Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is something strange about Selichot.
Selichot means “forgiveness” in Hebrew and refers to a series of penitential prayers and poems recited to ask God for mercy before and during the High Holidays.
In Ashkenazi tradition, Selichot begins on September 5, 2026, the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah. In Sephardic tradition, it began earlier at the start of the Hebrew month of Elul on August 16, 2026, and continues nightly through the eve of Yom Kippur.
During Selichot, Jews wake up early or stay up late to recite prayers that are, in many ways, repetitive. We confess. We ask forgiveness. We invoke God’s mercy. We admit our failures. And then, not long afterward, we do it again.
At first glance, it can seem excessive. How many times can a person say, “I’m sorry”?
But perhaps that is exactly the point. Judaism gives us not a ritual of perfection, but a ritual of return. That distinction makes all the difference in relationships.
We often enter relationships believing love will be measured by how naturally two people fit together. We talk endlessly about compatibility, chemistry, attachment styles, communication styles, red flags, green flags, boundaries, and whether someone is “right for us.”
These things matter, but relationships eventually ask a much more uncomfortable question: What do you do when you realize that some of what you blamed on a relationship or another person is actually coming from you?
That is the question Selichot forces us to confront.
During Selichot, we do not stand before God explaining why our behavior made sense at the time. We do not construct a legal defense. We do not say, “Yes, I behaved badly, but you have to understand what the other person did first.”
We say, “We have sinned.” Period. No buts. There is something beautiful about the simplicity of that sentence.
Most of us are extraordinarily talented defense attorneys when representing ourselves. We explain our impatience as frustration, our criticism as honesty, our control as concern, our withdrawal as self-protection, our anger as justified, our fear as intuition. Sometimes these explanations are true, but Selichot asks us to go one layer deeper: Maybe you had a reason, but did you do the right thing?
It’s a question that can transform a relationship.
One of the easiest mistakes in any relationship is confusing our emotional experience of something with the truth about it. I feel threatened, therefore they must be threatening me. I feel abandoned, therefore they must be abandoning me. I feel controlled, therefore they must be controlling me. I feel uncertain, therefore something must be wrong with the relationship.
But our feelings, while real, are not always reliable narrators. Sometimes the person standing in front of us is not the person who hurt us before. Sometimes we are fighting ghosts. Sometimes we are reacting not to what is happening, but to what we are afraid might happen.
Selichot gives us a language for admitting that.
There is another remarkable feature of the prayers: Confession is traditionally spoken in the plural. “Ashamnu, bagadnu,” we say in Hebrew. “We have been guilty, we have betrayed.” Why confess sins we may not personally have committed?
There are many explanations, but one lesson is especially relevant to relationships: Judaism refuses to let us imagine ourselves merely as individuals. In a relationship, two people affect one another. Two people carry one another. Two people participate in systems of behavior larger than themselves. Two people create an ecosystem together.
One person becomes anxious, so the other withdraws. The withdrawal creates more anxiety. The anxiety produces pressure. The pressure produces more withdrawal. Eventually each person can point convincingly to the other and say, “See? This is the problem.”
But if both people are only interested in proving who started the cycle, the relationship will never escape it. Repair begins when each person asks a different question: “What was my part?” That is Selichot.
Selichot does not require us to take responsibility for things we did not do, but it does demand ruthless honesty about the part that belongs to us. Where was I impatient? Where did I assume the worst? Where did I scold instead of communicate? Where did I allow fear to become accusation? Where did I demand certainty that the other person could not possibly provide? Where did I expect someone to understand needs I had never properly articulated? Where did I confuse loving someone with trying to manage them?
These are more challenging questions — because they leave us with something to do. And Judaism is deeply suspicious of remorse that asks nothing of us. Maimonides famously describes teshuvah not just as repentance, but as change: recognizing the wrong and becoming capable of behaving differently when confronted with the same situation again.
That final part is everything, and it may be one of the most useful definitions of growth in a relationship.
It is relatively easy to recognize your mistakes after losing someone. It is much harder when your heart rate is elevated, when you feel ignored, when someone disappoints you, when plans change, when your insecurity is activated, when the person you love says something that touches an old wound.
That is when teshuvah becomes real. Can I pause before turning fear into certainty? Can I ask instead of accuse? Can I tolerate discomfort without demanding immediate resolution? Can I allow someone to disappoint me without rewriting my entire understanding of who they are? Can I separate what is happening now from what happened to me years ago?
These are Selichot questions.
And there is one more lesson hidden inside the prayers that I find even more profound: We ask for forgiveness again and again because Judaism assumes that the door remains open. Teshuvah does not guarantee a particular outcome, but it does guarantee that we do not have to remain the person who made the mistake.
That means our worst moment is not our permanent identity. We can be impatient without becoming “an impatient person” forever. We can behave selfishly without being eternally selfish. We can mishandle love without concluding that we are incapable of loving well.
Judaism leaves room for the person we might still become.
Perhaps that is why Selichot comes before Rosh Hashanah. Before Judaism asks us to enter a new year, it asks us to examine the version of ourselves we are bringing into it. A new year means very little if we carry the same reflexes, resentments, fears, defenses, and habits into it unchanged.
And the same is true of relationships. You cannot build a new relationship with an old operating system. Nor can you repair an existing relationship merely by promising to “try harder.” You have to understand yourself differently. You have to become curious about your own reactions. You have to recognize the moments when fear is driving the car. You have to learn which wounds belong to the person in front of you and which wounds arrived long before they did. You have to apologize specifically. You have to change behavior. You have to practice.
You have to return again.
The word teshuvah literally means return. Relationships are not about finding someone to whom you never need to repent. Relationships are about building something in which return remains possible — returning after misunderstanding, returning after ego takes over, returning after disappointment, returning after saying the wrong thing, returning after realizing that your judgment was misplaced, returning after discovering that love requires you to change some things about yourself.
Maybe that is why we repeat Selichot every year — because the deepest relationships in our lives are not sustained by two people who never fail one another. They are sustained by people who learn how to come back to humility, responsibility, curiosity, compassion, and back to one another.
Selichot is therefore not a season of self-condemnation. It is a season of refusing to believe that our mistakes get the final word. We confess because change is possible. We ask forgiveness because broken things can be repaired. We return because Judaism believes that who you were yesterday does not have to determine who you will be tomorrow.