Anxiety and religious growth: A talmudic perspective

Abstract

A religious person's commitment to the ideas of sin and penitence represents an aspect of religious life that is inextricably tied to that religionist's sense of being and self-understanding. Penitence and the feeling of regret following sin are mechanisms by which one rises from the pitfall of sin and reverts to or perhaps surpasses one's pretransgression status. Repentance, in other words, can be understood as a return to status quo at the minimum level and further strengthening of one's spiritual status at the optimum level. As anticipated by the ancient kabbalistic Zohar, "There is a higher and lower order of penitence. If a man repents of his evil deeds and ceases to do them again, this is the lower form. If he repents of his evil deeds and strives to perform good deeds, this penitence is the higher type."1 The rabbis of the Talmud (a post-biblical compilation of law and extralegal material redacted ca. 500 CE) were also keenly sensitive to the role played and the function served by penitence for the religious personality. Further, as recognized empiricists and pragmatists, the rabbis often speculated and theo rized about matters universal as well as specifically Jewish. Therefore, many of their astute observations applied and are still relevant to all mankind. This is especially the case with regard to their theories about psychology, or what we today would call psychology. In view of this, I would like to discuss in this paper the talmudic conception of the nature and relevance of penitence and its related emotional states?not only as psychological and religious phenomena sui ge neris, but also as phenomena with great meaning for man's existence-as-such.