Is teshuvah just about covering up the past?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains that real teshuvah is “not covering your past, not hiding your cracks.” It is “hacking reality so your cracks shine brighter than the clean slate of someone who never struggled.”
In A Soul at Peace, he describes two levels. Returning out of fear covers the crack: deliberate sins become like mistakes. That is a real repair, but the crack has only been hidden. Returning out of love goes further: the deliberate sins themselves become merits. “They are not ‘erased.’ They are not ‘covered.’ They actually become merits.”
That is what he means by flipping shame into strength. “The very thing that [should] bury you has the ability to crown you,” and the fall itself becomes the platform for the person who comes back.
Related concepts: Believing you are forgiven · Growth
In A Soul at Peace: Turning Sins into Merits
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Teshuvah does not only hide the past; at its highest it turns the past around.
Fear, vulnerability, or tension
A person may assume the best he can hope for is that his past stays hidden.
Deepest human truth
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that the powers that went into the wrong are not lost but turned toward holiness: “The deeper the fall, the higher the takeoff.”
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Faith, Providence, and the Jewish Destiny · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz