Chapter 33: Your Behavior or Your Self?

On The Good Place, Eleanor’s terrible mother Donna Shellstrop has become Diana Tremaine, suburban citizen and responsible almost-stepmom, and Eleanor tells her to let go of the last fears rooted in her past. On the podcast, Sari Laufer and Jon Spira-Savett wonder whether and how much change makes you truly different, and if you can call it teshuvah without explicit apology and repair.

Texts
(Go to Jewish Lexicon on this site for more on Jewish terminology, names of texts and other background. The links here in the citations take you to the specific quotes in their full contexts.)

Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 16a
Said Rav Ada, son of Rav Ahava [note: ahava is Hebrew for “love”!]:
A person who has a wrong in one’s hand, and confesses but does not return/do teshuvah with regard to it — what is this like? Like a person who is holding a creeping animal in one’s hand, such that even if one immerses in all the waters in the world, the immersion does not count for them. One throws it from their hand, as soon as they immerse in forty seah, immediately the immersion counts. As it is said: “the one who acknowledges and leaves behind is treated with compassion” (Proverbs 28:13), and it says: “Let us lift up our hearts to our hands…” (Lamentations 3:41).

This teaching is rephrased in our friend Maimonides, Laws of Teshuvah 2:2.

The background for this analogy is the idea of immersing in a mikveh, a gathering of naturally flowing waters, for the sake of purification in a technical-ritual sense. Touching a “creeping animal” is one of the things that according to the Torah makes one “impure”, which is not a moral category. Here the Talmud is looking for an image for someone who is confessing and as such trying to self-purify, while holding onto the very thing that created the situation in the first place.

We make reference to teachings about teshuvah and apology and forgiveness, some of which we have referenced before, and all of which you can glance at in Maimonides’ Laws of Teshuvah chapter 2, particularly paragraphs 1-3 and 9.

The story of Jacob and Esau (Yaakov and Esav in Hebrew) has key moments in a few chapters in the book of Genesis. The story begins at 25:19 with the birth of the twins and their parents’ choosing sides, continues in chapter 27 with machinations around who gets the primary blessing, and twenty years later there is the reunion in chapter 33 that Sari refers to when the brothers embrace or fight, have a good moment, and then separate again. (Before that in chapter 32, Yaakov wrestles with a being or perhaps himself, in perhaps an analogy with Tahani doing the work before Kamilah!)

Learn more about both Jon and Sari, and how to follow them, on our Hosts page!

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