Every year, as we prepare to enter Rosh Hashanah, we ask ourselves what we will do differently in the coming year. And, if we are so inclined, what or who we will become.
This more radical conception of renewal famously appears in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Laws of Repentance 2:4) where the Rambam offers various paths of repentance, including that the penitent might, “…change his name, as if to say: I am a different person and not the same one who sinned.”
Maimonides didn’t invent the possibility of halakhic rebirth. Half a millennium earlier, the Talmud uses strikingly similar language to describe conversion to Judaism. In a beraita on Yevamot 48b, the sages consider whether various suffering that befalls a convert might possibly be punishment for their failure to observe the seven Noahide laws before they converted. Rabbi Yosei absolutely rejects this possibility and declares:
A person who converts is like a newborn baby.
In other words, conversion cleans the slate completely.
On today’s daf, we encounter an interesting wrinkle in this way of thinking about conversion. Here, a mishnah discusses the case of a convert who has his or her animal slaughtered immediately preceding their conversion. (Perhaps to serve at a celebratory barbeque?) The question is: What happens to the parts of the animal that are due to the priest? Does the convert owe the stomach, jaw and foreleg of the animal if the animal was slaughtered before the owner was a Jew? According to our mishnah, no — the convert is exempt from donating those portions to the priests.
The Gemara then proceeds to compare the halakhic ruling of the mishnah with a similar law about challah, the portion of dough owed to a priest when baking bread:
With regard to the dough of a convert, the halakhah is that if it was prepared before he converted, he is exempt from separating challah from this dough, and if it was prepared after he converted, he is obligated to separate challah from it.
What interests me about both of these cases is that the rabbis seem to understand that while conversion can remake us “like a newborn child,” it does not change the objects we own or the spaces around us. The dough a person made before converting remains dough made by a gentile, even as the one who kneaded it becomes a Jew. Likewise, the animal carcass, slaughtered by the person who was not Jewish, does not change in status along with the convert who owns it. No gifts from it need be given to the priest.
Perhaps this offers us some further insight into the Rambam’s radical proposal for repentance. Teshuvah — when done correctly — can completely change us. It can even remake us into a different person than the one who sinned not long ago. Yet it cannot remake the world for us. It won’t change our friends, our family, the people we hurt, the relationships we have damaged or the obligations for repair that we may have incurred.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur offer us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and become someone new. And yet, their power is limited. The new me still needs to live in the world I built for myself before my rebirth. What I am surrounded by today will be the same as what I am surrounded by once the ten Days of Awe have elapsed. Our challenge, in this season, is not only to change ourselves, but to figure out how our new selves will live righteously in the world our old selves created.
Read all of Chullin 134 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on September 11, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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