It always bothers me when I read the first sentence of the Laws of Repentance from Maimonides’ Mishne Torah. He writes there the following (my translation):

Regarding all the mitzvoth of the Torah, whether positive or negative, if someone violates any one of them, whether intentionally or accidentally, when he repents and ceases sinning, he must confess his sins before God … this confessing is a positive commandment.

What is strange about his description is that we would expect Maimonides to write that repenting itself is a mitzvah. But by writing “when he repents” Maimonides seems to be saying that if a person should happen to repent then he gets to do the mitzvah of confession. So is a person required to repent in the first place?

Maimonides uses the word “when” not “if” so that seems to imply a person is expected, even required to repent from his sins. Still this is a pretty vague way of commanding people to repent. And when it comes to counting mitzvoth, Maimonides only considers the act of confession to be a mitzvah, not the actual repentance. He titles this section of his book, Laws of Repentance, but does not consider repentance to be a law!

So if there is no commandment to repent but there is nevertheless a requirement to repent, what is the source of this requirement? Usually when a person has a job, his employer has certain expectation of his employee that may be communicated orally or in writing. For example, Come on time, Don’t use social media on work time, Work on your assignments. If the employee comes late or does not do his assignments, the employer should not have to tell the worker to to stop coming late or stop neglecting his work. The expectation to cease breaking the rules is subsumed within each
work rule. The employer does not say, And if you break any of these rules, stop breaking them! That is the meaning of the rules themselves.

Similarly each Torah laws contains within it the obligation to stop violating it, that is what a law is. If the Torah says eat kosher food, then the Torah is saying to stop eating that cheese burger. So the concept of repentance, tshuva , is concomitant to any law system and there cannot be a separate law prohibiting the violation the law. So too, there cannot be a mitzvah that we must keep the Torah. It is a logical redundancy.

That is the reason Maimonides does not count tshuva as a commandment but nevertheless assumes there is a requirement to do tshuva. The only mitzvah left to actually count is the act of confession. Maimonides considers this act to be crucial. Without expressing one’s commitment in words, a person will begin to view his commitment as ephemeral and will begin to create excuses for his laxity. Tshuva itself is part of every law of the Torah.