The Days of Awe challenge us to do the right thing, even when it is hard, so that we can repair harm and be the best version of ourselves as we enter the new year. Every year, inevitably, there is at least one issue that arises where I think that, you know, maybe it's best if I don't do t'shuvah for that one. Maybe doing the "right thing" would actually be the wrong thing to do here. Let sleeping dogs lie, am I right?
Maybe they don't want an apology from me, and apologizing would just upset them? Maybe I kept a secret, but wouldn't telling the truth about that secret just create a conflict where there wasn't one before? When you think about it, trying to repair this mistake would actually be more selfish of me. So, clearly, I should do nothing, move on, not think about it, and leave things as they are.
The kabbalist Moses Cordovero proposed that reaching a sufficient understanding of your misdeeds alone can still be t'shuvah:
Understanding is repentance. And this is that one [should] repent - as there is nothing as important as it, since it repairs every defect. And like it is the way of Understanding to sweeten all of the judgments and to nullify their bitterness, so [should] a person repent and fix every defect. And one who ponders repentance all of his days causes Understanding to shine upon him all of his days. 'And it comes out that all of his days are in repentance' - which is [to say that he] is including himself in Understanding, which is Repentance. — Tomer Devorah 4:1
Honestly, I disagree! I think that this is avoidant behavior. Maybe sometimes there are situations where it is too late or impossible to apologize, but if something only happened in the last year? "T'shuvah through understanding alone" feels like a bad excuse. If you caused harm, you should be brave enough to try and repair that harm—remaining open to the possibility that your apology will be rejected.
Sometimes, your honesty, bravery, and vulnerability will blow up in your face. Your apology will be rejected. Your honesty will end a relationship. Your vulnerability will be misinterpreted as manipulation. It's so easy to tell ourselves that we don't need to do t'shuvah because these outcomes are not worth the risk. However, the RamBam teaches that we should make ourselves open to t'shuvah and generous with forgiveness. We should keep the door open to repair.
Our fear of having the door to forgiveness shut in our face is not the same as the door being closed. Our avoidance of difficult t'shuvah closes the door but it does not lock it and it does not absolve us of our responsibility to repair. We are obligated to try.
Just because your t'shuvah was rejected or ignored does not mean you did the wrong thing by trying. Cordovero is right that it is meaningful that you understood that you needed to do t'shuvah, but the RamBam is correct that you must also be brave enough to make amends. If you have been keeping a secret from someone, it will snowball and become worse the longer you keep that secret, so you must do t'shuvah even if learning that secret would be distressing. You must do the right thing, even when it is uncomfortable. You cannot ignore a wound and hope it goes away. Often, the wound is a crack in a window, which will only worsen until replaced as it weathers each and every storm.
When Making T'shuvah is Avoidance
On the flip-side, there are times when I feel like I should do t'shuvah for something I did that made someone unhappy, even though I did the right thing. This, too, is conflict avoidance. Why allow a conflict to linger when it could be resolved by admitting a fault that is not there? Maybe I was stubborn. Maybe I should not have enforced that boundary. Maybe I should not have spoken truth to power. Maybe I should have been a simple stone in peaceful yirah of my place in the cosmos. It is a regret for having lost favor with someone who tried to do something unacceptable.
A lot of people have this instinct to apologize whenever somebody is upset with us, even if we did nothing wrong. It is easier to give in to their demands and avoid conflict than to stand our ground. A lot of neurodivergent people simply assume that any time anyone is upset with us, it must be because we unwittingly did something wrong according to the unknowable infinite list of secret social rules.
In these cases, it can actually be more uncomfortable to not make t'shuvah. The desire to fawn and appease just to ease the tension between you can feel so much more alluring than sitting with the fact that you did the right thing and somebody else lashed out at you or took issue with it for their own reasons. Somebody being upset with you does not inherently mean they are right to be upset. Often, allistic people take issue with Autistic people for things we do that they do not like but which do not hurt anybody.
Sometimes, the desire to reconcile with someone who hurt you can manifest as thinking that you should make t'shuvah. You want t'shuvah from them. You want to repair the relationship. So you try to eat crow and apologize for not gracefully fawning enough to their mistreatment of you. Maybe if you apologize first, they will realize their own contribution to the conflict and apologize in return. This will not be a successful reconciliation. You are setting yourself up to be harmed again in the same exact way. You are validating and enabling their harmful behaviors. This is not t'shuvah. This is fawning. Nobody gets better from this.
Cordovero is correct that understanding is sacred. A deep enough understanding allows you to know that whether your behavior was right or wrong is not determined by if it makes other people like you or even tolerate you. Sometimes, doing the right thing will make you unpopular. There is nobody in this world without an enemy. You do not need to apologize to someone for not giving them what they wanted. There is not always a correct thing you could have done that makes everyone happy—including yourself.
T'shuvah for Avoidance
Sometimes, avoidance is exactly what we must make t'shuvah for. We should have self-advocated. We should have confronted a problem instead of letting it fester. We should have thought about the things we don't like thinking about and felt the feelings we didn't want to feel. Things became worse because we were afraid of confrontation. We misbehaved because of festering feelings that we wanted to pretend were not there.
Emotions become cross-wired. Feelings from what we are avoiding become misdirected at someone who has nothing to do with the source of those emotions. Or, we intentionally misattribute our feelings to other sources, because we don't want to admit how we feel about the true source. Haven't we all known someone who just kinda sucks, but we all know that if they got divorced or dumped their partner that they'd start getting better? They redirect all of their negative marital emotions outward at everyone else in their life to avoid thinking about how unhappy they are in their relationship.
Sometimes, you are mad at someone who you cannot confront, so instead of confronting your feelings, you confront your friends. Your crush rejects you and starts dating someone else—so you take it out on an unrelated third party. If you directed your anger at your crush, or his new partner, then you would have to confront that you were rejected, you could not keep avoiding reality, so instead you blame someone else—perhaps the new partner, or the friend who introduced them.
At a larger scale, these sorts of avoidant thought patterns, where we flee the cognitive dissonance of the truth and direct our anxieties elsewhere, can manifest as Phantasms: Irrational beliefs and conspiracy theories that serve to protect us from confronting even more unsettling truths about our lives or the world. It is easier to believe that 15-minute cities are a conspiracy to take away our freedoms, than to confront the reality that our luxurious car-driven lifestyles are driving factors of climate change. It is easier to believe that someone is a liar than that they are telling you an unfortunate truth.
Sometimes, you know that someone else wants to confront you about something, and you just avoid them. You run away. You do everything you can to delay the conversation. Things will remain peaceful and good if you can just avoid being alone in a room with them. This is no way to live and it is cowardly. Take today to reach out to that person and start that conversation—now.
Sometimes, T'shuvah sucks. Sometimes, it makes you feel worse than when you set out to do it. Yet still, we are obligated to do it. Yet still, we are always going to live better lives in the long-run if we continue to repair that which has been damaged and try to be better people than we were the day before. Do not avoid that which you know will feel bad, or it will linger as tension in your shoulders forever. It adds up. You must be brave, and accept the awful things that you will feel. You must be willing to feel the pain. You must make t'shuvah, even when it hurts. Even the painful t'shuvah helps to make the world a place that we can live in.