Aperson can wake up one morning and just feel sick and tired of it all. Suddenly life seems like a wearisome pointless burden.

This feeling of alienation may come all at once or it may creep into the heart slowly over a period of time. It happens even to successful people perhaps to them in particular — people who seem to lack none of life’s gifts people who live in penthouses with shiny new cars parked out in front. People who are busy enjoying the convenience of the latest gadgets while still savoring the experiences of their recent amazing exotic vacation. It might happen to a person of high social status who holds a position of power and enjoys successful business enterprises jolly parties and carefree Friday nights playing cards with his cronies. But none of these luxuries and accomplishments can form a wall strong enough to hold back that gnawing feeling that moment of dissatisfaction sometimes faint and fleeting sometimes sharp and lasting — that discontent that overshadows and blemishes all the small sweet pleasures that fill the days and years.

That is the moment that says to us in a stage whisper “This just isn’t it.” We may not be sure what we’ve been searching for in life but we’re sure it isn’t this. That moment when something inside something inexplicable and in fact quite irrational troubling intimidating fraught with vague longings looks us in the face and tells us our life is pointless. It’s all worthless. This isn’t what we’ve aspired to — not for ourselves as individuals not for our communities not for our nation.

That feeling has worn many labels — emptiness ennui disenchantment loss of direction meaninglessness materialism.

But this depressing feeling has its bright side: It means we’re still functioning as human beings. It’s the moment when a hole is torn in the shroud of superficiality that envelops our lives and we get a peek at a deeper levels. Material life starts crumbling around the edges making way for the inner life bubbling up inside us. It’s the moment when we come to the gateway of… teshuvah.

What a scary word! Eyebrows jump up in surprise at the sound of it for there is an image ingrained in the mind of the reader who is distant from Judaism: Teshuvah means fleeing from life receding into the fringes of society into a wilted colorless existence cut off from the sunshine. Hiding oneself away in a narrow limited sad unsmiling world and submitting to a regimen that prohibits all of life’s pleasures.

Yet there is a glaring flaw in this popular image an insipid vestige of Haskalah-infused education from the last century while teshuvah in its true Jewish meaning embodies joy of life at its best. A simple natural joyfulness which when given full expression is a show of deep confidence a sense of belonging of true completeness of self-realization.

For teshuvah is indeed the answer to the question posed in Koheles (6:7): “And is the appetite not yet sated?” For as the Midrash says “This soul knows that all that it has toiled it toiled for itself. Therefore it never has its fill of mitzvos and good deeds.” That is the soul has an insatiable desire for positive spiritual acts. “Rabi Levi said: It is comparable to a man who married a king’s daughter. Even if he feeds her all the delicacies of the world he has not fulfilled his duty to her. Why? Because she is the daughter of kings. So it is for all that a man does for his soul he does not fulfill his duty — why? Because it comes from Above” (Midrash Koheles).

That is to say the soul that reality we cannot grasp hidden but keenly felt is full of desire. But unlike the physical body that finds satisfaction in sensory pleasures the soul’s yearning is for the spiritual. This hunger is the source of the restlessness deep within us. That is what underlies the aspiration for greatness the urge for conquest (in which the feeling of victory means more than the achievement itself) the ambition for wealth power honor and glory.

But a strange thing happens to us every time we reach one of life’s peaks. The allure of a goal once achieved quickly dissipates. We feel like Sir Edmund Hillary the first man to scaleMount Everest. When asked how he felt when his feet finally stood at the top of the world he replied that he felt elation at first then emptiness: “I was too tired and too conscious of the long way down to safety to really feel any great elation.”

So it is with each of us when we climb our private Everests. We’ve hoarded money gained control over a state or a society earned lofty status in the world of finance literature or art; we’ve been awarded the job we wanted. But the happiness for which we sacrificed so much which we so hoped to attain is not one step closer no matter how far we’ve come. And then comes the search for a new conquest a higher peak. We achieve our latest Everest and find ourselves back at square one and so it goes until the day comes when we find ourselves lamenting that we’re in “crisis ” “spiritual bankruptcy ” that everywhere we look that terrible ennui takes over.

Why? The midrash quoted above answers this question explaining how our soul scorns material pleasures which are limited and finite. It has no use for our “big important goals.” It “does not find any joy in all the pleasures of this world” (Mesillas Yesharim Chapter 1). Those things cannot satisfy its hunger no matter how “new and improved ” no matter how many varieties are available. (The very need for constant upgrades is proof that these pleasures are not infinite.) For the soul’s true nourishment lies in the endless realms of the spiritual.

And in those same moments that this hunger breaks out of its prison disturbing our routine calling it boring and pointless we lose the savor of life. We feel we can’t go on this way. A vague longing pulls us to the undefined the veiled. And deep inside we know what we want: The infinite the G-dly the source from which our soul was wrought.

It is here that according to Judaism teshuvah enters the picture.

It can bring about the change we need. It can quiet that painful yearning. It can provide food for the soul. For teshuvah means an answer a solution found through return — return to the source not an escape from reality but that which gives depth to reality. A return that breathes new life into everyday human action that has lost its direction enriching it with values that tie all of our deeds to the Source of all being and to His commandments quieting the hunger of our soul with real meaning and true pleasure.

And when that tired-of-living feeling comes and challenges a person Judaism calls for him to rise to the challenge and not surrender. Not to push it back into his subconscious not to drown it in a flood of physical pleasures (they can only hold back that sense of crumbling for a short while) or anesthetize it — but rather to grab hold of it to turn it into a creative stimulus a starting point for a new life. The feeling that “this just isn’t it” is what gives a person a new perspective on himself his achievements and the world around him. In that feeling lies the seed of teshuvah.

This is the Jewish Elul. This is Rosh Hashanah the day toward which we strive throughout Elul. These are the Ten Days of Teshuvah which peak on Yom Kippur. These are the days that stand at the gate of every new year the days of our annual checkup.

They signal us to stop. They demand that we grab hold of that sense of dissatisfaction and by its light (or shadow) examine the twisting pathways of our heart of our life; that we return to selfhood to embark on a journey inward and there to discover forgotten things truths gone rusty. To quench the thirst of the soul and thus breathe life into the year that lies just ahead.