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Rabbi W hen I first read Jane
Sacks Austen’s Emma, it was
the first time I had read
THE a novel in which a character changes
over time. Emma is a young woman
Courage who believes she understands other
people better than they do. She sets
GrToO w about arranging their lives, with
disastrous consequences, because not
A Message for Yom Kippur only does she not understand others,
she does not understand herself.
However, by the end, she is a different
person: older, wiser and humbler.
Over 40 years have passed since I
read the book and one question still
fascinates me. Where did Western
civilization get the idea that people can
change? It is not obvious. The Greeks,
for example, believed we are what we are
and we cannot change. They believed
that character is destiny, and the
character itself is something we are born
with, although it may take great courage
to realize our potential.
This is precisely the opposite of the
key sentence we say on Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur: “Teshuva, tefilla and
tzedaka avert the evil decree.” Look what
happened to the people of Nineveh: “In
forty days Nineveh will be destroyed.”
But the people repent, and the decree is
cancelled. There is no fate that is final.
The more I studied and researched, the
more I realized that Judaism was the
first system in the world to develop a
clear sense of human free will. As Isaac
Bashevis Singer put it, “We have to be
free; we have no choice.”
This is the idea at the heart of teshuva.
It is not just confession or remorse. It
is the determination to change. The
decision to learn from my mistakes, to
act differently in future, to become a
different kind of person.

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