The Power of Forgiveness

In our encounter with the Divine that characterizes these days leading up to Rosh Hashana, we consider our faults and shortcomings and endeavor to do better – and in doing better, to draw nearer to G-dliness. We expect of Hashem to draw nearer to us and to grant us forgiveness. This “dance” and the relationship between us is often compared to two people falling back in love with one another, and as we’ve explored in this column a few times in recent weeks, the month of Elul is an acronym for the Hebrew translation of the phrase “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

Rav Kook sees the process of repentance and return as the paragon of human spiritual attainment and in a real sense as the very meaning of life. We examined some of these writings in depth here a few years ago. The process of repenting, of rectifying our flaws and finding a path back to the light, is what makes us truly human and enables us to effectively span the gap between animals and the Divine that we are meant to embody as descendants of Adam, the first man. Rav Kook also examines how the act and the process of forgiveness most purely demonstrates what G-d is to us, and how runs the universe.

In the fifth of the “Eight Collections of Essays,” (Shemoneh Kevatzim), Rav Kook explains how the supernal act of forgiveness originates in the highest realms of G-dliness – in Hashem’s infinite capacity for kindness and mercy. The aspect of the Divine best known today as chesed, kindness, was known in antiquity as gedulah, greatness – because the kindness of Hashem is identified with His greatness. That Hashem emanates kindness into the universe and that this is His greatness is evident to us, but Rav Kook points out that as this kindness infiltrates our world and follows the paths that were created for this purpose, it discerns and identifies all the parts of our being which require its intervention and which desire to receive it. As the physical universe takes its form and we inhabit it with our imperfections, there are times when it becomes necessary to discipline us, to correct us – to steer us back toward G-dliness. In this way, everything we know and experience is, understood properly, another aspect of Hashem’s supernal mercy.

When we shift our focus away from the mundane and from the experience of pain or fear that accompanies our own defects and precedes our repentance, we come to know, above all, that everything is a manifestation of this Divine mercy. This is the overarching message of the High Holidays, the season of return and the Selichot prayers we recite during this period. 

Rav Kook explains that during the season of repentance, the days preceding and surrounding Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, our prayers and rituals are designed to shift our focus away from the mundane and the immediate pleasures and struggles we experience so that we can connect with this higher awareness of Divine benevolence that suffuses everything. Everything, literally, is understood as an expression of kindness, and so we delve into the details of our own transgressions, of the communal flaws that extend the exile, and of the threats that menace us out of the physical world as correlates to our own baseness. The goal, though, is to transcend and to supersede this consciousness of sinfulness and of human infirmity.

The power of these “Days of Awe” to leverage that will to transfigure even sin into an instrument of Divine mercy is embraced, in particular, on Yom Kippur. On that day, we reach the apex of our own transformation and become, according to Jewish tradition, “angelic beings” ourselves.

The highlight of the Yom Kippur service is sending the Scapegoat into the wilderness which, Rav Kook points out, seems to violate every principle established for the service of Hashem during our sacrificial rituals for the rest of the year. Rav Kook asserts that on Yom Kippur, given the power of the day to effect absolution and the work that we have done to step outside of our mundane concerns, even the flaws in our nature become instruments for self-improvement that draw us closer to union with our Creator. In his words, everything – even what had until recently constituted our wickedness – becomes an advocate testifying on our behalf before the Divine Throne on the Day of Judgment, “and the light of faith and of morality becomes elevated to become the foundation for freedom on high, from which is derived all the splendor of the sacred.”