The Great Comeback

25:2-3 ‘And if it will be that he will be given lashes for his evil, and the judge will lie him down and lash him according to his wickedness in number. Forty lashes he may give him, he shall not exceed; lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many lashes, then your brother should be dishonored before your eyes.’

Rashi: It is not written the exact number of lashes (in the first verse)  but we learn that this verse is connected to the next verse and that it is forty.  But really it is not forty complete lashes, rather a number that is complete towards forty which is really 39.   

                Elul is here- the final sprint before the finish line. To prod us, the shofar is dusted off and we warm up its coarse voice in preparation for Rosh Hashanah every morning.   Fresh from a summer break, we dig in for one final effort to tie up our loose ends from the previous year.  As we do so, we question why they were still loose in the first place.  Why didn’t we take care of these problems- monies owed, apologies made, character traits refined- right away as we said we would last Rosh Hashanah?  With so many loose ends once again, we begin to ask ourselves, why bother to make the promises in the first place? 

The secret is in the word of repentance, teshuva, whose root is ‘shin and beis’, shav, which means return.  Interestingly, the root of the word teshuva is comprised of the second to last letter of the alphabet and the second letter of the alphabet.  We are going from the near the end, and then back to near the beginning.  That is what repentance is all about, a miraculous return to a previous state of being. However, there is a pressing question (asked by the Maharal), which is shouldn’t the word for repentance really be ‘ta’, the last letter 'tav' and back to the first letter 'alef'- isn’t that an even greater example of repentance? The reason it is not like that is hinted at in the above verse from this week’s Torah portion.

                In this strange mix of verses we have an extra word subtly placed in the text.  It says in the first verse that according to his evil will the number of lashes be, yet a verse later it says that the perpetrator will get forty lashes.  Why doesn’t the first verse tell us this fact?   Rashi explains that the Torah is telling us in a roundabout way, that in reality, the number of lashes is really 39.  But, that doesn’t solve anything because the Torah should have then said directly that a person gets exactly 39 lashes.    In other words, the first verse doesn’t tell me a number, rather, it lets the next verse do the work.  Then, after the Torah finally tells us what the number really is, Rashi intervenes and says it isn’t really true what the next verse says about forty lashes but that in reality it is one less.   There is an interesting interplay between the number 39 and forty here- what is it?

                 The Maharal explains that a fetus is created in forty days.  However, it only gets its soul on the fortieth day.  Therefore, the first 39 days the fetus is a piece of flesh with no real value, and then, on the fortieth day, the soul comes in and makes this fleshy tissue intrinsically valuable.  However, this initial physicality is the source for all of our loose ends, or more simply, our sins.  Therefore, the 39 lashes are a correction for those 39 days in the womb where we were soulless; however, we need the number forty stated in the verse to remind us to look back to the womb to our humble beginnings.

                Now the word for teshuva, ‘shav’, begins to make sense.  We are never completely gone.  We never enter the complete physicality of the ‘tav’, the last and most physical letter of the alphabet.  No matter how many mistakes we make, there is still a soul, a remnant from the fortieth day.  And we can’t return all the way to the most spiritual letter, the aleph, because no matter how great we become after repentance, those 39 days of physicality remain with us albeit subservient to the fortieth day, the soul day.   With this in mind, we can remain steadfast to our promises knowing that we are never too far from a dramatic comeback.