So while we defy the meaninglessness of our life, the act of defiance consists in our refusal to run away and our resolve instead to fill it with our consciousness.

sometimes we are the subject of the turning, and sometimes God is the subject, all of which seems to suggest that Teshuvah—transformation—is a reciprocal process that depends on both God and us.

anger, boredom, fear, guilt, impatience, grief, disappointment, dejection, anxiety, despair—are the great markers of our Teshuvah. By their very intensity, they call us to transformation.

we try to see who we really are and what we really have. We try to acknowledge the emptiness of what we have been doing.

And the truth is, every time we come home, home is different, and so are we. My mother still lives in the house near White Plains where we moved when I was seven. It is almost unbearable to go back to my old room there.

Every once in a while, maybe just a few times in life, you can feel the force of this—the flow of consequences that has brought you to the present moment of your life. You can actually experience a moment as the product of the totality of all creation.

So step number one in the process of spiritual renewal, according to our tradition, is this kind of subtle inner turning either through prayer or through faith. Step number two is almost precisely the opposite. It involves neither turning nor any kind of movement at all. It involves being still. When we defy the sense of meaninglessness that

Our pursuit of pleasure and success is relentless, feverish, sometimes bordering on the demonic.

To sin means to remove oneself from the presence of the Master of the Universe.