One’s personal teshuva is a return home – not the parental home, nor the family home, nor even the nation’s ancestral home, but the home of the soul.
As the Song of Songs describes, “Draw me, I will run after You.”
The soul pleads: “Draw me,” because once, in the past, “the King brought me to His chambers.”
Originally, the soul was in “His chambers,” and it can therefore recall it and once again be drawn home.
When the soul returns “home,” it leaves all the foreign, remote places and returns to the starting point, where everything is still possible.
There, the whole reality of life, the reality of time, place, and deed, is as yet intangible and undefined, like an embryo at the initial stage of its formation.
From this point, it is possible to rewrite the past.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz