On Yom Kippur, when we stare our wrongdoings in the face, guilt and shame can overwhelm and push us into an emotional pit where we feel like there is no way out.

Yet the Jewish approach to reflecting on wrongdoings is to not despair. We try to hold onto hope and persevere, recognizing the only way forward is to keep moving. In life we dip orsway and even move backward at times, but as long as we are moving somewhere, we are on a path toward growth.

Despair eliminates the prospect of mobility, so we must eliminate despair. But how?

When we try to move on after making a wrong turn, the journey out of our mental pit is likely to be bumpy. There’s no automatic or direct path to growth, but the bumps actually make that growth more authentic and powerful. Judaism believes challenges are essential to growth, and it is our triumph over our downfall and our difficulties that make us great. This Jewish idea is famously expressed through the phrase,

Someone is truly righteous when they face challenges but continue to grow nevertheless.

When we have fallen, when we are low, these reminders can help us pick ourselves up:

The greatest people make mistakes. Indeed, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (Tzidkat HaTzadik 40:4) has said the larger the inclination to do evil, the larger the potential for greatness. He says there is an equal and opposite force between evil and righteousness within each person. Recognize that you are capable of living uprightly, and to the extent of your ill will — as bad or low as you think you are — you have the power to exercise goodness.

Making mistakes is a quintessential part of the human experience. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we embrace that with the blowing of the shofar. The shofar-blowing service consists of a number of blasts separated into stanzas. Each stanza comprises a
single blast, the tekia, followed by a broken blast of either a terurah (nine small blasts) or shevarim (three blasts) and another tekia. As explained by Rabbi Yehuda Amital, former rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Gush, this is a representation of the human experience. To him, the simple blasts of the tekiot at the beginning and end of each stanza represents the simple sounds of the beginning and end of our lives, but the broken sound in the center represents the experience throughout our lives.“During
his lifetime, nothing is simple, and his tortured soul cannot emit a simple sound.” In that vein, the final passage of the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah praises God: For you hear the sound of the shofar and you give your ear to the teruah, and none is comparable to you. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who hears the Teruah of Your people Israel with mercy.