mandates that these gestures of repentance must be conjoined with the effort to mend fences with one’s neighbor. Again, feelings of regret and remorse gain their religious validity through their integration in the world of action.