As we approach the high holidays, we speak a lot about teshuva. Translated ubiquitously as “repentance,” the call to do teshuva during this time promotes deep introspection, a major focus of the time surrounding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But the root of the word teshuva is the shoresh שוב, to return. Throughout the Torah, there is little reference to the word teshuva as repentance. The root shuv is used over and over again to describe literal acts of return. When God punishes Adam, God tells him that he will “return to the dust of the Earth” (Genesis 3:14). Noah sends out a raven that does not return and a dove who does return (Genesis 8:9-12). God instructs Abraham’s maidservant Hagar to return to her master Sarah (Genesis 16:9). It is only in the later books of the Prophets that we see the root shuv used to describe the act of repentance. Ezekiel cites God saying that God wishes for an evil person to “turn back from his ways” (Ezekiel 18:23), and Hosea begs the Jewish people to “return, oh Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have fallen because of your sin” (Hosea 14:2).
It is these later uses of the word teshuva that we often associate with this time of year. When defining the teshuva process, the Rambam writes that teshuva is indeed a process of returning—of leaving the undesired behavior behind and returning to a state of innocence, along with vowing never to do the sin again (Mishnah Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:2). This understanding of repentance having to do with returning always made intuitive sense to me. If we humans were created without sin, then our ultimate goal must be to return to that initial state of innocence. Or, as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks describes it, a “spiritual return to God” (Two Concepts of Teshuva: Nitzavim in Covenant and Conversation).
But there’s a baraita cited in Pesachim that forces me to re-examine the relationship between teshuva and returning. On Pesachim 54a, it says:
Seven phenomena were created before the world was created, and they are: Torah, and repentance, and the Garden of Eden, and Gehenna, and the Throne of Glory, and the Temple, and the name of Messiah.
Ignoring the obvious theological questions this baraita raises by implying that anything existed before the world, it is almost comical that teshuva would make this list. As we have explained, teshuva literally means “returning”—and here we are talking about the world before it even existed. How can the act of “returning” exist when there is nothing to return to, when the world and humanity did not exist? What is this baraita trying to tell us by saying that the concept of teshuva, of returning, existed even before the world did?
Perhaps, if we take this baraita seriously, it is telling us that the act of teshuva might be connected to the state of the world pre-creation. It is saying that teshuva wouldn’t be about returning to our initial state of innocence at creation, but to something that existed even before that. But how does one return to a state of pre-creation? What even is a state of pre-creation?
In the first few pesukim of Bereishit, the Torah describes the state of the cosmos pre-creation, saying, “The earth being unformed and void (tohu va’vohu), with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water” (Genesis 1:2).
Much has been written about the meaning of tohu va’vohu, with translators and commentators disagreeing on the exact meaning of these words. The JPS translation, cited above, defines it as “unformed and void.” Prominent biblical scholar Everett Fox translates it as “confusion and chaos,” while Robert Alter translates it “welter and waste.” The Rabbinic commentators on the Torah also struggle to explain these words, with Rashi defining it as “emptiness,” Rav Saadiah Gaon calling it “the deep,” Ibn Ezra saying it means “a howling wilderness,” and so on. Whatever translation they choose, all understand tohu va’vohu as referring to some particular trait about how the cosmos operated (or didn’t operate) before God created the world as we know it today.
But our baraita in Pesachim tells us that amidst that state, within the chaos or the waste or the emptiness, teshuva existed. The notion of “returning” somehow existed before there was anything to return to. What could this mean?
If we persist in understanding tohu va’vohu traditionally, that it refers to a state of emptiness or lacking, then the notion of teshuva existing within it can imply a dark reality: that even before God created the world, God anticipated that it would not always flourish. Instead, its beings would need to spend their time striving to return to the “clean slate” that existed before. This understanding is echoed later in Tanakh, where the words tohu va’vohu are used by the prophet Isaiah to describe the ominous destruction that would befall his generation of Jews due to their sinfulness (Isaiah 34:11). The verse states: “Jackdaws and owls shall possess it; Great owls and ravens shall dwell there. He shall measure it with a line of chaos. And with weights of emptiness.” In the Talmud, the Rabbis suggest that there were times when God looked at the world in disappointment and wanted to revert it back to tohu va’vohu, such as during the reign of the infamous king Jehoiakim (Shabbat 88a). Similarly, in his commentary on the initial term used in Bereishit, the 14th century biblical commentator the Ba’al HaTurim suggests that it serves as a forewarning, an implication that God knew that the world God was creating would need to be destroyed (in the form of the Temple being destroyed) due to the sins of its beings.
Each of these interpretations support the notion that tohu va’vohu refers to a state of emptiness in the realm of sin; that before God created the world, there was no humanity and therefore no human error, and that teshuva needed to be built into that world from its conception because God knew that creating humans would ultimately mean creating sin. But this is a stark way to look at teshuva, implying that it was created like some sort of insurance plan built into the cosmos of the world for when we as humans ultimately fail.
I’d like to suggest a different read, based on a comment made by the Netziv, the 19th century scholar Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, in his biblical commentary Ha’amek Davar. About the phrase tohu va’vohu, he writes:
And void: This name [bohu, which when broken down is made up of ‘in it’ and ‘it’] rests [on this concept] because much was included ‘in it;’ meaning from the dry land below the waters, to the end of the waters, the nature of all creation was included in it, [as well as] the potential of the creatures [that would be created] afterward (Haemek Davar on Genesis 1:2).
The Netziv’s understanding drastically changes our understanding of tohu va’vohu. For him, the state of the world before creation was not hollow and empty, but bursting and full, and, in particular, full of potential. God did not take something lacking and create something to replace it; rather, God took all of the potential—the potential for celestial and terrestrial beings, for good and bad, for productivity and destruction, and everything else—and folded it into one cosmos that we know as our world.
This idea, that tohu va’vohu means “in it” and refers to the magnitude of potential, is echoed in the words of the Kabbalists (see Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Inner Space, page 82). Similarly, twentieth century leader of the American Modern Orthodox community Rabbi Moshe Feinstein also suggested that tohu va’vohu is meant not to spark emotions of fear and emptiness, but of wonder and amazement at all of the potential in God’s world (Kol Ram, vol. 3.).
If we accept this understanding of tohu va’vohu, then suddenly our baraita in Pesachim takes on an encouraging and uplifting tone. Tohu va’vohu represents all kinds of potential, the good and the bad. Teshuva, thus, is both return and repentance in that, when done properly, it is the act of reclaiming our potential and using it for the good. And perhaps this is what the Talmud means when it claims that teshuva existed before the creation of the world; that the potential for all kinds of human action have always existed, but so has our ability to take hold of that potential.
Within this new framework, we can understand why the word teshuva is the word used for repentance. When we do acts of teshuva, during the High Holidays and throughout the year, we are, on some level, returning to a pre-worldly state. However, that state is not one of emptiness and clean-slatedness, but rather, one of potential. Yes, as the Rambam said, teshuva mandates recognizing where we have strayed and vowing to start over, but that restart should be a revitalization, a recognition of the sheer potential that we have as figures of divine creation. Teshuva through this lens is less about the act of erasing and getting rid of our pasts, than about returning to a state where we look forward with hope, recognizing the potential in all of us to better the world around us and make an impact.
May we merit to see that potential and look hopefully toward the future, using that potential for the good and to better the world and to return to a sense of wonder and amazement.
