"This really expressed the spirit of the holiday in terms of the ability to change your life, the ability to do things differently," said center director Rosalie Alexander. And so, in that brief watery encounter, participants symbolically cast away burdens or vowed to have different relationships with their loved ones.
The whole notion of repenting, of trying to become a better person, of asking forgiveness for hurts you may have committed, is entrenched in the Jewish world during Elul, the current Jewish month that precedes the High Holidays. The tradition teaches that asking forgiveness of both God and man for wrongs committed (in Hebrew, teshuvah) should be an ongoing event, but the Jewish calendar provides this special period for engaging in intensive self-reflection.
The Hebrew word shuv, from which the noun teshuvah comes, means to "turn away" or "return." In the Bible, when referring to repentance, shuv means turning away from sin and returning to the ways of God.
So it is timely that Moshe Halbertal, professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, will give a pair of endowed lectures on Talmudic civil law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The first, "Codifying Repentance: Maimonides' Laws of Teshuvah," will be given Tuesday; the second, "Confession and Regret in Jewish Law," on Sept. 25.
Halbertal, 42, said in an interview that he was particularly fascinated by Moses Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish philosopher and legalist often referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam. Maimonides, a towering figure in medieval intellectual and religious life, was the first Jewish scholar to create a body of legal work regarding repentance. His two major works were A Guide to the Perplexed, a philosophical work, and the Mishneh Torah, a code of Jewish law that took him 10 years to compile.
