Encountering real love … a love that says ‘no’
When I was Chief Rabbi, each year before Rosh Hashana I used to make a television film for the BBC. It was an interesting challenge. Among the viewers, 99.5% were not Jewish. Jews are only half a per cent of the population of Britain. Besides which, many — even most of them weren’t religious believers at all.
Britain is quite a secular society. So how do you explain to a non-Jewish non-religious audience what teshuva is?
It occurred to me that one dramatic way of doing so was thinking about addiction. After all, to cure an addiction you have to go through most of the stages of teshuva.
•You have to recognize that taking drugs is wrong: what we call charatah.
•You have to undertake to act differently in future: what we call shinui maaseh.
•And we have to be able to resist temptation when it comes our way again: what Maimonides defined as teshuva gemura, complete repentance.
So I spent a day at a rehabilitation center for heroin addicts. I found it incredibly moving. Here were kids, 16 to 18 years old. Most of them came from broken homes. Some had suffered abuse when young, others simply neglect. They’d had a terrible past. Trouble was, by seeking refuge in drugs, they were going to have an even more terrible future.
The people running the center were amazing, and they were changing lives. But to me the most remarkable moment happened while I was speaking to the head of the center, a young woman with, I remember, pink hair and punk clothes. Yet when she spoke, Shechinah medaberet toch gronah, it was as if I were hearing the Divine Presence.
• • •
I asked her what it was that the center did for the young addicts that helped them change their lives. She replied: this is the first place they’ve been to that offers them unconditional love. Then she said: We are the first people they’ve met who care enough about them to say “No.”
When I heard those two sentences, I realized that is what G-d does for us this time of the year.
We are sin addicts. We do things we know we shouldn’t — whether it’s taking drugs, or taking liberties, or not respecting others, or blaming someone else when we should be blaming ourselves. Whatever it is.
We could carry on like this forever, harming others but most of all harming ourselves, were it not for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur calling us to account. That’s when — if we open our hearts — we encounter G-d offering us unconditional love, but caring about us enough to say, “No.”
Published by Rabbi Sacks in 2014.
