You may recall the stories of the ancient Greek hero, Thesesus. He is the legendary founder of Athens. Among his many adventures, Theseus’ most famous exploit is his defeat of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull beast that dwelled in the labyrinth created by Daedalus on the Isle of Crete.
He returned home with the rescued youth of Athens on a ship with thirty oars. The people of Athens, to commemorate Theseus’ great victory, preserved the ship in the Athenian harbor to serve as a memorial.
According to the ancient Greek and Roman historian, Plutarch, the ship was maintained for several centuries. As we all know, things age, especially ships kept in the salty water, and humid air of the Mediterranean. Over times, the wooden planks of Theseus’ ship began to rot. They were replaced, as needed. This went on for years, then decades, and then centuries.
Eventually, Plutarch explains, the ship gave rise to a question posed by the philosophers: If every single plank, oar, rudder, and piece of rigging from Theseus’ original ship has been replaced, can it still be considered to be Theseus’ ship?
This question came to be known as the Ship of Theseus paradox.
Let’s extend the paradox to rock and roll.
Quiet Riot is a heavy metal band from my childhood. I remember listening to their 1983 hit, Bang Your Head, on the school bus with my friend Brian when I was in second grade. We would bank our heads against the padded seat in front of us whenever they got to the chorus.
When Quiet Riot plays Bang Your Head today, they sound just like I remembered them, even though the only band member that was with them in 1983 is the drummer, and even he was not part of the founding lineup. Are they still Quiet Riot?
It is a deep philosophical quandary.
Let’s shift the question to the human body. We each are made up of about ten trillion cells. It is often claimed that it takes seven years for every cell in the human body to regenerate itself.
It turns out, that is not quite true. Our cells die and are regenerated at different rates. The cells of the stomach lining, for example, are replaced every couple of weeks. The same is true of our skin. The liver takes about two years. Bones take about ten years to regenerate. Cardiomyocytes, in the heart, regenerate at about 1% per year, but the rate slows as we age. A seventy five year old person would still have more than half of the heart cells that he had at birth. For some parts of our body -Tooth enamel, the cells on the inner lens of the eye, and the neurons of the cerebral cortex–the cells we are born with have to last our entire lives.
On average, though, we could say that we are approximately eleven to fifteen years old.
I am in my 40’s. Does that mean I am on my third life, or does who I am transcend the physical parts of which I am comprised?
These are really questions about the nature of identity. Am I the collected sum my parts? If so, perhaps the gradual replacement of those parts transforms me into a new person. Or maybe, since the same DNA directs the regeneration of each of my cells, I remain the same person. My DNA is the genetic algorithm that defines me.
Or, perhaps identity has nothing to do with the physical body. Perhaps identity is rooted in consciousness, summarized succinctly by Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am.”
Although still in the realm of science fiction, we could imagine the future possibility that a person’s consciousness could be uploaded into a computer, or into an artificial body. Would this be the same person?
Might consciousness have something to do with the soul?
Maybe each moment in a person’s life is a distinct slice of existence, a solitary point in space-time, with no two slices being the same. We are constantly changing and reforming into new entities.
Or, we could go four-dimensional, and imagine a series of slices stacked together, forming a river through time in which each individual slice is distinct from a three dimensional perspective, but identical from a four-dimensional perspective.
It is enough to make you want to “bang your head.”
Our Jewish tradition asks a similar question. Am I the same person, year after year, throughout my life? The answer: it is up to me.
The great medieval Rabbi, physician, philosopher, and community leader, Maimonides, suggests a number of practices that those who are truly serious about teshuvah, repentance, might undertake. Those practices include: crying out loud to God with real tears, going out of one’s way to avoid situations in one has earlier sinned, and even possibly going so far as to pick up and move to a new city. Finally, Maimonides suggests that a would-be-penitent might change his or her name, as if to say, “I am a different person. I am no longer the one who perpetrated those misdeeds.” (Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah, 2:4)
This is kind of the opposite of the Ship of Theseus. The person’s physical body has remained exactly the same, but the identity is new.
These practices that Maimonides mentions are really just superficial changes. Real teshuvah, he explains in detail, involves a much deeper transformation.
In 1944, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote a book called Halakhic Man. In it, he connects a human being’s capacity to create to teshuvah. He says that repentance is itself an act of self-creation.
The severing of one’s psychic identity with one’s previous ‘I,’ and the creation of a new ‘I,’ possessor of a new consciousness, a new heart and spirit, different desires, longings, goals—this is the meaning of that repentance compounded of regret over the past and resolve over the future. (110)
In short, a person who achieves teshuvah creates herself as a new individual.
Imagine a sinner. In other words, every one of us. That person is characterized by the term rasha – wicked. What does it take for that person to no longer be a rasha? Two things: regret and resolve. The first step, regret, is about the past. It is when I recognize and feel shame about something I have done.
The action itself cannot be erased. The question is: what does the action mean in the story of my life?
If I do not change, I will continue on my course as the same person, as the same rasha. My past behaviors, personality traits, and desires will continue to direct me. It is as if I have lost my free will. I will continue to sin, and my sins will accumulate and become harder and harder to shed. Rav Soloveitchik describes this person “as the random example of the biological species.” (127)
The second step in teshuvah is resolve. Resolve is about the future. It is “an absolute decision of the will and intellect together” to “terminate [a person’s] past identity and assume a new identity for the future.” (112)
With resolve, something miraculous occurs. The future changes the past. That sin, which prompted such feelings of regret, no longer continues, through inertia, to its inevitable conclusion. I am no longer trapped in destructive patterns of behavior. “Such a man is no longer a prisoner of time but is his own master.” (127) He creates a new universe.
My regret for the sin I have committed has become the catalyst for self-transformation. The ability to change meaning of the sin in my past through teshuvah, says Rav Soloveitchik, is the essence of human free will.
Now, when I tell my story, I look to that low point as my wake-up call to change my ways. My sin becomes a merit. This is what the Talmud means when it teaches: “Great is repentance, for it causes deliberate sins to be accounted to [a person] as meritorious deeds.” (BT Yoma 86b)
Think about this from a parent’s perspective. We have to allow our children to make mistakes. We have to recognize their need to test limits, even if we want to throw them out the window. It is an essential part of their development. We even need to allow them to behave in ways that can be harmful to other people.
We also have to make sure that our kids face the consequences of their actions. That is the only way for them to mature into resilient human beings with a solid ethical foundation. If we shield our children from errors, they will grow into weak adults, unable to take charge of their destiny.
It is only by making mistakes that we have the opportunity to grow. The Talmud teaches “in the place where repentant sinners stand, the wholly righteous cannot stand.” (BT Berakhot 34b)
The midrash (Genesis Rabbah 1:4) teaches that, even before the creation of the physical world, God created teshuvah. It is built-in to human identity. Rav Soloveitchik adds that teshuvah is the key to a human’s ability to create as a partner with God.
A person is creative; he was endowed with the power to create at his very inception. When he finds himself in a situation of sin, he takes advantage of his creative capacity, returns to God, and becomes a creator and self-fashioner. Man, through repentance, creates himself, his own “I.” (113)
This sounds great. But is it true? Can we really stop the inertia of destructive behavior and transform ourselves? ?
If I look at my resolutions from previous High Holidays, can I honestly say that I have succeeded? Am I a new person from the person I was one year ago, five years ago? Have I created a new “I?”
Every night, the Hassidic Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev would examine his heart. He would review the day, considering everything he had done, every interaction, every moment. As he was only human, he would inevitably discover a flaw of some sort. Then he would announce out loud: “Levi Yitzchak will not do this again!”
Then he would pause and reflect: “Levi Yitzchak said exactly the same thing yesterday!”
To which he would add: “Yesterday Levi Yitzchak did not speak the truth, but he does speak the truth today.” (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Vol. I, p. 218)
This sounds a little more realistic.
The first instance of teshuvah in the Torah occurs between brothers. Joseph is the Viceroy of Egypt, tasked with guiding the nation through seven years of famine. He is in disguise when his brothers come begging for food.
To test them, Joseph accuses his brothers of being spies and throws them in jail for three days. Then he keeps Simeon as a hostage, and sends the others back to their father in the Land of Canaan. “Do not return,” he says, “unless you bring your youngest brother, Benjamin, with you!”
When they eventually come back for more food, Benjamin in tow, Joseph continues the test. He plants a silver goblet in Benjamin’s sack of grain and has them arrested. “Return to your father in peace,” he orders, “but Benjamin must remain here in Egypt as my prisoner!”
Joseph has reproduced the exact circumstances from twenty years earlier when they returned home to their father without their brother.
You will recall that it was Judah who devised the plan to sell Joseph into slavery. Now, it is again Judah who steps forward. “Take me as your prisoner and slave, and let Benjamin return to our father. For I cannot bear to return to him without the boy.”
Maimonides defines teshuvah gemurah, complete repentance, in the following way: When a person is found in the same circumstances, able to commit the same crime, and yet does not–that is complete repentance.
Judah has become a new man. He, along with the other brothers, are not the same people that they were twenty years earlier. Perhaps that is why Joseph, after revealing himself, says “it was not you who sent me here, but God.” (Genesis 45:8)
Regret leads the brothers to resolve to change. They rewrite the meaning of their earlier mistreatment of Joseph in their own narratives. They are not the same siblings who banished their brother. Since these are different men standing before him, Joseph cannot hold them accountable. He forgives them.
The Ship of Theseus paradox is not an analog for a human being. The ship was placed in the Athenian Harbor to remind future generations of what Theseus once did. Its meaning and memory is static. Regardless of how much a philosopher bangs his head against the problem, those tasked with maintaining the ship do not want it to change.
We are the opposite. Our bodies may remain basically the same from one moment to the next, but our purpose, as human beings fashioned in God’s image, is to be dynamic.
Rosh Hashanah celebrates Creation. While most of our liturgy focuses on God’s Creation of the World, there is another aspect of Creation which is at least as important. We often describe human beings as partners with God in Creation.
This rolls off the tongue easily, and sounds inspiring. But what does it really mean for a human being to create—to produce something out of nothing—to change the nature of reality?
That is what teshuvah can be. An opportunity not only to create a new “I,” but to create a new world. That is the aspect of being human that is God-like. It is the possibility to create. But to be Creators, we must look at what we have done with open eyes and brutal honesty.
I note those moments when I could have been better.
I discern the patterns of repeated mistakes.
I feel regret.
Am I prepared to change?
Can I resolve to become a new “I”?
Am I ready to create a new world?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
David P. Goldman, “The Jewish Idea of Freedom” in Ḥakirah 20, 2015 – (http://www.hakirah.org/Vol20Goldman.pdf)
Ilana Kurshan, If All the Seas Were Ink
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Birth of Forgiveness (Vayigash 5775) – (http://rabbisacks.org/birth-forgiveness-vayigash-5775/#_ftnref2)
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Rebyehoshua 