The Opposite of Teshuvah
One of the core prayers of the penitential season is the viduy, or confession. And the core of the viduy is the ashamnu, the alphabetical listing of transgressions—some very general, some relatively specific—in the first-person plural: “we have acted guiltily, we have done faithlessly, we have stolen, etc.” A sign of our therapeutic age is the introduction, alongside ashamnu, of the “positive” or “complementary” confession, an alphabetical listing of virtuous acts. In the formulation of Rabbi Binyamin Holtzman of Kibbutz Ma’ale Gilboa, which has gained some currency and can be found online at opensiddur.org, it begins: “We have loved, we have cried, we have reciprocated.” But is there really a place for such a complementary confession during the penitential season?
On the online site, the complementary confession is preceded by a epigraph from Rav Kook (Ein Ayah, Ma‘aser sheni, 7:10): “Therefore, just as there is great benefit for the repair of the soul by means of confession of sins, so too is there in confession of good deeds (mitzvot), so that a person will rejoice in them in his heart, and reinforce his paths of life in the way of the Lord.” Rav Kook draws inspiration for this notion from Deuteronomy 26:12-15. In this passage, the Torah calls upon the farmer, having completed all of his tithing requirements in the third year of the sabbatical-year cycle, to declare: “I have cleared out the consecrated portion from the house; and I have given it to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, just as You commanded me; I have neither transgressed nor neglected any of your commandments. … I have obeyed the Lord my God; I have done just as You commanded me. Look down from Your holy abode, from heaven, and bless Your people Israel, etc.” (NJPS) The rabbis call this declaration viduy ma‘aser “the tithe confession,” and from here Rav Kook infers that there is a place for a viduy for good deeds; we should not only confess our sins.
Rav Kook advocates for such a positive viduy “from time to time” (lifraqim); importantly, he does not envision the recitation of such a viduy during the penitential season itself. And indeed, the penitential season seems an inappropriate time for the positive viduy. The focus of this season is properly on our sins, on how we have done offense to God and to human beings, and how we might repent of them and win forgiveness in the face of God’s judgement. There is a time for balancing this praxis with reflection on how we have heeded God and done good for people, but the penitential season is not that time.
But something akin to the positive viduy is indeed appropriate to the penitential season. It emerges from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance 3:3. In the midst of a disquisition on how God weighs the “merits” that a person accrues from his good deeds against the “demerits” that follow from his transgressions, Maimonides, drawing on Bavli Qiddushin 40b, rules as follows: “If someone regrets the good deeds (mitzvot) that he did, and casts doubt on his merits, saying in his heart, and what did I gain in doing them, would that I had not done them, he has lost them all, and no reputation of merit is recalled for him in the world. For it says, ‘the righteousness of the righteous will not save him on the day of his wickedness’ (Ezekiel 33:12); this applies only to one who casts doubt on what he did earlier.”
The Talmudic passage on which Maimonides relies does not indicate why a person might regret the good things that he did. Maimonides suggests that the person might believe that he did not gain from them. It appears that he is not envisioning a “heretic,” one who rejects the existence of God or the principles of Judaism, but rather a more prosaic case. Perhaps, to flesh out Maimonides’ suggestion, the person thought that the good deed that he did would be reciprocated by the recipient, but it was not. Or perhaps he assumed that the beneficiary of his kindness was a worthy person, and then came to think that this assumption was mistaken. Or perhaps, embittered by life, disappointed by his circumstances, he casts a skeptical eye on all of his past good deeds.
By introducing the consideration of regret over past good deeds into the framework of divine judgement and the penitential season—he takes up the New Year judgement in the continuation of the very same pericope—Maimonides suggests that affirmation of one’s good deeds is an important penitence praxis. Such an affirmation looks something like the positive confession, but its purpose is not, as in the case of Rav Kook’s proposal, to recognize oneself as capable of good, to counterbalance the demoralizing and false implication that might arise from the traditional viduy. Rather, the purpose is to counter the prospect of disavowing one’s good deeds.
A positive viduy, so understood, is ultimately one component of a comprehensive penitential self-accounting (heshbon ha-nefesh). Some sins are easy for a person to recognize: He knows he did wrong; he knows he let his anger—his desire; his fear; his laziness—get the better of him. Other sins are harder to see, because they are easier to justify. These can come in two varieties. We may have convinced ourselves that the wrong that we did was right. Or we may have convinced ourselves that the right that we did was wrong. The last case is the space for the positive viduy. “We have loved.” Meaning: There was one time that I loved, and that love was not reciprocated, and I came to think, perhaps I shouldn’t have loved at all. But now I say: It was right for me to have loved, to have opened up the possibility of connection, even though the connection didn’t come to fruition. “We have cried.” Meaning: I saw an injustice done, and I cried for it, but then I saw the victim of that injustice do injustice in turn, and I came to think, what a fool I was to have wasted tears over such a person. But now I say: It was right for me to have cried, for after all, that injustice didn’t become any less unjust when the victim acted as he did. Such an affirmative confession has its place in the penitential season.
