Moving Forward From the Past

What does Yom Kippur teach about regret? 

Every one of us carries a memory that pulls us backward. Yom Kippur doesn’t ask us to erase it — it teaches us how to transform it into the beginning of our becoming.

There is a truth we rarely say out loud during the High Holidays, yet nearly every one of us carries it quietly: We all have a moment we wish we could go back and change. A word spoken too sharply. A silence held too long. A decision we wish we had made differently. A version of ourselves we wish we could rewrite. We rarely admit this, but it lives inside us — the ache of wanting to go back.

Psychology calls this retrospective clarity: the painful awareness that the person we were then did not have the tools, insight or emotional maturity we have now. Jewish tradition calls it teshuvah: the turning of the heart toward who we are meant to be.

Here is the truth worth saying plainly: Yom Kippur is not about going back. Yom Kippur is about ending the war with the past. We cannot go back. But we can go forward differently.

The Torah says, “You shall return to the Lord your God.” It does not say: “You shall return to the moment before the mistake” or “You shall return to the version of yourself you wish you had been.”

The Torah understands something psychology teaches, too: The return is forward, not backward. The return is internal, not historical. The return is about becoming, not undoing.