Yom Kippur: Coming Back To Ourselves

By: Tamara Gestetner, LMFT

I used to think teshuvah was about punishment. Not intellectually, I knew better than that. But somewhere underneath the knowing, in the place where old habits of thought live, Yom Kippur felt like a courtroom and teshuvah felt like the sentence you gave yourself before the judge could give you a worse one. I don’t think that anymore, and the thing that changed my mind wasn’t a text I studied, it was watching people heal in my office for years.

Here’s what I see, over and over, with almost everyone who sits across from me. The moment a person realizes they can actually change—not just cope or manage the damage—but actually change, is the moment their body relaxes. You can watch it happen in real time. Shoulders drop. The voice softens. People come in bracing for me to confirm the worst thing they believe about themselves; instead, I tell them that the pattern they’ve been repeating for fifteen years is not who they are, it’s just the deepest groove their life was worn so far, and grooves can be re-cut. Not because change is easy. (It’s the hardest work most people ever do.) But because it means the story isn’t finished being written. It means the person they were last year or last month, or in the fight they had this morning, isn’t a life sentence. There’s a word for that possibility in Judaism and we say it every year like it’s obvious. But it isn’t obvious at all. It’s actually kind of stunning if you let yourself feel the size of it. Hashem built an entire system around the idea that we are never stuck being who we thought we were.

I don’t think Hashem wants teshuvah from us because He’s waiting to catch us falling short. I think teshuvah exists because the alternative—a world with no way back—would be unbearable. Imagine believing that every choice you ever made was permanent and there was no way back to who you were meant to be. Nobody could live with that reality. It would devastate a person. I’ve sat with people who believe this about themselves, who treat one bad year, one failed marriage, one period of losing themselves as proof of some unalterable identity. And the suffering that comes from that belief is a category heavier than the suffering that comes from the original mistake.

Teshuvah is the door out of that prison. The fact that it exists at all, that it’s built into the calendar every year whether we’re ready or not, is not a threat. It’s a kindness so large I sometimes think we’ve gotten too used to it to notice.

I think about my own life this way now too. There are things I did this year that I’m not proud of, ways I was short with my kids, moments I chose comfort over courage, times I knew the right thing and did the easier thing instead. For a long time, my instinct was to hide from that list of shortcomings, to explain it away or just not look.

What has slowly changed is that I’m starting to see the looking itself as an act of love rather than an act of shame. Hashem isn’t asking me to catalog my failures because He enjoys watching me squirm. He’s asking me to acknowledge them because He already believes that I can be different, and teshuvah is the mechanism by which that belief becomes actualized.

There’s a particular client whom I think about this time of year, a person who came to me convinced that she simply could not be trusted with her own temper. That was the sentence she’d given herself and it was final and unappealable. We spent months working not on suppressing the anger, but on understanding what it was protecting. And somewhere in that work she stopped being a person managing a flaw and slowly became a person who occasionally got angry and knew what to do about it. That is an entirely different identity. The first one is a life sentence. The second one is just being human. I think that shift, from identity to event, from who we are to what we did, is the entire engine of teshuvah, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s also the entire engine of good therapy.

That reframing changes what the work feels like. Among my clients, the ones who make real change aren’t the ones who beat themselves up the hardest. In fact, it’s almost always the opposite. The clients stuck in shame spirals are usually the ones making the least actual progress, because shame is a terrible engine, it burns hot and fast and leaves nothing behind but more shame. The clients who make the greatest change in their lives are the ones who can honestly look at a pattern, feel appropriately sorry about it, and then let that sorrow turn into action instead of paralysis. Teshuvah asks the same thing. Not endless self-flagellation, one honest look, followed by a turn. The word itself means return, not punishment; not erasure, but return. Return to who I am underneath the year’s mistakes, the person G-d sees when He looks at me, the person I often overlook in the course of a difficult year.

I think that’s why the process of teshuvah has stages instead of just an apology. Regret, confession, and a resolution to change, in that order, because regret alone curdles into shame if you stop there, and confession alone is just information without transformation. It’s the turn that matters most, the actual decision to walk differently next time you’re standing at the same fork. Judaism doesn’t ask us to feel bad forever; it asks us to feel it honestly once, and then move on.

I think about this every year when I actually stand in shul on Yom Kippur, saying the same viduy I’ve said my whole life, the alphabetical list of communal sins that mostly don’t apply to me individually. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, we have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen, and so forth, through the alef bet, and the genius of it is that it’s written in the plural. Nobody is up there alone reciting their private rap sheet. We’re saying it together, as a community, which means nobody has to carry the full weight of their own list by themselves. That structure alone tells you something about what Hashem actually wants from the day. If the goal were pure punishment, you wouldn’t design a confession that lets people quietly pass over the sins that aren’t theirs and still feel covered by the ones that are. You’d want everyone isolated with their own specific failures, facing them alone. Instead, we’re given a communal script, sung, sometimes almost cheerfully, which has always struck me as strange until I understood it as the point. Even the confession is designed to hold you rather than crush you.

I think about my own children in this too, because parenting has taught me more about teshuvah than any text ever did. When my kids mess up and come to me scared, bracing for punishment, the moment that actually changes them isn’t the consequence, it’s the fact that I still want them close afterward. That I don’t love them less for having done the thing. If anything, I think most parents love their children more in that moment, because vulnerability does that, it opens something up. I have to believe G-d relates to us at least that well, probably infinitely better, and that the entire architecture of these ten days exists to make us feel it rather than just believe it. Not a courtroom scene where the verdict is in doubt before the gavel falls, but something closer to a parent kneeling down at eye level saying, “I already know and I already love you, so let’s figure out how we can do this differently together.”

Maybe that’s the real gift of these ten days. Not that we’re forced to confront what we’ve done wrong, but that we’re given—every single year—a guaranteed way back to ourselves. Hashem wants our teshuvah for the same reason a parent wants their child to come back inside when it’s cold out. Not to punish the child for leaving. But because there’s nothing He wants more than for us to walk back through the door, back to Him.

That’s not a courtroom. That’s a home where the porch lights are always on, no matter how many times we’ve wandered off, no matter how long we took to turn around. And maybe that’s the piece I want to carry into this Yom Kippur more than any resolution or specific list of what I’ll do better. Not fear of the book being written, but gratitude that the pen is somehow still in my hand.

To my clients, readers, and podcast guests who have trusted me with a piece of their story this year, thank you for letting me be a part of it. I wish you all a gentle Yom Kippur, one that brings you back to yourself with more compassion than judgment. G’mar chatimah tovah. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.