Ramadan And Repentance
abracad, · Categories: externally authored, religionRabbi Allen S. Maller
“We have indeed (started) revealing this (Message) in the Night of Power. What will explain to you what the Night of Power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand (ordinary) months. Therein come down the angels and the Spirit by Allah's permission, on every errand: Peace!… This until the rise of morning.” (Quran 97:1-5)
The yearly Night of Power brings down the angels and the Spirit to empower every action that humans engage in that empowers Peace: Peace within and between our families, our neighbors, our communities, our country and all humanity.
Ramadan visits Muslims every year and offers them reasons to reflect on all aspects of their lives. Muslims pray:
O Allah! Forgive us of the sins that hinder our prayers.
O Allah! Forgive us of the sins that suppress our hopes.
O Allah! Forgive all the sins we committed and every mistake we made.
O Allah! Accept our apologies, have pity on our sufferings, and
set us free from the chains of narrow minded beliefs, arrogance and prejudices.
In the same way Jews confess during the 24 hour fast day of Yom Kippur-The Day of Atonement- a confession of sins said ten times in the course of the Yom Kippur services:
For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness.
For the sin which we have committed before You inadvertently.
For the sin which we have committed before You with immorality.
And for the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly.
For the sin which we have committed before You with knowledge and with deceit.
And for the sin which we have committed before You through speech.
For the sin which we have committed before You by deceiving a fellowman.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.
For the sin which we have committed before You by a gathering of lewdness.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by verbal [insincere] confession.
For the sin which we have committed before You by disrespect for parents and teachers.
And for the sin which we have committed before You intentionally or unintentionally.
For the sin which we have committed before You by using coercion.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by desecrating the Divine Name.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by foolish talk.
For the sin which we have committed before You with the evil inclination.
And for the sin which we have committed before You knowingly or unknowingly.
For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, be at-one-ment with us.
Repentance literally means return, as if turning back to something you’ve strayed from. The Hebrew Bible sees teshuvah as principally a return to God. "Come, let us return to the Lord," the prophet Hoshea (14:2) tells the people of Israel.
In Psalm 51, King David seeks teshuvah for committing adultery with Bathsheba. Importantly, David’s confession is addressed to God because, as he says, "Against You alone have I sinned."
Traditional rabbinical commentators have interpreted this to mean that teshuvah requires confessing your sins to God. Part of achieving intimacy with God involves God’s knowing your sins. Only in that way can you return to God.
For centuries after the destruction by Rome in 70 C.E. of Jerusalem's ancient temple, where Jews would say confession and offer sacrifices for atonement, the rabbis reworked Biblical ideas and practices of teshuvah into a roadmap for spiritual and moral growth. The rabbis called for introspection, changing one’s ways, and asking others for forgiveness.
So Rabbi Maimonides' "placed confession and regret at the center of repentance so that teshuvah, became a process of "moral and spiritual self-cultivation and self-education.”
The medieval mystics who wrote the texts of the Kabbalah took this even further. They said teshuvah comes not only from inside an individual but is also a dynamic force all around us to produce at-one-ment with us.
In the 13th-century "Zohar," the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, teshuvah became a way of repairing a rupture or tear in the spiritual fabric of the universe. When the varying energies at work in the world — justice and mercy, male and female, tradition and change — go out of balance, teshuvah helps to rebalance them.
In other mystical texts, return is seen as a kind of rebirth, and the achievement of the soul's deepest freedom of at-one-ment with God.
Some 300 years later, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the great mystic of Safed in northern Israel, famously connected teshuvah with tikkun olam (healing, repair of the world). Through teshuvah, Jews and non-Jews can improve God's fractured universe, helping to usher in the Messianic Age.
For Rabbi Luria, this largely meant a kind of spiritual healing. But over time, and especially in the last century, Jews have begun to connect this to ideas of social justice, adding another layer of interpretation to Jewish messianic ideals.
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