No Satisfaction – Rosh Hashanah and Repentance

Without Jesus, in the Christian story, God gets no Satisfaction.

Human Evil is turned into the doctrinal reality of Original Sin – which can only be overcome – satisfied – by the sacrifice of the man/God, Jesus. In this 1410 Austrian vision of the trinity, Jesus is God’s puppet. There is only one story here – God’s. Jesus, the human sacrifice, plays his bit part.

God as Puppet Master

Man is so heinous, unredeemable, that it takes the sacrifice of Jesus, the merciful Son, to overcome the vengeance of the Old Testament God (a Christian invention). The universality of the Christian story of Love depends upon a human sacrifice to satisfy God’s demand for Justice. (This Christian invention of the Jewish God of Justice has, by the way, fueled blood libels for millennia).

But for the Infinite God of the Hebrew Scriptures, Justice and Mercy are undivided, the latter not subcontracted out to a human agent. Teshuva or Repentance, the metaphysical principle created before Creation (with among others things, the Garden of Eden and the name of the Messiah), is the divine gift to the human. God says to man: Your redemption, the story you write, is up to you.

Teshuva humanizes redemption, placing responsibility and the potential for transformation upon the individual. Repentance comes, not through the erasure of self, but, through creativity – the writing of the Self. ‘My tongue,’ the Psalmist writes, ‘is the pen of a ready writer.’

That writer does not take dictation, nor does she shy away from the past. She reads her past, and in the process rewrites it.

Rembrandt’s Hannah – A Reading Life

Teshuva is the creative attention to one’s life as a story, and facing up to the past, no matter how horrible, how seemingly irredeemable. The power of teshuvais the human ability to rewrite a story of tragic determinism into creative freedom. Only those who confront their past will be determined by it. This is not the divine ‘satisfaction’ of absolution, but taking ownership of one’s story and transforming it.

The ‘birthday’ of the world both corresponds with and creates the possibility for individual renewal. The cosmological story told in the prayers of Rosh Hashanah spans from Creation to the Great Shofar of the Final Redemption. During the Jewish days of renewal, the anticipated, however delayed, cosmic redemption becomes the model for the human story. No matter how desperate the past and the present, teshuva gives our stories – personal and collective – a direction, towards the future.

Getting written in the ‘Book of Life’ does not mean gold-embossed letters on a vellum page, but the opportunity, the blessing, to continue to write. We entreat God to be remember us for life. To ‘remember our memories for the good‘ – it wasn’t all bad – to help us take our pasts into the future.

Teshuva means to ‘return’ – to return to the self to read and write, again and again.

Writing our stories, always open to revision, we transform our lives into stories which have a future, turning ourselves into people with whom we can live, and maybe even admire.

Man in the image of God, the man who creates, starting with the self.

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The first in a series of articles on the Jewish High Holidays