Okay, someone asked me to do 'sin' as the next Why Judeo-Christian Values Aren't a Thing thread, so let's look at this. "It is in the nature of man to sin". Okay, but what does that mean? Not the same thing in Christianity and Judaism, turns out.
The Christian (and therefore common to Western culture) meaning is to commit an offense, to do wrong. To trespass against God. To act in an evil way. It's a negative mark on your soul.
The Hebrew word most often translated as sin is 'chata' (חטא) which means, literally "to miss the mark". To swing and miss. To shoot wide of the goal. To veer off course. It's not necessarily to do evil, it's most often a failure to succeed at doing good.
So a phrase like "it's in the nature of man to sin" takes a radically different meaning. In the Jewish framework, that's just saying "it's in man's nature to try and fail. We're not perfect." That's a far cry from "it's in man's nature to do evil. We are inherently bad."
If it's in man's nature to do evil, and we don't want to do evil then we have to fight our nature. There's no way to change it, we just have to fight it, and when we inevitably fail there's no way to fix it, because it's inherent in who we are.
But if it's in man's nature to miss the mark, we can incorporate improvement into our lives. We'll never be totally perfect, we'll always miss sometimes, but we can improve our aim. And when we've gone off the path, we can course correct and come back.
Which is what repenting and atoning are all about in Jewish tradition. The word for atonement is 'teshuva' (תשובה), which literally means "returning". We have missed the mark, or wandered from the path, so we need to return to the path - move back closer to the goal.
We might not make it *onto* the goal, we might not manage to hit the bullseye directly, but getting closer is a good thing. We are nearer to the mark. We've improved, and we can keep improving. It's a process of moving on a spectrum, not a good/evil binary.
Importantly, we divide sin into two categories - sins against God and sins against our fellow humans. If we've missed the mark in our responsibilities towards God, then the process of returning is encapsulated. We admit we were off, we accept it, and we work on doing better.
If we have missed the mark our responsibilities to our fellow humans, though, no amount of apologizing to God is going to make it better. We can't get closer to the mark just by feeling bad about it and trying not to do it again. We *also* have to correct the wrong we did.
Which is, again, pretty different from the idea that if we did an evil act, that act is done, the sin is on our souls and that's that. The Jewish framework says no, you threw a dart and it's off the mark, go get that dart back and try to get it closer to center.
