The central theme of this entire season and especially of this day is Teshuvah, Repentance, Return. The idea that man can change and that he is commanded to change for the better lies at the very heart of the religious experience, and particularly in Judaism. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, to note the opinion of one of the great Talmudic scholars of the nineteenth century, the author of Minchat Chinukh, who maintains that Teshuvah is not to be considered one of the 613 commandments. Eating Matzoh on Passover is a Mitzvah, praying is a Mitzvah, putting on the Tefillin and Talis is a Mitzvah, making Kiddush is a Mitzvah – and yet Teshuvah, the most penetrating, personal, and consequential religious act known to Jews, is not regarded as a Mitzvah! Surely there must be some rational explanation for this considered opinion of a profound and comprehensive scholar who knew Jewish law as few others did and whose intuitive grasp of the whole Jewish spirit – its whole Weltanschauung – was second to none. May I suggest a solution to this problem which I believe explains the opinion of the Minchat Chinukh and allows us some insight into the act and experience of Teshuvah. The counting of a religious act as a Mitzvah, as the fulfillment of a commandment applies only to some voluntary action which I can choose to do or not to do. But if there is something which is beyond my free will, the act into which I am coerced and forced cannot be considered a Mitzvah. I may choose to pray or not to pray; if I do, it is regarded as a virtue, a Mitzvah. I can choose to observe the Sabbath or I can choose not to observe it; therefore, my observance is regarded as meritorious and my lack of observance as wrong.

Teshuvah, however, in its deepest and most essential sense, is not a voluntary act. We must return. The act of return or Teshuvah is a universal phenomenon, an absolute need of the spirit, a necessity of man as much as eating or breathing. Man has no choice but to return. He must, willy-nilly, do Teshuvah.

Perhaps the best analogy can be drawn from the field of psychology. What happens when we sometimes find ourselves in strange situations, fearing the unknown, unhappy and insecure? Do not we feel a desire from the bottom of our hearts to return, to return to the safety of childhood, to the time when we had no responsibilities, to the warmth of a parent’s loving care? Is not, to use a more severe example, the phenomenon of senility often accompanied by a return to childhood, what we often call “second childhood”? Psychologists tell us that very often there are psychoses which are expressed in a regression, to even a prenatal or fetal stage, symbolic of the time when the person was completely dependent upon another from whom he received all nourishment, all care and all love. As a matter of fact, Freud maintains that the death instinct, a universal instinct of man towards death which is the counterbalance of an instinct towards life, has its origin in what he calls a “repetition compulsion” – an instinct for return to the original state of lifelessness; for death, lifelessness, inorganic matter, the Afar of the Bible, is the origin of life and therefore of human beings.

Now just as it is true psychologically that there is a constant urge to return to the origins, so is it true spiritually. Judaism is aware of a truth more comprehensive than that taught by either psychology or biology. It recognizes that man has more than one origin, more than just dust or the primitive cell. Judaism teaches that man has two origins – one is Afar Min Ha-Adamah, dust from the earth, and the other is the Breath of God which the Lord breathed in to the first man. Man is composed of the elements of Heaven and the elements of earth, of the Breath of God and the dust of the ground. And therefore for us the fact that man must return is an accepted fact. Teshuvah, return, is an inescapable requirement of human life.

But the great and crucial question that faces each and every one of us, particularly on this day and during this season, is: What are you going to return to? Which of these origins of man is it to which you most aspire, to which you crave to return?

How interesting that we have two verses that urge return or Teshuvah upon us. One is the verse that comes from the Book of the Prophet Hosea in which he says שובה ישראל עד ה׳ אלקיך, “Return, Oh Israel, unto the Lord thy God.” The second verse comes from the Book of Psalms in the Tefillah Le-Mosheh, in which we say תשב אנוש עד דכא ותאמר שובו בני אדם. “Thou returnest man to dust, and sayest ‘Return, ye children of men.’” Thus the choice is given to us. It is an either-or choice – either we return unto the Lord thy God, the source of life and the author of all that is decent and honorable and noble within us, or else we are given the command, “Return ye children of men – unto dust, unto the lifeless origin of man.”

To God or to dust, this is the alternative presented to us on this day of Teshuvah. What this means in terms of individual men and women is that there are two sides to human nature and each calls and beckons to us. It is the old, classical distinction, as relevant today as it ever was before: the Yetzer Tov and the Yetzer ha-Ra, our inclinations for good or evil, for being constructive or destructive, our capacities for love or for hate. The rabbis of old in contemplating the creation of man told us that in six ways he is like a beast and in six ways he is like an angel. They meant to tell us that there are these two aspects that struggle for supremacy in the life of man; the side which is angelic, constructive, positive, the good inclination, the inclination to return to the Breath of God, which summons us “Return O Israel unto the Lord thy God,” and then there is the beast in man, the inclination for evil and destruction, that which is generated by the dust origin of man and says, “Toshaiv Enosh Ad Dako,” Return to dust, return ye children of men. Here are powerful words that are addressed to all of us in every capacity in which we live and exist. The entire world is told that it cannot long survive this kind of unbalanced equilibrium and tension of the Cold War of half a world free and half a world slaves, that sooner or later there must be a return to either one or the other, to dust or to God. The State of Israel is reminded that it too has two origins: one is מתחילה עובדי עבודה זרה היו אבותינו. In the beginning, our ancestors, the father of Abraham and others were idol worshipers; and the other origin is ארמי אבד אבי, my father was a wandering Aramean, having cut himself off from his pagan heritage and gone in search of the G-d of the universe. Which one shall we return to? We cannot waver between God and the Baal. We must return: either unto the Lord thy God, or unto dust. Each and every man during this period of Din, of judgment is asked to make his choice clearly and unequivocally. If we will be just Benei adam, ordinary mortals, finite, limited and no different from the beast of the fields then: “Return to dust ye children of men.” But if we will be Israel, the people of God, the champions of the Lord, then “Return O Israel unto the Lord thy God.”

It is to my mind no mere coincidence that the Book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur afternoon, the time when the great day of Teshuvah is about to end and the sun has begun almost to dip below the western horizon – the last chance as it were for the great moving act of Teshuvah. The story of Jonah is essentially a simple one. God informed him that the people of Nineveh have sinned; they are an evil people. Therefore God commands Jonah to go to the people of Nineveh and preach or prophesy unto them, urging them to change their ways and mend their behavior and turn back to God. Jonah refuses to accomplish this mission and makes an attempt to escape from God, as it were. The rest of the story – his adventure aboard ship and his being swallowed by the whale, and the end of the story – are well known to you.

It is in the first part, however, that a passage appears which bothered many of the classical commentaries on this Book of the Bible. We read that God tells Jonah the following words: עוד ארבעים יום ונינוה נהפכת, “In forty more days Nineveh shall be overthrown.” At the end of the story, Jonah does finally appear before the people of Nineveh and gives them this message, the message that if they will not repent God will “overthrow” the city of Nineveh, and the people of Nineveh respond wholeheartedly and return to the Lord God, thereby avoiding their destruction. Now, the question the commentaries ask is this: The words of God were clear and unconditional: In forty more days Nineveh will be destroyed. The fact, however, is that forty days later the city of Nineveh was not destroyed. It was saved – it so happens, because of their response to the preachment of Jonah. No matter how beautiful the moral of the story, no matter how noble and lofty the emphasis on man’s ability to change, there is here the problem of the fact that God’s prediction did not come true. He maintained that in forty days Nineveh Nehepekhet, Nineveh would be “overthrown,” and this did not come about.

The answer to this problem of the commentaries is a remarkable confirmation of the theme we have been developing. For the Hebrew word for “overthrown,” Nehepekhet, literally means “to be turned.” Ordinarily, in Hebrew, “to be turned” means to be plowed under, to be utterly destroyed. And yet, those who are careful in their reading of this verse, and those who take the trouble to consult that classical commentator, “Rashi,” will understand that the word Nehepekhet also has another meaning in Hebrew. For so does Rashi comment on this word, אם יעשו תשובה אז נהפכת מרעה לטובה, If they will be turned from evil to good, by doing Teshuvah.

This then is the crux of the matter: Nineveh has a clear choice – it must be “turned.” However, it must choose: to be turned upside down, to be ground to dust; or, to “turn from the ways of evil to the ways of good, from the ways of destruction to the ways of construction, from the ways of malice and shame to the ways of nobility and loftiness and, ultimately, holiness. God’s words came true. For when he said that in forty days Nineveh would be “turned” he left to the people of Nineveh the great choice as to which shade of meaning they will accept. Just as we are this day given the choice of two origins to which to return, so was Nineveh given the choice of their “turning”: to dust or to God. העידתי בכם היום את השמים ואת הארץ, “I have called witness to Thee this day, Heaven and earth” – man is made of both elements, of the elements of Heaven and the elements of earth, the character of angels and the character of beasts, these are his two origins. החיים והמות נתתי לפניך הברכה והקללה, “Life and death have I given before Thee, the blessing and the curse,” ובחרת בחיים למען תחיה אתה וזרעך, “And thou shall choose life in order that thou and thy seed shall live.”

We must return. Let us this day resolve where we and our families shall return to. May it be to return unto the Lord God, to return to the elements of Heaven within us, the return to a higher, finer, lovelier kind of life.