The Two Voices: A New Perspective on the Meaning of Teshuvah

As we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we invite you to take an hour to join Rabbi Sacks on an intellectual journey to explore the concept and deep meanings of Teshuvah.

Watch the video and download the accompanying mekorot (source) sheet here.

I want to do a bit of intellectual archeology, to dig down beneath the surface of Jewish practise, and search for the roots of the idea of teshuvah in Judaism. During the course of this journey into the history of Judaism, we will stumble on a major disagreement between two of the very greatest Rabbis of the Middle Ages – Maimonides and Nachmanides – about what is the nature of Teshuvah. Secondly we will travel all the way back to Biblical Israel, to the times of Moses and Aaron, and will make another fascinating discovery about the fact that in Judaism there is not one kind of spirituality but there are actually two that are very different from one another. And number three, by the time we step back from that long journey and come back to the present, we will be able to see in retrospect that something extraordinary happened to Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple, something that in a way was not achieved in the whole of the Biblical era.