It is important to bring clarity to our situation, to gather all aspects of teshuvah together, to feel regret, to confess with clarity where we went wrong. Just as when warning a person who is transgressing an aveirah, we must warn him precisely and clearly, “Know that you’re transgressing this-and-this aveirah,” so too, we must be clear about our own situation. Lack of clarity will cause a person to stall rather than to progress forward.
It’s exactly as in money matters. People who aren’t clear about their financial situation—how much money they have, how much they owe to others—live in an incredible confusion. We ask the person, “How much debt do you have?” And he will say, “I believe that it’s about 60,000.” And we say, “What does belief have to do with this? How much do you owe?” And he is forced to sit down with pen and paper... and it will usually turn out that he owes far more than he originally thought. This is how it looks when there is no clarity.
If a person doesn’t confess where he went wrong, he lacks clarity. True, no one likes to have to pronounce, “The words that I have just spoken involve a serious issur d’Oraisa of lashon hara, about which the Chofetz Chaim tells us that I have transgressed numerous transgressions.” It’s far easier to simply say, “Listen, I’m not always a great tzadik... sometimes, I fail a little bit with avak lashon hara.... Chazal already tell us that everyone is sometimes nichshal in this. We can proceed....”
