The gemara (Yoma 86a-b) reports two different statements about teshuva in Resh Lakish’s name — one, that teshuva is so great that it turns misdeeds from intentional into unintentional acts, and the other, that teshuva is so great that it turns intentional misdeeds into merits! Which one is it? The gemera explains that the first statement concerns teshuva done out of fear (yirah) and the second concerns teshuva done out of love (ahavah).
This tradition strikes me as a deep statement about inner work. Resh Lakish’s words here are ne’eseit lo — “they become for him” — the sins “become for him” like merits. In other words, through the inner work of teshuva, some shift happens inside oneself with respect to these sins — “they become for him” something different, something better; they start out seeming like sins but they end up, in an atmosphere of love, seeming like merits.
This process has been my experience of parts work in the IFS therapy system. Admittedly, the work is concerned less with actions and more with the aspects of the person that produced the actions, but I think the same could be said about true, deep teshuva, that it, too, is concerned with inner attributes.
One of the fundamental tenets of IFS is that all parts have good intentions. They may carry false beliefs and unnecessary burdens and have been through traumas that forced them into extreme roles, so that at the present moment, they are causing us, and maybe others, a lot of suffering. But underneath it all, if we can hear their stories with friendliness and compassion — in the gemara’s terms, with ahavah, love — they inevitably turn out to be well-intentioned and to desire only good things for us and others. Even a part that seems evil, like a tyrannical inner critic or a self-destructive or aggressive part, even such a part is actually aiming for the best given the circumstances, often trying to protect us through these extreme mechanisms from feeling something very painful.
These parts, it turns out, don’t particularly like their extreme roles; they are suffering and exhausted, too. When allowed to tell their stories and to unburden their burdens, and when there is also healing of whatever pain they are protecting, they gladly shift roles. There is this idea in IFS that these parts — after going through such a process — will return to their naturally valuable states. All parts are valuable. We don’t so much get rid of the part as allow it to shift into a more positive role.
As the gemara intuited, these shifts can only happen — in their most complete form — in an atmosphere of love. We often think of teshuva as a harsh process of self-judgment, but things inside us tend to close up in such an atmosphere; they get stuck and intransigent. On the other hand, when there is a sense of love and acceptance, an open embrace, then our parts feel safe enough to open up to the light of understanding and transformation. Nothing can really move without love.
There is something else that happens that is a bit more subtle. There are parts of us that have — in our own internal climate — been demonized or shamed for years. These are not parts that are objectively “evil” — they haven’t actually hurt anyone — but parts that we, inside us, deem “evil” because they have been the source of humiliation and shame in the past, a loud part or an overeager part or a sensitive, intense part or a socially awkward part. The work here might not involve getting these parts to shift. It might instead involve getting us to shift our view of them, to see that they are not the “bad” parts we thought they were, but are actually, in a way, our strengths, or in the gemara’s language — our merits. Being loud and overeager is great energy; it is needed to start any project with enthusiasm. Being sensitive and intense is painful but it means we are living at a deep level. Being socially awkward — in the light of love — begins to appear as a kind of asset, too, a way of being genuine in any situation, without pretense. Suddenly, what appeared to be a fault is an asset. It is all gold inside us.
It is all gold inside us because it all comes from God, who is wholly good. What appears to be evil either needs a little shifting or shifting of our point of view; the essence is always good. To do teshuva, then, is to return all parts to their original goodness, to their original divine origin. Once we see them in the light of love — of a divine love that brought them into being and that holds them no matter how far they stray or how burdened they become — once we see them in that light, they can return to their goodness; they are truly turned into merits, into assets that are only stronger for their journey.
