Rabbi Glenn Ettman
Teshuvah Is Not a U-Turn
Teshuvah is not a return to. It’s a bold reimagining of.
We’ve been taught teshuvah means “return” as if a better version of us is standing somewhere behind us, waiting to be rediscovered. But cheshbon hanefesh doesn’t have a rewind button. You cannot un-live a year. You cannot turn in place and land where you started, because the person who started is gone. Every joy changed you. Every disappointment shaped you. Every mistake left a mark that doesn’t come out in the wash.
Here’s the danger in insisting on return anyway: it misdiagnoses the problem. We treat this year’s failures as detours from a fixed self, like a wrong turn we just need to correct. But what if the self we’re trying to get back to was never the cure? What if it was already carrying the same blind spots, the same avoidance, the same fault lines that got us here in the first place? Return doesn’t fix that. It just reinstalls it.
So teshuvah, honestly done, is not a return to. It’s a reimagining of. Not who I was but who I might become, having failed and learned and poised to start again from wherever I am. Not restoration. Revision.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that anyone who wants real compassion for him/herself should begin each day anew, as if just born, and say: today is what counts (Likutey Halakhot, K’riat HaTorah 6:17).
This year, don’t just return.
Reimagine.