tshuva: nostalgia

tshuva: nostalgia

 

This is the season of tshuva. The word is usually translated as repentance but it is clearly related to the word meaning return.  Tshuva implies that a better state was abandoned for an inferior one.  Things used to be better ( before automobiles, telephones and Internet divrei torah).  Tshuvah - I want to return to a prior state of innocence, before I was distracted by the power of human in(ter)vention.

 

The romanticized vision of the past that the 10 days of Tshuva evokes in me is very long and deep.  It stretches from the time before Adam and Eve took the fatal, intoxicating, permissive fruit  (before Woodstock) to the pre-Twitter, pre -RSS, pre -Google era of days of delay before questionable, essential information became available.

 

Part of tshuvah is realizing that, in the future I will look back at this time.  Thus, one who denies olam haba, the ultimate future, loses olam haba because she cannot do tshuvah.  

 

Don't rely on miracles - do tshuva.