ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how, in contrast to the psychoanalytic confrontation with past failures, the Jewish Midrash provides a framework for reinterpreting and correcting one’s failing past through what can be termed “biographic rehabilitation” or simply: “re-biographing.” The dialectic divorce from past identity, be it criminal or “schizophrenic,” advocated by the “new leaf” rehabilitation formula seems to pose questions when examined through such extreme cases as Protected Federal Witnesses or degraded political personalities seeking rehabilitation. One can best understand how the possibility of “biographic rehabilitation follows from the Midrash by examining Midrashic cases of “re-biographing” in the light of the meaning of the concept teshuva. The reader is hence cautioned to understand that the Midrashic rereading of one’s sinning past is possible only if it indeed restores the organic harmony with one’s subsequent repenting past.
