Shabbos Parashas Vayeilech-Shuvah - 5779

Shabbos Parashas Vayeilech-Shuvah - 5779

Rabbi Hal Miller

Take this Torah scroll and place it along side the Ark of Hashem, your God,

and it will be there for you as a witness. [Devarim 31:26]

We just spent a month blowing the shofar, and a week or a month, depending on

custom, saying selichos. Now, just before Yom Kippur, we have Shabbos Shuvah.

What is it, and where does it come from? Why is it different from all the rest of the

year? How does it tie to our parsha?

To begin, what is Shuvah? A simple translation is 'return'. A more common usage

is repentance, or more properly, return to God. What are we returning from?

Rav Soloveitchik writes that there are two functions for Yom Kippur. One is kapparah,

acquittal from sin, or atonement. The other is taharah, purification. These equate to

liability and defilement. Kapparah means forgiveness or withdrawal of claim. God

may absolve one of penalty to which he is liable due to sin. Kapparah removes the

need for punishment, one no longer owes repayment.

But sin also has a polluting quality. One is no longer the same person he was before,

but is somehow spiritually damaged. Sin deprives man of human attributes. He is

transformed into something else. It is a metaphysical corruption of the human

personality, of the divine image in man.

The prayer service on Yom Kippur is kapparah. We do this together, and as a nation

are no longer liable for the punishments we had on the books. But each individual

must also cleanse himself to remove the defilement side of sin. One can use an

agent to recite the service, but cannot use an agent for issues that are personal,

such as a mikveh. This is how true teshuvah takes place. This is where we can

apply Shabbos Shuvah.

After breaking the first tablets upon seeing the golden calf, Moshe went back up on

Mt. Sinai on the first day of Elul. He stayed there forty days, coming back down on

Yom Kippur. That was the climax of the teshuvah process, the release from liability

for the whole nation. But before that could happen, each individual had to use that

forty day period to cleanse himself from sin. This Shabbos before Yom Kippur, we

are at the end of this opportunity. Our verse describes placing the Torah scroll next

to the Ark, which contained the two sets of tablets, and acting as a witness for us.

Witness for what? That we have made use of this Shuvah time and are ready to

proceed to the release portion of the process. May we, both as a nation and as

individuals, successfully cleanse ourselves and return to God.