When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit to do a trespass against the Lord and that person be guilty,

then they shall confess their sin which they have done, and he shall make restitution for his trespass in full.

So we read in Chapter 5 from the Book of Numbers,

and that's a passage that Maimonides quotes

in the beginning of his own Hilchot Chuvah in his laws of repentance.

That idea, repentance, is very much at the forefront of the Jewish people's minds these days.

These days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are called

the 10 days of Chuvah, 10 days of repentance, during which time traditional Jews engage in

much prayer and supplication and penitence. Today I want to think about that idea, repentance,

and try to discover what it is. To begin with, we can observe that repentance is an answer to the

problem of sin, and sometimes also to the human emotion of guilt. That is when our conscience

processes our transgressions, and we feel sad, disappointed, sometimes even more intense emotions than

that. Guilt points the finger inward, into our inadequacies

and failures, and we need some way to quiet that, some mechanism that can bring us some peace.

Now, that thought might lead us back to sin itself, and here I want to offer the thought

that sin, transgression, moral frailty, smallness of soul, these are not exceptions

to the normal experience of a human life. They are temptations that lurk within us at all times.

They are ubiquitous in human life. Now, we try to avoid sin. Civilized, moralized peoples

have structures to help us avoid transgression. And of course, for us,

for the Jews, in his great loving kindness the creator of the world gave the Jewish people

Torah to help us avoid transgression. But the fact that we are free means inescapably that we will

fail. Some of us hurt other people, and some of us hurt the other people whom we

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