This is what I said in an episode I recorded for our podcast Tov! about the TV show “The Good Place” and Jewish ideas, just before Rosh Hashanah in 2023. You can listen to this specific episode on the Tov! website here or on YouTube here. Or find Tov! on any favorite podcast app.
Hey! This is Jon Spira-Savett, and this episode of Tov! is different from the others in a few ways.
First of all, this time it’s just me and no conversation partner, no other voice. I wanted to get down some of my own thoughts about what I have learned from The Good Place through this project of bouncing it against Jewish teachings, specifically about the concept of teshuvah, Judaism’s central metaphor for personal change as returning or turning around. Almost everything in this episode is something we’ve at least touched on in a previous podcast. I’m just trying to organize and extend my thoughts on this one topic in one place.
This is actually my third attempt, and I want to thank the two institutions that let me do this before. In 2020 at this time of year, right before Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Rebecca Schatz at Temple Beth Ahm in Los Angeles let me do an online session through a collaborative called Jew It At Home, an early pandemic project put together by Rabbi Adam Lutz, who was then at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. This was a year before the podcast began. Then this past June I tried again to sum up through Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz’s Valley Beit Midrash, also online, and you can catch that on their podcast and YouTube channels. That one I tried to do two or three things in an hour and ran out of time! So I’m trying again.
The second difference from our other episodes of Tov! is that I actually wrote down everything I’m going to say including this introduction, word for word. So this won’t sound conversational like the rest of our episodes. It’s somewhere in between a sermon and a lecture, and not the way I usually talk or teach. If you’re like me someone who processes certain things better by reading, if you just want to read the talk, I am posting the whole text of this episode in the show notes. Feel free to turn off my voice and go read instead. Though if you can let it run for another 15 seconds or so, it helps with the search algorithms! I hope this isn’t the first time you are encountering a rabbi speaking – usually if we’re in front of a group, we’re not speaking for this long or biting off so much and being so expository.
Third difference, and I promise I’m getting toward the end of the preliminaries — while I’m laughing inside a lot as I’m creating this episode, I don’t have anyone here this time making me laugh or chuckle out loud. This episode will sound more serious than the other. So if the style doesn’t suit you skip this episode, or listen in smaller chunks or hop out in the middle.
And if you are just discovering our podcast, you may want to first find an episode that’s more typical for Tov!, where two of us or a few of us are talking about a specific episode. That’ll give you a better flavor of what we’ve been doing. Then again, if you landed here because of something other than The Good Place, hopefully I’ll whet your appetite for this amazing TV show!
By the way this is not the last episode of Tov!. Though we’ve done our major work, which is to discuss each episode of The Good Place, there are a few more things cooking. I am not arrogating the last word for myself.
My final preliminary is a thank you to all the Tov! co-hosts who have taught me the things I’m about to talk about, and especially my main partners – Rebecca Rosenthal, Dan Ross, and Sari Laufer.
All right. I’m ready to talk about what I think I have learned from The Good Place about teshuvah. I’m releasing this early in the Jewish month of Elul, the month that leads to the Jewish new year, so it’s the teshuvah season. We’re getting near the end of the Jewish year 5783 as I record, in August of 2023, and it’s about two years since we kicked off Tov! at exactly this time of year, to get in the mood and mindset for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The Jewish intellectual figure least likely to be associated with a TV comedy would have to be Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the rabbi-philosopher-physician of the 12th century. He was extremely suspicious of metaphor and representation, at least as applied to the Divine, and he was one of the most straightforward writers in the history of Jewish philosophy and law. We also refer to him as Rambam, which is an acronym of his title and Hebrew names, HaRav Moshe ben Maimon, so I’ll use both these names. Maimonides wrote about moral psychology and philosophy, and at some point in my early watching of The Good Place I had this flash: Eleanor is the best dramatization of Maimonides’ teachings on personal change that I have ever come across.
In Judaism that process of change is called teshuvah, a term from the Hebrew root shuv which means to return or go back. The Torah and the biblical prophets imagine the process of being distant or close to the Divine, or to the path of Torah and the mitzvot, using images of exile and return. Which was a literal experience for the ancient Israelites. Return meant both coming back to a land and a home, which would itself be the same but not entirely, and return also meant a change of heart in some way.
Rambam drew together teachings about teshuvah that were scattered across the Torah, the prophets, the Talmud, and other subsequent Jewish sources. He codified them in a book called Hilchot Teshuvah, the ways or laws of teshuvah, within his all-encompassing law code called the Mishneh Torah. In Hilchot Teshuvah, Maimonides took the concept of return and focused it entirely on the individual.
I should say that Rambam’s is not the only towering Jewish work on teshuvah, and we’ve been focusing on a small set of his teachings within his own Hilchot Teshuvah and related writings. On the podcast we’ve zeroed in especially on his definition at the beginning of Chapter 2 of the Ways or Laws of Teshuvah. This is my gender-inclusive translation, which I’ll leave a little clunky so it’s as literal as possible otherwise. I’m skipping some of his biblical citations, as well as one example I’ll loop back to after I quote from his text directly.
What is complete teshuvah (in Hebrew: teshuvah g’murah)?
It is when the thing that one did wrong comes to one’s hand, and it is in one’s power to do it, and one separates and does not do it because of teshuvah. And not from fear and not from a failure of strength or power or capacity.
… and if one only did teshuvah in one’s old age or at a time when it was not possible to do what one had done, even though this is not an elevated teshuvah it is still effective teshuvah and that person is a master of teshuvah.
And even if one did wrong all of one’s days and did teshuvah on the day of death, and died in one’s teshuvah, all of one’s wrongs are forgiven.
End of quote.
As I say, Maimonides was not funny, and the part I skipped over here was especially not funny. He offers the example of a man who sleeps with a woman once outside of a marriage sanctioned by Torah law, a woman he still has strong feelings for, and he finds himself with her again and in the same locale where their previous encounter had taken place, but this time he holds himself back. I don’t know if he centered this teaching on a man specifically, and I don’t think he was addressing sexual violence; how teshuvah might apply to that is its own matter of supreme importance. Like many other traditional religious thinkers Rambam takes sexual attraction as one of the biggest challenges to free will.
Maimonides’ definition of teshuvah is about finding yourself back in a specific situation and choosing differently, with awareness of exactly what you did wrong and the reality that it was wrong, and with all the same capacities and thoughts that you brought to the earlier time available to you this current time. But this time, you recognize an opportunity to make a different choice, to override any situational or internal factors and take a different action. It could happen any time in life, even at the end of your life, or even when you don’t have the strong feelings or impulses or physical powers that made it easier to choose wrongly before, or even if you are more sensitized to the negative outcomes that can come from a particular choice. But it’s a particularly strong kind of teshuvah, Rambam says, when you are in the prime of life, with all your powers and less inclined to be fearful of what others might do to you or think of you if they knew about your action or choice.
So, early on when I was watching The Good Place I thought that so much of Eleanor’s story touches the points in Maimonides’ definition of teshuvah. In season 1, almost all of Eleanor’s realizations happen when a lesson or freak-out from Chidi or a comment from Michael sparks a very specific flashback to an episode in her life on earth – the T-Shirt Bitch incident, the dog sitting fiasco, etc. The big twist in Season 1 and the first part of Season 2 then introduce the 800+ reboots, which happen initially just within the afterlife itself. Flashback and reboot are great examples of teshuvah, literally goings- back or returning or turning around.
Let me say out of an abundance of caution and intellectual honesty that it’s possible to reject my premise entirely and to view the show from a kind of opposite lens, of leaving home or going away on retreats. The neighborhood, Australia –these are not anyone’s home towns or home bases. But one of the great things about a Jewish approach, what we call midrash, is that we’re encouraged to interpret texts in contradictory ways and see what we can learn from each one. I’m not claiming this is the only way to view The Good Place and I don’t attribute any of this to the intentions of Michael Schur and the creators.
For me one of the most compelling illustrations of teshuvah in Rambam’s sense is in the Season 2 finale, when the Judge sends the humans back to the moment before they each died. We see Eleanor telling off the environmental activist, and this time instead of that being her last act she is saved from death by shopping carts and the Engorgulate truck. Soon after, Eleanor goes back to the supermarket entrance to talk to the guy with the petition. She apologizes, sort of – she says “I came to apologize, there I did it. I apologized.” And he calls her on it – “No you didn’t.” She says, “Yes I did, assface – no, you’re right, I didn’t. I apologize for being mean to you like a thousand times. There’s really no excuse.”
Eleanor literally goes back to the exact person in the exact place where she had done a wrong, and she tries. Her first words of quasi-apology, Maimonides would say they weren’t quite for the sake of teshuvah, not quite – for a moment she reverts to trying to ward off embarrassment or to not let herself be connected to the guy. Then the activist’s response helps her focus and clarify what she’s doing as a decision to act for the sake of teshuvah in that moment, for all those specific prior moments with that person in that place.
And before Eleanor even went back to the supermarket, she sat down at her computer and wrote out on social media: “My name is Eleanor Shellstrop and I think I might be a monster,” and then stated her intention of changing. Following that by going back to the supermarket — that specific interaction is the opposite both behaviorally and on the inside of what she did before, and Rambam would call that in itself teshuvah g’murah.
Then she says to the guy she just apologized to: “Hey, I’m on kinda like a self-improvement kick. Do you think you could help me out, teach me to get all horny for the environment or whatever?” Eleanor broadens out in that moment from one wrong to her a pattern of living that is out of alignment, and while it looks a bit impromptu, she makes an articulate statement that it’s for the sake of self-improvement – for the sake of teshuvah, as Maimonides would put it.
I recently was looking again at another teaching of Rambam’s in chapter 1 of his laws of teshuvah. He opens with the idea of acknowledgement of one’s wrongs as a first step, a verbal acknowledgement toward the Divine separate from trying to reconcile with the person wronged. In Hebrew that’s called vidui, for those of you who might find yourself at a Yom Kippur service, and it’s often translated as confession but it’s broader than that. It’s acknowledgement coupled with resolve. That’s like Eleanor typing at her computer, which we the viewer hear in her own voice. In Rambam that comes before acts of teshuvah, and that’s how Eleanor does it here.
And of course that Season 2 finale is a version of Rambam’s thing about teshuvah on the day of one’s death, which technically this is for Eleanor. We know it and experience it that way, even though she doesn’t realize there’s an iteration of her life where she actually died. Eventually Tahani and Chidi and Jason will go back to their last days also.
I’m not saying Michael Schur was consulting Maimonides, but again these are the best dramatizations of Rambam’s specific teachings on teshuvah in those texts that I have ever seen or could possibly imagine.
The scenes that follow in the Season 2 finale took my breath away – Eleanor becoming engaged in the work and with the people in the environmental group, joining the team; her sense of satisfaction and her connection with her leader and teacher; her self-image changing. And then the difficulties when the environmental work becomes harder, and she questions the value of this teshuvah and finally again she wonders who she is. Her outing with her friends doesn’t go as she thought it would, when her honesty about the dress and the T-shirt are not rewarded — quite the opposite. As I said on the podcast about that episode, it’s hard to believe that so much was presented so truthfully and beautifully about teshuvah and its difficulties in maybe half an episode, thirteen minutes or so. Even without the scene at the bar with Michael, it’s a beautiful piece of art, with laughs but not as many laughs per minute needed, earned by the truthfulness of everything that’s come before.
And if all The Good Place did was give some color to that primary teaching from Maimonides, dayenu, as we say in the Passover Seder – it would have been enough. I think those of us who began this podcast probably only had that much worked out when we started. But there is so much more the show does to riff on the metaphor of teshuvah as turning back and on Maimonides’ specific guidance and to deepen it in ways I know I hadn’t thought about before.
Flashbacks and reboots and returns to life are the most obvious parallels to the teshuvah metaphor of going back. The way the show uses these techniques reinforces for me why turning back is actually an important metaphor for personal change. In America, it’s counter-cultural to talk in this way. Our master metaphors are growth, progress, even flourishing – these are fundamentally about the insufficiency of the past, or the ways the past holds us back. Or there are master metaphors of quick redemption, granted or graced from outside. I’m exaggerating; I think these metaphors are more like the different dials on a stereo mixer. They all coexist in our culture and our experiences at different levels when we think about repairing ourselves or judging the bad acts of public figures and if and when they deserve to be restored. Judaism sets the teshuvah dial higher than other groups do. Returning has power, even when we’re after growth and change and redemption.
I don’t know if I can put a finger on why, but I am bowled over at Eleanor’s various returns to Chidi at different points in the show, and then at the end his returns to her. Returning to Chidi functions as an envelope around the Season 2 finale. She starts all alone at her computer typing her declaration of teshuvah intent – we know, even though she doesn’t that in that reboot, that this is Chidi’s influence. She ends back at her computer doing a search for “what we owe each other” and finds a video of Chidi. And to go way meta, Ted Danson returns to the bar for the first time since he played Sam Malone in Cheers for the key conversation that nudges Eleanor to her next step and toward Chidi. It seems like the notion of return nourishes us in some way, as some combination of roots and footholds, I wish I could articulate it better.
I want to move from illustrations of teshuvah in a Maimonidean sense to amendments or elaborations of teshuvah that the show provides. In her early moment of teshuvah on earth that I’ve been talking about, Eleanor asks the person she has wronged before for his help in her self-improvement. She asks him to teach her, specifically, and we know as viewers, again even though she doesn’t, that the only way Eleanor could ask this is because of her experience with Chidi.
In fact the whole show debunks the idea that we can improve ourselves on our own. Maimonides does present teshuvah as a moment of individual choice, something we do without regard to external pressure and not for the sake of others’ superficial approval and even their positive moral judgement. But that’s not how it happens on The Good Place.
That sounds trite, and maybe a couple decades ago it would have been more radical to point out that we can’t do self-improvement alone. Coaches and mentors are “in.” But it’s more than that on The Good Place. Each of our characters, even Michael and Janet, and even Shawn, and I suppose even the Judge — each one has their own teshuvah agenda, but most of them can’t even realize what it is outside of this group. And none of them can get past the early or continuing obstacles to their own teshuvah without the others. This isn’t about using the group to support the teshuvah you’ve already identified for yourself, or finding a group where everyone is trying to change in the same way. On the show each individual’s teshuvah is very distinct. And yet they all function as teachers to the others, even about things far from their own life experience. And they either ask each other specific things or they are open to hearing things sometimes out of the blue that turn out to speak to them. That’s the essence of Team Cockroach.
So for instance, Tahani doesn’t seek out Eleanor as a teacher, the way Eleanor wants to study with Chidi. Tahani is repeatedly jarred over most of the series when she observes Eleanor overcoming her own selfishness in new ways, finding new capacities and leadership, and periodically this jolts Tahani into looking back on herself from a different angle. Initially in Season 1, Tahani viewed herself as Eleanor’s teacher. Eleanor seems like the opposite of a party-planner and morale booster and philanthropic benefactor, but Tahani comes to view her as a teacher. In Season 4, “Employee of the Bearimy”, when Janet’s been kidnapped and Tahani and Eleanor have to manage the new experiment on their own for a time, Tahani expresses frustration about her current role in comparison to the leader Eleanor has become. By now Eleanor can respond, and put Tahani’s unique talents into perspective back to her. The process is depicted in a beautiful set of contrasting camera shots, a wide angle where an unhappy Tahani towers and leans over Eleanor, and closer shots where Eleanor looks up at Tahani and reassures her.
Another thing the show does with the teshuvah metaphor is to extend Maimonides’ paradigm beyond the righting of wrongs, reactive or after-the-fact. In the final season, while the humans are awaiting the Judge’s verdict on the experiment, Eleanor and Tahani and Jason and Janet create the funerals to end all funerals, and they are more than just opportunities to hear the eulogies none of us get to hear while we are alive. Tahani and Eleanor and Jason each choose a single place from their Earth lives, and bring their new friends back there. For each of them, it’s a chance to go back to something that symbolized how they used to live and tie it directly to some way they’ve become better because of these specific other friends and teachers. The emphasis isn’t on fixing the past but redeeming it as an ingredient made less raw and more delicious by current friends.
Then in the next episode, when Michael is giving Chidi back all his memories in what seems like an instant undifferentiated infusion, Chidi is not a passive receiver. He chooses to recall an important conversation in each of a series of past places, one by one with people in his original life and in various reboots of his afterlife. Like in the funeral episode, Chidi doesn’t simply go back over something from his past. He weaves his current questions and purposes, what’s on his mind and agenda now, into a narrative of his past, and interweaves his current friends with his going back to the places where he was formed or influenced, places where he made not great decisions or planted seeds for better.
The funeral and Chidi-remembering episodes are back-to-back, and in them, going back in a teshuvah way is an alternative to nostalgia about our past, or wistfulness and loss, or regret about bad decisions. This teshuvah is more satisfying than what Eleanor tries to do for Chidi in the finale by simply bringing him back to Athens and Paris, places he loved in the past. Instead, in the funeral and “The Answer” episodes the past stays past but we get to bring our present people and concerns back to our past, and then bring that past back to the present for the purposes we are working on now. And that’s also a more positive, affirming take on teshuvah than the wrong-centered focus of Maimonides. Or at least they are complementary.
Another remarkable twist on the show is what happens in the middle of Season 3, the Soul Squad. I didn’t like the premise, personally or Jewishly, that an awareness of the afterlife reward system means from now on you can’t ever have the right motivation for doing good. But the outcome was a new take on teshuvah. Eleanor says, “There are still people in this world that we care about. So I say, we try and help them be good people, try and help them get in.” And they go to Arizona to Eleanor’s mother, to Jacksonville for Donkey Doug and Pillboi, and to Budapest for Kamillah. In the finale, Eleanor asks Janet over marguaritas on the bench by the door to eternity what her top-three moments of her not-life with them have been, and Janet starts with the moment Eleanor proposed the Soul Squad. Maybe that’s Michael Schur himself speaking there.
In Eleanor’s case, she used the lessons of her own life of pushing people away to help her mother make a leap of commitment into her new life. In Jason’s case, it meant the hard choice to give up on his dad Donkey Doug, and help Pillboi instead.
In Tahani’s case, it was her sister Kamillah. Even though Kamillah seemed to show no interest in talking constructively about their upbringing, Tahani gave her an emphatic hug, and an explanation of their relationship and their “fractured inheritance.” It was a grace from Tahani to Kamillah, a gift of forgiveness and a gift of insight, which led to an immediate breakthrough for Kamillah but Tahani offered it in the moment without that expectation.
And as I write this I am realizing that this became Tahani’s own teshuvah not just for that moment. In the end, Tahani was the one who decided to stay in the afterlife forever, out of a sense that her purpose in existence was not over when she had checked everything off her long bucket list. Tahani made other people’s teshuvah her mission for eternity. At the start of the show, Tahani was the philanthropist who did a lot of good but with mixed or questionable motivations. In the end, Tahani went back to that kind of role not to correct a wrong, but to complete and fulfill something, an absolute good that had been buried in a bad that she had had to return to again and again. It was Tahani, after all, on whom the new system and its VR-style afterlife entrance test had first been calibrated. Putting someone else’s teshuvah even above your own is a most excellent revision of Maimonides, and the show suggests that this indirect path might even serve one’s own teshuvah.
And in the unbelievable “Janet(s) episode”, so soon after Jacksonville and Arizona and Budapest, helping someone else come back literally saves the universe. In Janet’s void, where all of our humans lose their own appearance, Eleanor says to Chidi, “I don’t even know who I am anymore”, and she begins to turn into all kinds of other people, and the void they are in begins to disintegrate. Eleanor says, “Chidi, I’m scared…. What am I supposed to be doing right now? I don’t remember. I’m having a hard time remembering.” And Chidi says, “Right. Memories, you need to remember who you are. You’re Eleanor Shellstrop from Phoenix, Arizona. Your favorite meal is shrimp scampi. You listed your emergency contact as Britney Spears as a long-shot way of meeting her… You flew halfway around the world because you wanted to be a better person, and it was very brave.” Chidi brings her back, they all get their faces and bodies back, and the void stops disintegrating and they leave it.
Wow.
For me like for Chidi the biggest conceptual challenge has been Jeremy Bearimy. But I don’t think it’s for the same reason. I get that in modern physics and cosmology time isn’t just linear, and that fries my brain but most of the time it doesn’t affect my day. When I think about it ethically, in terms of teshuvah, Jeremy Bearimy is a bigger deal, and if it’s true then it does affect my day, whether I know it or not.
Here’s why. One of the things that is appealing to me about the Rambam teaching on teshuvah is that it’s built on a straightforward picture of learning over time, reflecting on your past and making a free will choice in the present. Which requires that you can remember your past, that you have knowledge of it, that you can point to a specific memory or series of memories. I’ve known for a long time that each of these things are impossible to find in a pure form. All kinds of things interfere with memory, give us made-up memories, and make it hard for us to exercise free will. Maimonides knew that too with the science of the 12th century, even though he didn’t have behavioral economics or neuroscience the way we do. He would have embraced those, since he believed that established science was an essential part of Torah. And yet he held that his teshuvah picture was an ideal you could stretch for. A refreshing assertion of the power of free will and self-control, over our actual human natures.
But you can’t learn from your past if time isn’t linear, or if part of your experience is over off on an island that is simultaneously Tuesdays, July, and never. So that’s one of the reasons that the dot on the “I” of Jeremy Bearimy broke me, just as it did for Chidi.
Or so I thought, before my conversations on the podcast convinced me that Jeremy Bearimy is actually a much better representation of how returning to a moment or situation happens. Yes, often as I’ve been discussing we consciously return to something past. But often the past surprises us, and something or someone from before that we didn’t expect comes to be present. Or we think we’ve settled on the story we tell ourselves about something in the past and we have to rethink it when the past pops up unexpectedly, in our minds or in front of our eyes.
And Rambam actually did understand this about the occasions for teshuvah, and we know this because of where he put these teachings in his code of Jewish law. Jews are usually taught about teshuvah in connection with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, holy days that happen once a year in the fall. But for Maimonides, the laws of teshuvah are part of his opening book on the fundamentals of Torah and life, along with basic principles of theology and Torah and virtue. Teshuvah is a practice for all the time, a basic reality of our lives all year and every year. It’s the fundamental ethical practice, not just a High Holy Day thing. This might be as important an insight of his into moral psychology as an any specific teaching about teshuvah.
In Rambam’s ideal picture of teshuvah gemurah, complete and ideal teshuvah, we would have to have access to our memory, to knowing exactly what we did in this particular scenario at a certain time and place with a certain person or other people. One of the most stirring and jarring prayers of the High Holy Days, called Unetaneh Tokef, describes a metaphorical Book of Remembered Things, Sefer Hazichronot, where every single thing each individual has done in the year is recorded in our own handwriting, and it reads itself out in the presence of the Divine. It’s like the records behind the Book of Dougs. The prayer has often been taken as a brutal theology where God uses that data on the Day of Judgment like the accountants do, toting up the impact of roses picked and gifted to decide whether to grant us another year of life, or to grant more time to someone we love, or to assign us a year of tranquility or struggle, etc. I prefer on the holy days to focus on something more beautiful in that prayer, the value it places on every single moment of our lives, whether we remember or not. On Rosh Hashanah, we’re offered access to all our lost memories in some sense, the way Jason does as he and Michael propel themselves by hand on the train tracks to rescue Janet from the Bad Place.
However, almost as soon as Jason gets his memory infusion, he asks if Michael can give him the memories again. Memory is slippery. And even for Chidi, when he gets his back, he doesn’t experience it as raw data, as I’ve described already – he writes the story as he remembers. And after 800+ reboots, and a second chance at life on earth, each of our human characters has only a certain kind of trace of memory for everything that happened before or in another Bearimy. Only Janet grows in a linear fashion, gaining access to an ever-more complete range of human sensitivity every time she is reset – though even with Janet, each time there’s a momentary regression in her capacities.
Ultimately the show decides this is how the relationship between memory and self-improvement ought to be for us, when we face the perfected version of the test. As Eleanor puts it, “In the new system, you will retain a vague memory of what you learned in the evaluation sessions. That information, what you did well or badly, stays with you like… like a little voice in your head, helping you become a better version of yourself.”
The vague memory is Bearimy-memory, as all our human characters have experienced it throughout the show. We’ve gotten glimpses of that in other ways – when the show goes back to flashbacks we’ve laughed at and adds more backstory even to them. Or when there’s a scene in the afterlife that was already central or thrilling, like Chidi’s and Eleanor’s final night and the movie in Season 3, and then the show comes back to it and adds on something just as important like Chidi’s conversation with Michael about answers and soulmates.
Which once again means that memory isn’t just about how we recall bad things we have to go back to and fix, as Rambam might have it, but also about how we construct a picture of ourselves where even the bad things have a place, so we can live forward more fully.
And Jeremy Bearimy also means that when we do want to do teshuvah and fix something or improve ourselves, the memories we need don’t have to be in perfect order. Memory isn’t a sequence so much as a cluster, and as we do teshuvah the clusters get more layered and they attract more relevant memories to them, as for Chidi when he goes over his life. Or it’s like when Mindy St. Claire tells Eleanor in the Season 2 reboots about how she and Chidi continue to fall in love – it doesn’t matter which version came first. If you drew that process of memory, it would look like Jeremy Bearimy.
That’s why the original test given by the Judge in season 2 is so wrong, the one with the Madden football game for Jason and the two hats for Chidi. Superficially it’s exactly Maimonides, a specific situation where the humans fell down in each of their lives, and that bugged me. It was like a parody of Maimonides and I wondered if my whole thinking was off, if the show was revealing my whole podcast premise to be silly and too literal-minded. But the show instead reminds us our teshuvah situations aren’t like that. As our gang presents it to the Judge and Shawn and Timothy Olyphant, even if we have to drill down and focus on one characteristic, across-the-board flaw – whether Eleanor’s selfishness, Jason’s impulsivity, Chidi’s indecisiveness, or Tahani’s complete inability to carry off a mod look – the best test scenario will have texture, and might well be much longer than a game of Madden. The new test is actually a much better Maimonidean approach. Or at least a very friendly amendment to Rambam.
So, what have I actually learned about teshuvah, from rewatching The Good Place and discussing the show in connection with Jewish ideas with amazing partners?
I think I’ve established that I learned a lot about the idea of teshuvah and found that learning to be enjoyable. Everything I’ve said to this point is something I learned about how the idea itself works, how it might guide me as a road map. It’s not that I had never thought of any of it before in this way, and it’s certainly not the case that I’m the first person to have had any of these ideas.
But have I learned about doing teshuvah? Am I actually doing my own teshuvah any differently, more like any of the characters in the show, because of all this discussion? Am I at least approaching my teshuvah differently in my mind?
This is the question of whether study and learning leads to action, whether Talmud leads to ma’aseh. I’ve wanted to think that concepts help us live better, and that Jewish concepts enrich the mix for me as a person living in this time in America. And my other rationale for the podcast was my appreciation for how the show actually teaches concepts in philosophy, in ways that support the characters in what I’m calling their teshuvah.
So, enough stalling. Is there any evidence I have learned anything?
For a real answer you’d have to ask my family.
But if I were sitting on the bench with Janet, trying to sum up the impact on me of the past two years of working on this project, I would say that I’ve learned about striving to be part of a group who care about each other’s teshuvah as much as their own. And about being alive to the ways people I seek out and random people actually are giving me the gift of teshuvah by things they want to say to me or by accident.
I also think I’ve learned that teshuvah means repetition, that going back means going back to the same agenda over and over. Some of it just happens, but most of it happens because you return and return, or someone who cares about your destiny helps you do that. And it’s not just my life and behavior I have to go over. I also have to go over the ideas and principles I think are foundational for me, the questions that have always energized me or dogged me, like whether I should think about the points available to me or the act in front of me or both, whether I should compare myself to who I was yesterday, as Michael said when he captured Bad Janet, or whether I should strive to some version of who I might be able to be, which is Jason’s mantra, or Eleanor’s perennial question.
From the show I’ve learned that you can’t do that going back over questions by yourself – you have to turn to valued friends and teachers, over and over, who are willing to listen and enjoy talking with you because it matters to you, and who because you go back again and again sometimes know what to say to you or have a response to try out on you, and sometimes just accidentally say something that turns you around, and sometimes you build the answer together for the time being, until the next time you talk about it again.
I’ve learned to want that for myself, and to want to be that kind of spouse and parent and friend and rabbi and teacher. I think that’s all I can say confidently that I’ve really learned.
I couldn’t have learned any of this without all our co-hosts, and especially the ones with whom I’ve talked the most on Tov! – Rebecca Rosenthal, Dan Ross, and Sari Laufer. Obviously Michael Schur and the incredible team of The Good Place, and if you want a great statement about how to approach an ethical life philosophically, read the final piece of his book How To Be Perfect where he tries to capture it in a letter to his children. I want to call out by name three of my own teachers, Earl Schwartz and Michael Sandel, who first taught me about moral psychology and moral philosophy, and Michael Walzer whom I’ve never met but whose works I read all the time and whose mode of relating concepts and experience has stimulated and helped me profoundly.
Thank you for listening or reading. If you have any insights of your own, whether sparked by what I’ve said or not, please do share them – on social media where we’re @tovgoodplace, by e-mail to me, Jon Spira-Savett or anyone on our co-host or guest team at tov@tovgoodplace.com. You can find other things I write at rabbijon.net, and I’m on Twitter and Instagram @rabbijs3, and may have some High Holy Day things on tiktok @ravjon.
Once again this isn’t the last word from Tov!, so subscribe and give us a good rating, tell other people about the podcast, and visit our website tovgoodplace.com for all kinds of resources on Jewish ethics and concepts.
If you are listening or reading this on your way to celebrating the new Jewish year, Shana Tova Umetukah, a wish for a good and sweet new year! And to tweak what Marc Evan Jackson who plays Shawn says at the end of the official NBC Good Place podcast – now go learn more about something good.
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