Judgment Day

Yom Kippur - Day of Judgment, day of repentance. We repent, and if our repentance is sincere, the Almighty forgives us our sins. It would seem that everything is quite clear, but upon serious reflection, questions arise that urgently require an answer.

I will now give a couple of examples that have a very indirect relation to the moral sphere, but well illustrate the problem itself. Let's say we missed the plane or invested serious money in stocks that are now worth less than the paper they were printed on. Whatever our repentance, the facts remain the same: the plane took off without us, the money was missing. We cannot go back in time and fix anything.

It's the same with sins. They continue to exist. In this case, what does it mean the forgiveness that we receive (more precisely, under certain conditions we can receive) from the Almighty and from those people whom we have offended?

The key to resolving this problem is to understand that there is genuine repentance. A person makes a firm decision to change his life - to change it in such a way as to minimize the preconditions for sin. The airplane story. Of course, there may be reasons here that are completely beyond your control. But it is possible that you are constantly late; the plane is only a special case of mismanagement of your life. And so you decide to leave the house from now on fifteen minutes earlier than required (and not fifteen minutes later, as you did just recently) and strictly follow this decision. This will be sincere, and therefore effective, repentance. The movement of the soul must certainly become a deed.

Yes, but what about missing the plane? No matter what you do now, the fact of being late still remains immutable: now you are not late, but you are late!

In fact, the conflict is resolved simply: in your repentance you have changed, you have now become a different person, the sin committed in the past does not belong to you, but to the one you have already ceased to be.

The word "repentance" is one of the translations of the Hebrew word "teshuva". Another meaning is “return”. In repentance, a person returns to the Almighty, from whom he departed in his sin. Moreover, it returns at a new level of experience of separation, at a new level of understanding. But in this way a person returns to himself, because in sin a person leaves himself; sin is darkness, distortion, corruption of the nature inherent in it by the Almighty. Overcome sin becomes an instrument of spiritual growth, because problems and crises create new opportunities.

On Yom Kippur, the day of repentance, I wish you all to take advantage of these opportunities.

To the readers of the Kommersant newspaper