Teshuva, me'yirah and me'ahava

Ahava and yirah are the two fundamental ways that we relate to God. Each can lead one to teshuva, but they are not equivalent. In several lectures, the rabbis here have mentioned the teaching that teshuva me'yirah transforms intentional sins into unintentional sins in some spiritual sense, whereas teshuva me'ahava even transforms intentional sins into merits. Initially, this caused me great difficulty. It seems that the Talmud is establishing a clear hierarchy between two things that I had always considered to be opposite sides of a dialectic. If that were the case, I might be forced to reevaluate my general strategy for understanding Jewish hashkafa. There was one obvious way out, which seemed to be the one that the rabbeim here were taking, which is to say that this is not true, proper yirah, but a simple, infantile fear of punishment. Presumably, any higher motivation would then be me'ahava, making it a terribly vague category while resolving the problem of having one superior to the other. I am willing to accept that this surface level reading is in some sense correct, and comes to teach that even poorly motivated teshuva is worthwhile, but it is too facile to be satisfying and I think I can do better. Full disclaimer: I don't have a source that explicitly supports this reading.
Rather than seeing teshuva me'yirah as based on a desire to avoid the consequences of sin and teshuva me-ahava as done for its own sake, I would reverse the two.
Let us take yirah as a more mature emotion of awe -- the way of relating to God that we find when we stand on a mountain and watch the sunrise, or feel the power of a crowd of people acting together, or find beauty and precision in the study of math or physics. God as the distant, eternal, impersonal melekh, such that we are made aware of our own insignificance, yet can still be elevated by that very awareness. What would it mean to do teshuva motivated by this relationship? I would say that it would be a recognition of the moral truth in the universe that God represents. To know that there is right and there is wrong, and you have done wrong, and thus to feel remorse. Your remorse is a demonstration of one of two things: either you were overcome by your yetzer hara, or you were not as cognizant of the immorality of your act at the time as you are now. This brings me to several relevant halakhic points. First, one's true will is considered to be that of the higher parts of the soul, which has legal ramifications (if a man refuses to give his wife a get, the court is authorized to beat the yetzer hara out of him until his true will can act). Second, one who sins in ignorance is not considered to have deliberately sinned. Third, accidental sins can be atoned for through human action, particularly sacrifice. Thus, the sinner can make a legal case before God that his sin ought to be counted as unintentional, and ask that God take the lenient position and give him the chance to rectify it himself. He is asking for justice to be done in a merciful way.
The one who comes to teshuva through ahava, on the other hand, circumvents justice entirely. Ahava is the relation to God as the loving, intimate, personal av that we find in private prayer, or when we see the divine in a close friend or family member, or feel moved by an act of chesed. How do I see this moving one to teshuva? He realizes that sin creates a separation between the self and God, and is pained by that fact. He is moved to approach God, not as a defendant before the judge of the world, but as a child, a friend, or a spouse; admits his fault; apologizes; and asks for help in repairing the relationship.
In both cases, God, in his infinite mercy, grants exactly what is sincerely asked of him. The one seeks to correct his mistake in awe of the truth and majesty of the moral system, and asks for the means to do so within the bounds of justice, and God accepts his case as just. The other seeks to remove a barrier out of longing for connection and relationship, and finds it turned into a bridge. In this reading, neither is so superior as to make the other superfluous. The balance and dialectic of avinu malkeinu is preserved.

Some updates on yeshiva life:
Rosh Hashana was intense. It is easy to forget over a year what a trial of stamina it is. I slept in the beit midrash to ensure that I would wake up on time, and started praying as soon as I woke up as the first people entered. That meant that I was praying roughly 6:00-1:30, with a short kiddush break around 10:00, two days in a row, and then more in the afternoons and evenings. Still, I somehow managed to maintain decent kavanah through most of it, and it was a powerfully moving experience. Lots of good food, too, although the fish heads were rather dodgy. Shabbat the next day, morning services began at eight and ran less than three hours. Practically a day off!
Tzom Gedalia, we had the afternoon off, so I went to go take a nap in the neighborhood park. On my way, I thought, "I have plenty of time, why not get a bit of a walk and go to Gan Sacher for the nap?" Walked a couple blocks in that direction, then thought, "Screw napping, I'm going to take a proper walk; follow the sun into the Judean hills, then chase my shadow home!" Obviously, I was missing the ache in my legs from standing all day on Rosh Hashanah. Should probably have gone back and changed out of my sandals at that point. So it goes. The hills, by the way, are breathtakingly beautiful. Also, I got back into the city just as the the sunlight was starting to change the Jerusalem stone into glowing, rosy-hued blocks of magic. Good times. I haven't traveled as much as I would like, but I have seen enough cities that it is not entirely trivial to say that Jerusalem at sunset is the most lovely. I also happened to walk by Rabinowiz park on my way back. The slide there is my earliest memory of Israel. I was almost surprised to find that it is still really cool and visually interesting twenty years older.

Well, that was long. Still need to work on that. You wouldn't believe how much I didn't say about yirah and ahava!

Shana tova u'metuka!
Shalom,
-Ethan