Dealing with Guilt | Elul with the Chief

Understanding that feelings of guilt come from the depth of the soul, can empower us to transform the discomfort they bring into a catalyst for personal change and new beginnings.

This understanding comes from understanding the deeper meaning of teshuva, which is often mistranslated as repentance. Repentance comes from the Latin for penitence, meaning remorse and regret. The same root gives us penitentiary. A prison. Time served for what you have done.

That is not what teshuva means. Teshuva means return. During Elul, the month of teshuva, we are then faced with a difficult question: if teshuva is return, what is it we are returning to?

The distinction is not just semantic. It changes what a person is actually being asked to do at this time of year, and what they are being asked to believe about themselves.

The parsha of Nitzavim is read every year in the days before Rosh Hashanah. Drawing on this parsha, Pirkei Avot, the Ramban, the Rambam and others, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein follows that question from guilt through to redemption, and asks what the discomfort has been trying to tell us all along.

Key Questions

• Guilt tells us something is wrong. Why can't it tell us what is right?

• Is the wrong a person has done evidence of who they are, or evidence of the distance they have travelled from it?

• If our deepest nature is already good, why would we need commandments at all?

• If the mitzvot express who we already are, why do they so often feel like rules imposed from outside?