The language of repentance comes up unexpectedly in conversations I have about work we have to do in public, like racial healing.

As a teacher to college students and a person in recovery, Lewis Newman explores repentance as a refreshing practice.

The stuff of our ordinary lives, even beyond the lifetimes of those we may have wronged.

The Jewish High Holy Days, which are now upon us, the New Year of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, create an annual ritual of repentance, both individual and collective.

The Hebrew word is Shiva, and this is work that begins in oneself but does not end there.

We cannot literally go back in time and undo what we did.

And yet repentance is precisely that process by which we can in the moral realm, if not in the physical realm, we can go back to the deed, we can find that part of ourselves that led to doing the transgression and reform ourselves.

I find that inspiring to think that we are not in bondage to even our most grievous mistakes.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Lewis Newman is Associate Dean of Carlton College in Minnesota and a professor of religious studies there.

He's the author of several books on Jewish ethics and theology, including repentance, the meaning and practice of Shiva.

So I would like to start where I always start, how you would describe the spiritual background of your life, of your childhood.

I would say that I grew up here in St. Paul in a family that was very deeply Jewish.

My parents were both leaders in the Jewish community in a variety of ways.

I grew up in a home in which Jewish affairs and issues of Jewish life were just kind of dinner table conversation all the time.

So that was kind of in the air.

And then they felt that it was important for me to get a strong Jewish education, which my mother had had, but my father hadn't.

He'd grown up in a small town in Brainerd in northern Minnesota.

And so they sent me to a Jewish afternoon school.

And unlike most kids who sort of drop out after their bar or about Mitzvah age, I continued because I actually enjoyed it and I liked studying.

And I found the material interesting. And after I got to the end of high school, I decided I wanted to keep studying in college.

So I took Hebrew and Hebrew in college and so on.

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