What Is Teshuva? The Jewish Art of Beginning Again

If you ask most people what the High Holy Days are about, they will say repentance. And if you ask what repentance means, they will say: feeling bad about the things you did wrong.

The Jewish concept of teshuva is more interesting than that, and more hopeful. Understanding it changes not just how you approach the High Holy Days but how you think about human change in general.

What Does Teshuva Mean?

Teshuva comes from the Hebrew root shuv, meaning to return or to turn back. It is usually translated into English as repentance, but that translation loses something essential. Repentance implies guilt and suffering as the goal. Teshuva is about direction, not feeling. It is a turn — a reorientation — toward something better.

The question teshuva asks is not: how terrible do you feel about what you did? The question is: which way are you facing now? Are you moving toward the person you want to be, or away from them?

The Steps of Teshuva

Maimonides, the great 12th-century Jewish philosopher and legal authority, laid out the requirements of genuine teshuva in his Mishneh Torah. His framework remains the most widely cited description of how teshuva actually works.

Recognizing the Wrong

Teshuva begins with honest recognition — not generalized guilt, but specific acknowledgment. Not ‘I have not been a great person this year’ but ‘I said something cruel to my sister in March and I have been avoiding thinking about it since.’ The tradition is not interested in vague self-criticism. It wants specific honesty.

Remorse Without Wallowing

The tradition calls for genuine regret — charatah — for the wrong done. But Maimonides is careful to distinguish this from excessive guilt or self-punishment. The goal of remorse is to create the motivation for change, not to become an end in itself. There is a version of guilt that becomes self-indulgent: endlessly rehearsing your failures as a substitute for actually addressing them. Teshuva is not that.

Repairing What Can Be Repaired

If the wrong involved another person, the tradition is unequivocal: you must go to them. You must ask forgiveness directly. No amount of prayer or fasting on Yom Kippur will atone for wrongs done to another human being without the human work of repair coming first. This is the most demanding part of teshuva — and often the most transformative.

Genuine Commitment to Change

Teshuva is not complete without a sincere intention not to repeat the behavior. Maimonides writes that the test of genuine teshuva is this: if the person encounters the same situation again and has the ability to sin but refrains, having genuinely changed — that is teshuva.

What Teshuva Is Not

Teshuva is not about accumulating guilt. The tradition is remarkably clear that God does not want our misery — God wants our change. Excessive guilt that paralyzes rather than motivates is not teshuva. It is stuck.

Teshuva is also not a transaction. You cannot perform the right external behaviors and consider the inner work done. The High Holy Day services — the prayers, the fast, the shofar — are tools that create the conditions for teshuva. They are not substitutes for it.

And teshuva is not a once-a-year event that can be rushed through in the final days before Yom Kippur. The tradition gives us a full month of Elul before the High Holy Days precisely because the inner work takes time. That is why Elul exists: not as a countdown to a deadline, but as a genuine preparation.

Why Teshuva Is One of Judaism’s Greatest Gifts

At its core, teshuva rests on a claim that is genuinely radical: human beings can change. Not just modify behavior around the edges, but genuinely transform. The tradition does not accept determinism — the idea that people are who they are and cannot be otherwise. It insists, with remarkable optimism, that the person who harmed someone last year is capable of being the person who repairs that harm this year.

Rabbi Yochanan, one of the great sages of the Talmud, said: Great is teshuva, for it reaches the throne of glory. The rabbis also taught that in the place where those who have returned through teshuva stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand. Teshuva is not second-best. In some ways, the tradition considers it higher than never having needed it in the first place — because the person who has genuinely turned has demonstrated a capacity for change that the person who has never been tested has not yet shown.

Practicing Teshuva During the High Holy Days

The High Holy Day season — from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, with the preparatory month of Elul before it — is the traditional time for the deep work of teshuva. The season’s prayers, music, and practices are all designed to support this work.

At Neshamah, Rabbi Amy’s teaching throughout the High Holy Days engages directly with teshuva — not as a theological concept to be explained and set aside, but as a living practice to be applied to real life. The questions she raises are the ones worth sitting with: Where did I hold back this year? What relationship needs attention? What have I been meaning to do differently and not yet done?

Come and do the work in community. It is easier — and it goes deeper — than doing it alone. Reserve your place at niboca.org/high-holy-days/