Where is teshuvah, when you can’t go home again?
A couple of weeks ago, I returned to my gap-year seminary, the Stella K. Abraham Beit Midrash for Women, more commonly called by the name of the kibbutz over which it casts its mighty shadow, Migdal Oz. Arriving there for its now-famous selichot program, my sister-in-law, niece and I parked in the late-night fog and began that familiar bowed-shoulder plod to the mountaintop.
Composed of prayers, song, and a soul-stirring lecture delivered by the school’s founder and director, Rabbanit Esti Rosenberg, a night of selichot at Migdal Oz, once a humble gathering of seminary students, has become a thunderous affair, drawing hundreds of women from across and beyond Gush Etzion.
And yet, despite alterations in scale, the heart of the experience remained unchanged, and my voice, too, rose to a familiar sort of soprano. Penitent and weeping, it recalled something ingrained, something it seemed to know by heart. Alongside the thrum of a steady, mournful drumbeat and an outpouring of tears, there I was. After 19 years– looking from afar, as if at my own ghost seated at my former makom in the Beit Midrash– there I was. Alien and native both, wondering if my 18-year-old self would recognize me today, and, at once, knowing that she and I never parted.
Long before and ever since that night, my mind has been chafing against the notion that one “can’t go home again,” pained by the likelihood and insofar-as-I’ve-experienced-it reality that it’s true, but haunted by my soul’s romantic insistence that it’s not.
And it’s at this time of year, especially, that my repudiation feels strongest. If one can’t unwind what’s been warped in the course of a year, then how do we perform teshuvah? If one can’t go home again, then to what place are we meant to return?
Mentioned in dozens of biblical commentaries and in several tractates of the Talmud, the shivrei luchot, the broken pieces of the first set of tablets, are said to have been kept in the ark, along with the new, unbroken ones. Of course, the obvious metaphor about carrying one’s mistakes into the present and recognizing the worth and necessity of “the broken road” is beautiful and heartening. But, in his commentary on the subject, R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch strikes at an even deeper and more resonant chord, referring to the tablets’ coupled residency as a “zweifaches gedächtnis für alle zeit,” a double memory for all time.
A double memory – the notion that we live and travel in the present bearing all the layers of self that have emerged since birth. A double memory – a notion implying that the past is defined and recast continually by the present. The implication that one’s prior home wasn’t only, but still very much is. That home lives, inherently, in the present.
Still, though, even if one rejects the sort of harmony of past and present that Hirsch suggests, I find myself hellbent on the possibility of “going home again.”
Standing in the midst of the seminary community’s sacred sound, it occurred to me that, as tender and painful an aching as I felt for my younger self, I was grateful that I hadn’t made choices that would’ve alienated me so much from my own origin that I was numb to it. I stood there, and I thanked God that I hadn’t since lived a life that estranged me so much from my own self that I didn’t miss her.
So maybe going home again is as simple as never fully leaving. Maybe it’s as simple as wishing for the ability to go home, achieved in the simplicity of missing oneself.
I’m reminded, too, of Rav Hutner’s commentary on Psalms 34:12. Narrating a father’s instructions to his son, the text says, “Go my son, listen to me.” In the 155th of his famous letters (Pachad Yitzchak: Iggros U’Kesavim), Hutner explains that, though it would have made more sense for the text to say, “Come my son, listen to me,” it says “Go,” suggesting that distance, in fact, is necessary in order for a boy to metabolize his father’s teachings. Maybe, we need to “go,” if ever we’re to return. Quite obviously, from a definitional standpoint, return isn’t possible without departure.
As we sang a classic– both at Migdal Oz selichot and in our year round liturgy, I meditated on the words, germinating the seed of another idea pertaining to “going home again.” The verse, “hashiveinu HaShem eleicha v’nashuva” (return us, Lord, to you, and we will return; Lamentations 5:21), sounded over and over, pounding the airwaves in the closest thing I’ve ever heard to a knock on heaven’s door, and I thought to myself, that’s exactly what’s necessary. Reciprocity.
There can be no “going home again,” no teshuvah, if home’s doors are not open to the one returning. And, in fact, a person may not feel encouraged to return until the desire for her presence – however changed she may be – is made known. Migdal Oz didn’t ask me if I still belonged within its walls. It didn’t wonder if I’d abandoned the promises and plans I’d made during my time there (or if those plans had abandoned me). It only yielded space; and I swayed, shuckled, and lifted my arms, taking as much room as my however reorganized and transfigured self needed.
Thus, I’d go so far as to say that one’s community, one’s home and, even, God, have a responsibility to accept and desire a person’s alterations, brokenness, and ever-maturing core. And the Talmud, it seems, agrees, noting that, when Moses broke the tablets, God turned to him and said, “yishar kochacha she’shibarta,” a sort of congratulatory statement of approval at Moses’ having shattered the stones (Yevamot 62a). It’s as if, in the prophet’s most controversial moment of his career– in what was, undoubtedly, his least popular demonstration of leadership and his most grave departure from consensus opinion – God stands beside Moses, accepting what he’s done and embracing whatever breaking he chose; whatever brokenness befell him.
During this season, we hear so much about New Year’s resolutions and the goal of change. But teshuvah, return, is about revival and recall. It’s not about inventing some new self, but, instead, about accepting the person who has emerged in the wild swells of the year and reuniting her with the self that afforded her foundation. It’s about revisiting and resuscitating dormancies, beautiful things– or perhaps even mere hopes– that were always there and have yet to be fully realized.
In yet another of my seminary’s favored tunes, a repeated Psalmic phrase that so happened to be my chosen quote in the 8th grade yearbook, we sing, “One thing I ask of God, only that do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of God…all the days of my life.”
And, if it’s the eternal house of God to which we aim to return, I have to conclude that, of course, one may go home again.
Because, in fact, leaving wasn’t possible in the first place.