Elul, the month immediately preceding Rosh Hashanah, has always been a season of reflection and repentance for Jews worldwide. The days leading up to the High Holidays carry an emotional weight for many, especially when repentance is framed as an inventory of everything we have done wrong.
But I believe meaningful repentance doesn’t come from shame or guilt. It happens through return.
Teshuvah is commonly translated as “repentance,” though the Hebrew word literally means “return.” I understand it as a return to our core selves: not the version of us defined by our traumas, harmful choices, or worst mistakes, but the essence sitting underneath those experiences, the person who remains capable of honesty, repair, and change.
I call this process the homecoming. The homecoming is the journey back to who you were before you started to build up walls and protect yourself. Somewhere along the way, most of us built up defenses, ways of coping, hiding, performing to keep our true self safe. The homecoming, rooted in much of what we learn from Internal Family Systems therapy, is finding our way back to our truest self, what I believe is our neshama.
The actual process of teshuvah describes the psychological work of accountability, repair, and forgiveness, both toward others and toward ourselves. Jewish tradition mapped out this framework three thousand years before psychology had the language for it. Maimonides taught that genuine teshuvah requires acknowledging and abandoning the harmful behavior, regretting it, confessing it, and resolving not to repeat it. When another person has been harmed, repentance also requires making amends and seeking that person’s forgiveness. Those steps map almost exactly onto what modern psychology recognizes as genuine accountability.
I find it helpful to organize that work into four steps:
Recognition: Name what you did without softening it, disguising it or shifting blame. Internally, that might sound like: “I broke someone’s trust and hurt them in the process.”
Remorse: Allow yourself to feel the weight of the harm—not merely the awkwardness or embarrassment of being caught. You might say: “I’ve been sitting with what I did, and I genuinely regret it.”
Restitution: Repair what can be repaired. That may mean replacing something, correcting a falsehood or asking what meaningful amends would look like: “I told someone what you shared with me in confidence. That wasn’t mine to share, and I understand if it changed how safe you feel with me. I’m not asking you to tell me it’s okay. I want you to know that I understand what I did, and I would like to know what might help, if anything.”
Resolution: Commit to behaving differently if the same situation arises again. The clearest evidence of change comes when you encounter a familiar situation and make a different choice.
Real accountability isn’t simply saying sorry that someone felt hurt. It means taking responsibility for our actions in a way that shows genuine remorse. Real accountability names the harm clearly, demonstrates that you understand what you did, how it affected the other person, and maps out how you intend to behave differently going forward. Real accountability says “I am sorry I hurt you, I broke your trust, I acknowledge I feel genuine remorse about it, and here is how I plan to change going forward.” It is different than simply saying “I’m sorry you felt that way.”
Taking accountability without being consumed by shame
It’s important to draw a line between accountability and drowning in shame over our mistakes.
The Torah gives us the very first example of this. After Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, they hide. Reflecting on that scene, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “Guilt is self-knowledge.” Shame makes us want to disappear; guilt is the quieter, harder voice that actually asks us to look our mistakes in the eye.
Modern scientific research has come to the same conclusion. In her extensive research on shame, Brené Brown describes guilt as potentially adaptive: it asks us to compare something we have done with our values. Shame, by contrast, turns a harmful action into a judgment about the entire self. Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt can direct our attention toward a behavior we need to address. Shame can convince us that our entire identity is irredeemable.
Related post: Finding forgiveness on Yom Kippur — advice from a therapist and rabbi
My Jewish faith teaches me that at the core of every human being sits a soul created in the image of God. That means no one is inherently bad and people cannot be reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever done. We can regret our actions without allowing shame to keep us stuck, rather than moving us forward. The goal is to feel remorse deeply enough to inspire change, without collapsing under it.
Judaism’s entire framework for teshuvah rests on the claim that we are not inherently bad, and are therefore capable of real change — that’s the whole premise behind recognition, remorse, restitution, and resolution. This isn’t a way of letting yourself off the hook. It’s closer to the opposite. Shame often gets in the way of accountability because it triggers self-protection — the urge to hide, deny, lash out, or defend ourselves — instead of honest reflection. When we believe that admitting wrongdoing will prove we are fundamentally bad, we become more invested in protecting ourselves than in recognizing the other person’s pain.
Healthy guilt can work differently; it can be sat with. It can be examined, learned from, and eventually resolved.
Is forgiveness always necessary?
I believe the answer is not always, and Jewish law agrees.
Jewish tradition strongly encourages granting forgiveness when someone has sincerely acknowledged the harm, made amends, and asked to be forgiven. Real teshuvah means acknowledging the harm and taking real steps to repair it; it isn’t just a promise that it won’t happen again. But genuine teshuvah is more than “I’m sorry you felt that way,” and forgiveness should not be confused with pretending the harm never happened.
Nor does forgiveness automatically require reconciliation. Forgiveness can be an internal or spiritual process; reconciliation is a relational decision about whether and how someone will remain in your life. Reconciliation may require rebuilt trust, changed behavior and a renewed sense of safety. Those things cannot be produced by an apology alone.
Forgiveness is not required in situations involving ongoing harm, abuse, or a complete absence of accountability. Extending forgiveness under those conditions isn’t virtuous, it’s often just another way of absorbing harm to keep the peace.
It’s also worth pointing out that forgiveness doesn’t require maintaining a relationship with that person. You can forgive someone while still deciding you don’t wish to reconcile the relationship. Forgiveness is an internal process; reconciliation is a separate decision about whether and how someone stays in your life. They don’t have to happen together, and sometimes they shouldn’t.
If someone hasn’t done the work, hasn’t named what they did, hasn’t attempted repair, hasn’t shown any real change, you’re not required to manufacture forgiveness you don’t actually feel. You’re allowed to still be working on it. You’re allowed to not arrive at forgiveness this year.
Extending forgiveness to yourself
Self-forgiveness is probably the most difficult form of forgiveness, largely because we tend to be far harsher on ourselves than we are toward others. This is where the distinction between shame and guilt needs to do its work.
But self-forgiveness should not be used to bypass accountability. If we rush to reassure ourselves before acknowledging the person we harmed, our desire for relief can become another way of avoiding responsibility.
Meaningful self-forgiveness requires the same steps you’d expect in forgiving someone else: naming specifically what happened, feeling the real weight of it, repairing it in whatever way is still possible, and deciding what you will do differently going forward. Skipping straight to “I’m over it” without that process tends to produce a fragile form of peace, one that cracks the next time guilt resurfaces.
The way to truly forgive yourself is to hold two things at once: you made mistakes and are still worthy of care. You can be humanly imperfect and still be capable of behaving differently. You can feel real guilt over your actions and still move forward to do better. Teshuvah isn’t asking you to just repent; it’s asking you to return to the very essence of you, the part that already knows healing is possible.
Teshuvah is available to anyone able to look at themselves without hiding in shame: to look honestly, take responsibility for what’s actually theirs to carry, and put the rest down. This is what coming home actually means. Returning to your neshama, or soul, the core self buried under the guilt and pain that still knows repair is possible.
