When we transgress God’s will, we violate our God-given potential. We experience a schism between who we are and who we ought to be; we feel fragmented and conflicted. Divorced from our inner self and from God, we suffer psychic pain and feel spiritually homeless. The Kabbalah metaphorically describes sin as the taking of holy sparks and throwing them into exile. Teshuvah is the act of retrieving those sparks and bringing them home. But God’s forgiveness and pardon alone cannot fix the damage we have done to our self-worth; for that we need God to redeem us. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a great Jewish thinker of the 20th century, defines redemption as the restoring of our sense of personal adequacy. When we sin, we first ask God to forgive us because we have betrayed our relationship with Him. Then we ask God to pardon us, to release us from the consequences of our actions. But wrongful acts also cause us a loss of self to a great degree; when we do wrong we are not only being disrespectful to God but also to ourselves. The prophet Hoshea calls, “Return, Israel, to God, for you have failed through your transgressions.” Hosea did not say, “you have fallen,” but rather, “you have failed.” Rabbi Soloveitchik explains this to mean that we are not just sinners, but we are failures. Our sins have made spiritual cripples out of us. We failed existentially, not just religiously. When we do wrong, we wrong ourselves. When we do bad things, we end up feeling badly about ourselves. The story of Esav is a good example of how a transgression can cause us to feel like failures. When Esav returns from the field and sees Yaakov brewing a bean stew, he says to him, “Pour that red stuff [down my throat], because I am tired.” The commentator Rashi points out that the Hebrew word used here for “pour” (haliteni) is a term used for describing the feeding of a horse. In other words, Esav referred to himself in a derogatory manner. Rashi also notes that Esav said that he wanted the stew because he was tired rather than hungry. Quoting a Midrash, Rashi explains that Esav was tired because that whole day he was busy raping and killing. In other words, sin exhausts a person. Behaving in ways that contradict our godly inner-self is exhausting. People may work in a comfortable, air-conditioned office, but if they feel their work does not fit them, they will feel exhausted. On the contrary, acting in ways that befits our godliness brings us vitality. It is likely that Esav was tired because he was depressed. When we behave in ways that are contradictory to our Divine soul, we feel inadequate, depressed, tired. To be redeemed from that means to have our personal worth restored together with the feeling of being at peace with our inner selves and with God. Therefore, redemption is a vital stage in the teshuvah process.