If not now, then never

In 1985, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – not yet a sir or a lord, and not yet a chief rabbi – wrote an article about repentance (teshuvah). The entire article was based upon the power of the word “now”.

He starts with a famous verse from the book of Deuteronomy (10:12), “And now Israel, what does the Lord your G-d ask of you other than to fear the Lord your G-d, to walk in all of His ways, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul?”

One of the reasons why this verse is so well-known is that it is prone to raise a smirk. How can Moses make it sound as if he’s asking for a small thing, when, in fact, he’s asking for us to keep all of the minutiae of Jewish law with utter dedication? The rabbis ask this question in the Talmud. It might have been a small thing for Moses, they insisted, but not for us!

But that isn’t initially the focus of Rabbi Sacks’s attention. Instead, he turns to a midrash. The midrash quotes just the first word of our verse, “Now.” It says, “The word ‘now’ means nothing other than teshuvah.” Why is that? What is it about that word that conjures up the notion of teshuvah?

In a nutshell, I think that Rabbi Sacks’s idea was this: teshuvah is something that has the power to change both the past and the future for the better. It’s obvious how teshuvah can change the future for the better. By repenting our sins, we set ourselves onto a new trajectory. We turn a new leaf. And because of that, a future that was going to be full of continuing bad habits and bad deeds is averted and replaced with something brighter. But what about the past?

One of the great sages of the Talmud, Shimon ben Lakish, was a gladiator and a criminal, before turning his life around. He used to say that teshuvah has the power to change the past. What I take him to mean is that teshuvah has the power to change the significance of the past.

I once met a recovering drug addict who had dedicated his life to educating young people about the dangers of substance abuse. The first chapters of his life were truly lamentable. He became an addict at a young age, and turned to petty crime to feed his addiction. He was in and out of prison, and had alienated all who loved him. Had his life ended in the midst of those troubles, his biography would have been one of almost unrelenting misery. But, because he had managed to get clean and turn his life around, those first chapters of his life take their place in a very different story. Had it not been for those exact episodes that were, at the time, so pitiful, he wouldn’t be the very inspiring person that he is today. His teshuvah had, in that sense, taken his past, and given it a different meaning and significance.

What is this thing that can change both the past and the future for the better? That thing can only be the present. Nobody in the past can act to make things better. It’s too late. Nobody in the future can act to make things better, because the future doesn’t yet exist. It is only the present that can promise us salvation from both an ugly past and an ugly future.

Some philosophers and scientists think that all times are alike. As far as they’re concerned, there’s no past, present, or future. There are only times, laid out in an order from earlier to later. But none of those times are more real than any other. We happen to call the time that we’re in, “the present”, but that’s just because we happen to be here. People in other times are busy calling their times “the present” too. But if that’s your perspective on time, then you run the risk of neglecting what Martin Luther King Jr called “the fierce urgency of now”.

“A history of teshuvah,” Rabbi Sacks wrote, “would contain some momentous ‘nows’. The moment when Rabbi Akiva decided to give up his life as a herdsman in favour of study, perhaps, or when Shimon ben Lakish turned his back on a career as a gladiator.”

Judaism is of the opinion that not all times are alike. The past has already been written. The future, by contrast, is a blank book that awaits our actions. And the present is the only time in which we can actually do anything. To do teshuvah is to be sensitive to the fierce urgency of now. It is to recognise that in this moment, we have the power to re-shape our past and to chart the course of our future. It is to realise that, in the midst of a now, all of our genetic predispositions and the psychological conditioning that has shaped us until this point, aren’t the final world. In the midst of a “now”, Rabbi Sacks insists, “the fear of heaven is as live an option to us as it was to Moses”.

We are living in the shadow of a traumatic year, and we’re living in anticipation of a very uncertain future. Rabbi Sacks insisted that one of the most powerful messages of the high holy days and this period of teshuvah is that we can live in ways that do honour to the past, and that, despite the obstacles in our way, we get to decide who we’re going to be in the future. All of this is true if we can seize upon the power of just one “now”. And though he wrote these words 39 years ago, they still call upon us now.

• Rabbi Professor Samuel Lebens teaches philosophy at the University of Haifa. His website is samlebens.com