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Mishneh Torah: Repentance

The laws of turning back from sin, which hold that anyone can become as righteous as Moses, with a critic's objections printed beside them.

by Maimonides52 passages held

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Original title
Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Teshuvah
Original language
Hebrew

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Overview

Abraham ben David of Posquières, a Provençal rabbi who wrote critical notes on the whole of the Mishneh Torah, objected more than a dozen times in this short section, and his notes are still printed beside it. One comes where Maimonides lists those who lose their share in the world to come, and counts among them anyone who believes that God has a body and a shape. Abraham ben David did not hold that belief, but he wrote that greater and better men than Maimonides had held it, misled by the plain words of Scripture and of the rabbis' stories, and that it did not make them heretics. Another comes in the fifth chapter, the core of the section, where Maimonides argues that repentance only makes sense if people are free: no fate decides a person's character, and every human being can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam, the king who led Israel into idolatry. He then asks how this freedom fits with God knowing in advance what each person will do, and answers that God's knowledge is not like ours and cannot be grasped. Abraham ben David complained that an author should not open a question he cannot close, and offered an answer of his own: God's foreknowledge, like an astrologer's prediction, does not cause what it foresees. The rest of the section, written in Hebrew around 1180, gives the steps of repentance and asks each reader to see himself and the world as evenly balanced, so that one act could tip the scale. It ends on serving God out of love rather than for reward, a love Maimonides compares to a lover's sickness and finds in the Song of Songs.

Key concepts

What does repentance actually require in these laws?

Four things. The sinner stops the sin, regrets having done it, resolves never to return to it, and confesses it to God aloud, naming it. Feeling sorry alone is not repentance, and confession without the resolve is, in Maimonides' image, like a man who dips himself in purifying water while still holding an impure creature in his hand.

What is the world to come, according to Maimonides?

The life of the righteous soul after death, without a body. Since there is no body there, there is no eating, drinking or anything else bodies need; the righteous sit, as the rabbis say, with crowns on their heads, which he reads as enjoying what they came to know of God. It is the true reward, and being cut off from it, the soul simply ceasing, is the gravest punishment there is.

Who counts as a heretic in the laws of repentance?

Maimonides sorts heretics by what they deny. One kind says there is no God, or two gods, or that God has a body and a shape, or worships a star as a go-between. Another denies prophecy or the prophecy of Moses, or says God does not know human affairs. A third denies that the Torah is from God or that the rabbis' oral law is valid. All of them lose their share in the world to come unless they repent.

What is the difference between the righteous, the wicked and the in-between?

It is a matter of weighing, not of single acts. Someone whose merits outweigh his sins is righteous, someone whose sins outweigh his merits is wicked, and someone evenly balanced is in-between. The weighing is not a count, since one great merit may outweigh many sins and one sin many merits, and only God, who knows each deed's weight, can do it. The same scale applies to a city and a whole country.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What Turning Back Takes

When is a wrong really undone: when the sinner feels sorry, when he confesses, or only when he is tested again? Maimonides gives repentance a definition, steps and a proof.

Repentance, for Maimonides, means leaving the sin, regretting it and resolving never to return, then saying so to God in words that name it. Complete repentance is proved only when the same chance comes again, with the same strength and desire, and the person walks away. Neither a sacrifice nor the Day of Atonement wipes out a sin without it, and a wrong done to a neighbour is not forgiven until the neighbour has been paid and appeased. Yesterday hateful to God, the penitent is today beloved.

  • repentance
  • confession
  • atonement
  • forgiveness
  • moral transformation
  • sin
  • prayer

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As Righteous as Moses

If God already knows what each of us will do, can anyone be free to turn? Maimonides insists on freedom first and then faces the question he admits cannot be answered.

Nobody's character is decreed in the womb, Maimonides writes against those who say so: every person can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam. Without that freedom, the commandments and the call to repent would be meaningless. Each person should see himself, and the whole world, as evenly balanced between merit and guilt, so that the next single act tips both. As for God's foreknowledge, he replies that God's knowing is not like ours and lies beyond human grasp.

  • free will
  • moral responsibility
  • predestination
  • divine knowledge
  • moral judgment
  • character
  • community
  • justice

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Serving Out of Love

Should anyone keep God's commandments for the sake of a reward? Maimonides ends his laws of repentance by setting the service of love above every hope and fear.

Serving God for a reward in this world or the next is allowed, Maimonides says, to the ignorant, women and children, who are trained through fear until their knowledge grows. The one who serves from love does what is true because it is true. That love should be like a lover's sickness for a woman, never out of the mind whether sitting or rising, eating or drinking, and the whole Song of Songs is a parable of it. Such love grows only with knowledge: one loves God as much as one knows God.

  • love of god
  • reward and punishment
  • afterlife
  • immortality
  • incorporeality
  • wisdom

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Within this work

passages held
52
distinct concepts
97
by passages held, corpus-wide
#649

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “free will” and “moral responsibility”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 56 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
free willmoral responsibility8
free willrepentance8
moral responsibilityrepentance8
afterlifereward and punishment6
atonementrepentance5
repentancesin4
afterlifereligious practice2
afterlifesin2
atonementsin2
religious practicerepentance2
afterlifemoral responsibility1
afterliferepentance1
atonementmoral responsibility1
free willsin1
moral responsibilitysin1
religious practicesin1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Commentary on the Mishnah: Tractate Sanhedrin (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Sanhedrin)

    One tractate of Maimonides' first great book, the Commentary on the Mishnah, including the introduction to Perek Helek in which the Thirteen Principles first appear; held in the medieval Hebrew translation printed in the Vilna Talmud.

     HE
  2. Eight Chapters on Ethics (Shemonah Perakim)

    Maimonides' ethics set out in eight chapters, opening his commentary on the tractate Avot in 1168; the Mishneh Torah's laws of character later restate its doctrine of the mean as law. Held in Joseph Gorfinkle's English of 1912.

     EN
  3. Mishneh Torah: Foundations of the Torah (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah)

    Where the Mishneh Torah begins: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, the opening section of its first book, the Book of Knowledge (Sefer ha-Madda); held alone, its ten chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.

     EN
  4. Mishneh Torah: Human Dispositions (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot De'ot)

    The second of the five sections of the Book of Knowledge, between the Foundations of the Torah and the laws of Torah study; held alone, its seven chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.

     EN
  5. Mishneh Torah: Repentance (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Teshuvah) you are here EN
  6. The Commentary to Mishnah Aboth (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Avot)

    Maimonides' commentary on the five chapters of Avot, written within the Commentary on the Mishnah and opened by the Eight Chapters, which have their own page here; held in Samuel ibn Tibbon's medieval Hebrew.

     HE
  7. The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn)

    Maimonides' last major book, addressed to a single reader and completed in Fustat around 1190, a decade after the Mishneh Torah had made his name. Held here in Michael Friedländer's English of 1904, with the letter to Joseph.

     EN
  8. Treatise on Logic (Maqāla fī ṣināʿat al-manṭiq)

    Traditionally the earliest of Maimonides' writings; held in Moses ibn Tibbon's Hebrew, all fourteen chapters, from a Warsaw printing of 1928.

     HE
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