As a little girl, I imagined people “doing Teshuva” bent over a workbench pounding away with a heavy hammer to achieve something, a reshaping of some hard wood or metal into a desirable form. I laughed at my juvenile imagination when I got older. And though I don’t know what might have inspired that association, and what Freud would make of it, it occurs to me now that my tactile perceptions of Teshuva may be worth probing for insight.

This time of year offers us a chance to begin again, to reshape ourselves through the process of Teshuva. It is a time when we are invited to disprove the cynicism that does not allow us the optimism and faith in the possibility that human beings can change.

The first rule of Yom Kippur—the most spiritual day of the year, the day of Teshuva—concerns itself not with prayer or introspection, but with abstaining from food and drink. That not eating should take a central place in how we mark Yom Kippur seems to suggest that the kind of deep change we are meant to seek at this time of year, is achieved not so much by spiritual and sublime aspirations, as by practical changes in the quotidian and commonplace behaviors of our day to day lives.

Like eating. You are what you eat, goes the saying, and according to the Rebbes of Chabad, what you feed your child is as important as what you teach your child. Parents hoping to mold their children into refined, sensitive adults are advised to teach them good, kosher eating habits before they teach them poetry or philosophy. It may be prosaic and practicable, but it's where doing teshuva begins—at the breakfast table.

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Whose Life Are You Living?

A Yom Kippur video ad by Chabad produced hours after his death, features a clip of Steve Jobs speaking to university students. From the man who changed the face of the modern world, a few profound words of guidance:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You have to trust in something.”

Trust, not denial, faith, not doubt, were the values that nurtured Steve Jobs’s vision, his genius and his desire to make a transformative difference in life as we know it.

Jobs, the individual who altered human communications, reminded his listeners that there is a rhyme and reason to the madness of life, and that we ought not discard our individual histories and try to live another’s life, but better find our grounding in our past, and build our future from there.

Steve Jobs died young but advanced our reality many lifetimes. His death, a few days before Yom Kippur, now gives us more food for thought.