Teshuvah also is owed to your spouse

By Jené Verchick, Ph.D., in Los Angeles

Every year at this season we talk about teshuvah, our return. We usually picture it as something between a person and God. We think about the ways we have missed the mark, and we resolve to do better. That work is holy, and it is worth doing. But teshuvah was never meant to stop at the synagogue door. Some of the most important returning we do is toward the person we married.

The word teshuvah means return, not apology. That distinction matters in a marriage. An apology can be a single sentence you say to end a fight. A return is a direction. It is turning your body back toward someone you had slowly turned away from, often without noticing you were doing it.

Maimonides laid out the steps of teshuvah plainly. You recognize what you did. You feel the regret of it. You say it out loud to the one you wronged. And you resolve, when the same moment comes again, to choose differently. Read that as a husband or a wife, and it stops being abstract. Most of us are very good at the private regret and very bad at the part where we say it out loud to the person across the table.

Here is the part I love about this season. Teshuvah assumes that people can change. The whole idea rests on it. Our tradition does not treat us as fixed, and it does not treat a marriage as sealed. The gates are described as always open. After more than 26 years of sitting with couples, I can tell you that this is not only a beautiful idea. It is true. I have watched marriages that looked finished come back to life, not through some dramatic gesture, but through two people deciding to turn back toward each other.

A real return is small and specific. It is not “I am sorry you feel that way,” which is not teshuvah at all. It is “I have been short with you for weeks and I know it, and I do not want to be.” It is picking back up the small habits you quietly dropped. The question you used to ask about their day. The hand on the shoulder walking past. The couples who last are not the ones who never drift. They are the ones who notice the drift and turn around.

This is also why I think the High Holidays are a gift to a marriage, not only to a soul. Most of the year, nothing forces the conversation. Life is loud, the children need things, the calendar fills. Then the season arrives and hands you a built-in reason to stop and take account. Use it. Sit with the honest question the days are asking. Where have I turned away from this person, and how do I turn back.

You do not need the perfect words. Teshuvah has never required eloquence, only sincerity and a change of direction. If you have been living beside your spouse like a good roommate, efficient and polite and a little far away, this is the season to come home to them. Not with a grand speech. With a turn of the body and a softening of the voice, and the willingness to say the true thing out loud.

May this be a year of real return, in every room of your life, including the one where you sleep beside the person you chose. G’mar chatimah tovah.

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Dr. Jené Verchick is a licensed psychologist with 26+ years working with couples. She works with couples throughout California. Learn more about her work as a couples therapist in San Diego.