Spiritual growth is of three levels.
The first is the level of the great majority of men and is the level on which we must intend to place out children and to which we should hope to lead our students. It is the realization and recognition that Jewishness and masorah is at the core of our being, that we identify with Torah and its tenets, that we and it are one. This is a very high level, one that many but not most achieve within their lifetime, so that Jewishness and the frum lifestyle is at the core of their beings, and to abandon it is to be untrue to themselves. Untold numbers have remained within the fold against all difficulties owing to the sights, smells, experiences and patterns of thought welded into them from their earliest upbringing. It does come with a danger, however. Just like to some people Judaism is identified with their selves, so to others their selves are identified with Judaism. Intolerance of religious expressions and ideas and positions that "don't feel right" can follow and it can be passionate and destructive. After all, there are few things that provoke more passion than an attack on the self. The confusion of the personal and religious can permit what is forbidden and make forbidden what is personally detestable but securely within the Torah's limits of tolerance, or simply a different way. It can lead to unconscious hypocrisy, idealistically driven misuse of power and glorification of the self instead of Hashem.
With all this, this IS the way of most men, and it is a safe and good place for most people to be. It is a place of religious naivete, a blessed childhood of Faith, a secure and comfortable ancestral home from which we should not attempt to dislodge anyone.
A few move beyond the self and grow to realize that it is not the true parameter of authenticity and truth, that there are outside criteria and that maturity demands self-criticism. This level resembles adolescence, in that it is often accompanied by a sense of dislocation and insecurity and a willingness to value the judgments of the outsiders more than one's own. In the secular world, we encounter this stage of growth among those who hold everyone elses's perceptions and opinions as somehow more valid than their own. They are afraid of the power of self-interest to pervert their view, for they have recognized its power to do so. In the religious world, it manifests itself as the desire to encompass all views and to live as detached from the inner voice and subjective opinion as possible. Modern maimonideans sometimes fall into this group.
This is an inherently unstable position; it only has value as a transitional device. Rav Kook in Orot Haemuna compares this situation to a sapling that has been uprooted from its native soil and must very quickly be replanted, for if it is not, it dries out. Similarly, those who remain at this level are at a real danger of spiritual dryness and impoverishment, if not worse.
The mature man of years trusts the inner voice. The third level is the return to the inner truth, to the naive faith but now from a position of strength. Giving up the self paradoxically makes one stronger." What should a man do so he may live", asked Alexander of the Sages of the South? "He must kill himself". To truly live in Hashems' truth, one must dissolve the self. So taught the Rebbe of Kotsk. Now, unafraid that the self will be injured, the believer is strong enough to open the self to the immediate experience of the Outside. Before, he feared being absorbed and ceasing to exist should the Divine Light flood in; now he no longer fears it. Inside, he is certain that he will find that simple faith that animated him before but that was dim, obscured by self-interest and self-delusion. Few achieve this level; few even perceive its existence. People think that tsaddikim are merely more scrupulous in their observances or have learned more Torah. This is true but what makes tsaddikim into tsaddikim is openness to Hashem's light and it can only flow inside those whose self does not fill all their space.
Repentance is not only an act or series of actions; it is a process of growth and rebirth. Jewish calendar institutionalizes the process of growth in Return during the month of Elul.
Reish Lakish said: Great is repentance, for intentional sins become for a penitent as if they were not intentional, as it says: Return Israel to your God for you have stumbled in you crime (Hosea 14,). Crime refers to intentional sin and yet it is called "stumbling". Is this really so? Did not Reish Lakish say, "Great is repentance, for it turns sins into merits, as it says, "When the wicked returns from his sin…he shall live(in the sense of "prosper") (Ezekiel 33,)". No problem - this statement is about repentance through love and this one is regarding repentance from fear (Yoma 86b)". Returning to God because one fears for himself, in this formulation, is the return to oneself, out of fear.One is not transformed by fear and neither are his sins. Love, on the other hand, is transformative, for in the light of the face of the King, is Life (Proverbs 16:15).
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