“The urge to repent grows out of the realization that it is necessary to change.
Lamenting our past wrongdoing will not serve us, for contact with evil is inescapable.
We must avoid, too, pondering the past and reliving it as it happened — complete with faults and mistakes.
Rather, we should meditate on it, as it ought to have been.
The main thrust of teshuva is not only to redeem, but to rebuild, the past.”
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz