In 1968 I had my first encounter with the Lubavitcher Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York. It changed my life. I was a second-year university student, my summer vacation was drawing to a close, and I was due to return to Britain on the Sunday before Rosh HaShana. The day before, the Rebbe held a fahrbrengen. This was a huge gathering of thousands of Hasidim at which the Rebbe spoke for several hours, pausing every twenty minutes or so for a niggun, a hasidic song which was sung with great gusto by everyone present.

During one of these singing interludes I went up to the Rebbe to say thank you and farewell, but he looked at me with surprise, told me I did not have to return just yet since the Cambridge University term did not begin until several weeks later, and urged me to stay for Rosh HaShana. That was when I discovered that when a rebbe suggests something, you do it. So I came to spend Rosh HaShana with this extraordinary man and heard him blow shofar, an almost otherworldly experience.

One of the local Hasidim invited me for lunch on the first day, and there I found another guest, with a fascinating story to tell. It turned out that he was a successful composer of pop songs – I knew some of his compositions – and had abandoned Judaism several decades earlier. What brought him here, he said, was that he had been driving alone one day in a remote part of the mid-West when it occurred to him that Rosh HaShana must be imminent. At that moment, a tune came into his head, a hasidic niggun, which he had been taught as a child. The melody awoke in him a Jewish identity that had lain dormant for years. There and then, he stopped the car, turned around, and headed for 770 Eastern Parkway. It was as if he had suddenly realised that he was lost, and the music from his childhood was calling him home.

He and I, in our different ways, were both examples of a phenomenon that appeared at this time. The phrase used to describe it was an ancient one, but it had hitherto a quite different meaning. It was baal teshuva, meaning, a penitent. Classically this meant someone who had committed a specific sin, and now repented of it. In the late 1960s, however, it came to describe an individual who had been, in some sense, distant from Jewish faith or life and had now come back.

This was not an entirely new phenomenon, but hitherto it had been rare. Previously, either people stayed within the fold or they moved away from it – they became assimilated, or in some cases even converted. There was little movement in the opposite direction, with the exception, in the early twentieth century, of unusual individuals like Franz Rosenzweig and Jiri Langer. Something happened around 1967 to change that: Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, together with thoughts of the Holocaust that had surfaced in the anxious weeks before the war, and the general resurgence of ethnic identities at that time. Suddenly it became acceptable to be different and to wear one’s Jewish identity openly with pride.

It was around this time that the first baal teshuva yeshivas were opened. The work of Chabad which, under the guidance of the Rebbe, had already been active in this territory for many years, began to be re-evaluated and imitated by many other groups. Like my new acquaintance, the songwriter, a generation was coming home. This had not been witnessed on such a scale for many centuries. Indeed, it would be hard to find a precedent in post-biblical times. The fact that it was described using a classic term, baal teshuva, concealed its novelty, because the term itself was being given a new sense.

This became evident to me a year or so later. By now I had become a yeshiva student in Israel in Kefar Chabad (a village I described as being five miles and two centuries from Tel Aviv). At the request of his grandson, I paid a visit to Dayan Yehezkel Abramsky, who had earlier been senior judge of the London Bet Din. He asked me what I was studying. “Teshuva,” I replied. He – a mitnaged, strongly opposed to Hasidism – bridled at the answer. “That is the difference between Chabad and me,” he said. “I see teshuva as something you need when the machine breaks down. They see it as part of the machine itself.”

Exactly so. He was using teshuva in its classic sense: repenting and atoning for specific sins. It was a form of repair. Teshuva in its modern sense was something else entirely. It was coming home to Jewish identity, practice, and faith after estrangement or ignorance. It was a reorientation of the total personality.

In fact, though, this modern sense is the revival of something very old indeed.

In Parashat Aḥarei Mot, we are given a detailed description of Aaron’s service on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when he atoned for his sins, those of his “house,” and those of all Israel. This became the model for the service of the high priest when the Temple stood. It was an awe-inspiring occasion. On the holiest day of the year, the holiest person in Israel entered the Holy of Holies and performed the rites that restored the relationship between the people Israel and their Father in heaven.

Yet, if we read Tanakh as a whole we find that there are two models of atonement, not one. They see sin differently, they see its rectification differently, and they use a completely different vocabulary. One is priestly, the other prophetic.

The key verse in our parasha describing the effect of the high priest’s service states: “For on this day, atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you of all your sins; you shall be clean before the Lord” (Lev. 16:30). There are two essential verbs: K-P-R, to atone, and T-H-R, to cleanse, purify.

Within the world of the kohen, the priest, a sin is like a stain. The verb K-P-R first appears in the Torah in connection with God’s instructions to Noah to make an ark: “Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and cover it with pitch inside and out” (Gen. 6:14). K-P-R means “to cover over.” That is one way to rectify a stained garment, by covering the stain with clean fabric. But the stain still exists even if it is not outwardly visible. Hence the importance of the second stage, T-H-R, “to cleanse, purify,” meaning to remove the stain altogether.

These two words are not evenly distributed throughout the Torah or through Tanakh as a whole. So, for example, the root K-P-R appears three times in Genesis, three in Deuteronomy, and fifty-nine times in Leviticus. T-H-R appears seven times in Genesis, six in Deuteronomy, and seventy-four times in Leviticus. K-P-R appears twenty-four times in the prophetic literature, and T-H-R twenty-six times, while the key word for the prophets, SH-U-V, to return, appears 480 times.

For the prophets, sin is equivalent to getting lost, straying from the path, being somewhere one should not be. Accordingly, the punishment for sin, measure for measure, is being sentenced to exile, losing home. That is what happened to Adam and Eve, exiled from Eden. It is what happened to Cain, condemned to be a restless wanderer. It is what Moses told the Israelites would happen to them if they disobeyed the covenant. It is what occurred to the people during the Babylonian exile. Hence the key verb used by virtually all the prophets, to return:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have fallen because of your sin. (Hos. 14:2)

I wipe away your sins like a cloud, your transgressions like mist; return to Me, for I redeem you. (Is. 44:22)

Turn back, rebellious children, declares the Lord… (Jer. 3:14)

Say to them: As I live, declares the Lord God, it is not My desire that the wicked shall die, but that the wicked turn from his [evil] ways and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, that you may not die, O House of Israel! (Ezek. 33:11)

From the very days of your fathers you have turned away from My laws and have not observed them. Return to Me, and I will return to you, said the Lord of Hosts… (Mal. 3:7)

Each of the italicised words uses a form of the verb SH-U-V. The prophets did not speak of atonement and purification. They spoke of coming back, coming home. The master-text from which all these prophetic utterances derive is the speech of Moses to the next generation, at the end of his life:

When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you, and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you. (Deut. 30:1–3)

Though it is not evident in translation, the verb SH-U-V appears seven times in this passage (Deut. 30:1–14). According to Nahmanides, this is the source of the mitzva of teshuva.

So the new sense of teshuva and baal teshuva that developed after the Six-Day War was not something unprecedented. It was the recovery of a tradition that is very old indeed, namely the prophetic sense of repentance as homecoming. Not “I sinned and I atone” but “I was distant and I seek to return.” Nor is it accidental that this happened in the context of the rebirth of the State of Israel and especially the emotions aroused by the Six-Day War. From Moses to Malachi, the prophets connected the return to the land and the return to God. Physical and spiritual homecoming are related.

Hence the life-changing idea: Sometimes we find our life is on the wrong track, not because of a specific sin, but because we have an overall sense of being lost. Teshuva means coming home to God.

יש שאנו מבינים שחיינו אינם נוסעים במסלול הנכון, לא בגלל חטא מסוים אלא כהרגשה כללית של אובדן דרך. התשובה פירושה חזרה הביתה, אל האלוהים.

Life-Changing Idea 29 Sometimes we find our life is on the wrong track, not because of a specific sin but because we have an overall sense of being lost. Teshuva means coming home to God.