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Section 5. The tenth is the penitent who observes the conditions of repentance. The conditions of repentance are four: abandonment, remorse, seeking forgiveness, and committing not to recidivate.
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All four are gathered in Scripture in a single passage: 'Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity. Take words with you and return... Assyria shall not save us, upon a horse...' (Hos 14:2–4).
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'Return' — turn back from what you are doing — is the heading of abandoning transgressions.
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'For you have stumbled in your iniquity' means remorse — acknowledge that those sins were stumbling-blocks and evil.
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'Take words with you' means seeking forgiveness — and in it is a remarkable expression: 'Forgive all iniquity and accept the good' (Hos 14:3), meaning: for every sin You forgive us we will thank You and say 'Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in the way' (Ps 25:8) —
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And also: 'We will render as bulls our lips' (Hos 14:3) — this may be read figuratively as 'we will render as bull-offerings our lips'; or it may contain an ellipsis: 'we will render bull-offerings which our lips have proclaimed.'
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'Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses' (Hos 14:4) is the heading of the commitment not to recidivate. These three types — Assyria, horses, and idol worship —
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— because these are the kinds of sins the people were known for, as is explained at the beginning of the book: 'For they went up to Assyria, a wild ass wandering alone' (Hos 8:9), and also: 'Because Ephraim multiplied altars for sin' (Hos 8:11).
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Similarly, if their known sins had been murder, theft, and adultery, he would have said: 'Innocent blood we shall not shed; adultery we shall not commit; theft we shall not steal.' When these four are complete, they constitute the conditions of repentance.
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I am not concerned that most of our people will neglect the conditions of repentance — except for this fourth heading, namely recidivism.
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For I am confident that at times of fasting and prayer they abandon and feel remorse and seek forgiveness — but it occurs to me that they are intending to return to the sin.
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Then I ask: what is the remedy for uprooting the intention to recidivate from hearts? I say: through cultivating discourse about renunciation of this world.
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A person should call to mind his state of weakness, wretchedness, toil, being dragged away, death, the dissolution of his limbs, the worms and decay, the reckoning and punishment — and whatever is associated with each of these aspects —
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— until he renounces this world. If he renounces it altogether, his transgressions will enter among the renounced things and he will be sincere in his commitment to abandon them.
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I say: for this reason I find that the sages ordained that in the Yom Kippur confessional one say compositions of this kind: 'You discern the secrets of the heart; Lord of all deeds, will You enter into rebuke?' — and the like.
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These four have three supplements: increased prayer, charity, and seeking reconciliation with people.
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For prayer and charity He said: 'By lovingkindness and truth iniquity is atoned' (Prov 16:6). For seeking reconciliation He said in praise: 'Then I will teach transgressors Your ways' (Ps 51:15).
I will also clarify that —
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— a servant who is sincere at the time of his repentance in committing not to recidivate, even if his repentance is not maintained, will nonetheless have the sins before his repentance dropped from him, and only what he commits after it will be recorded against him.
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Similarly, if this pattern of repentance and recidivism happens multiple times, he is accountable only for what follows each repentance — provided that each time his commitment not to recidivate was genuine.
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And what you find Scripture saying — 'For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke it' (Amos 2:6) — this is not about the acceptance of repentance.
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Rather it concerns the deferring of punishment after repeated warnings — He would send to a people: 'Repent, or I will punish you with the sword and inflict upon you famine.'
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If they repented following the first, second, or third warning, the threat would be lifted; otherwise He sealed that decree upon them.
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And even if they repented at the fourth — their repentance would not benefit them in averting that worldly decree; but it would benefit them in being saved from the punishment of the world to come.