By Rabbi Josh Wander

As Yom Kippur approaches, the Jewish world turns instinctively toward teshuvah. We examine our actions, reconsider our priorities, ask forgiveness from those we have wronged, and attempt to repair our relationship with Hashem. This is the teshuvah we know. But one of the great early heralds of the return to Zion, Rav Yehuda Alkalai, taught that there is another kind of teshuvah—one that much of the Jewish world has nearly forgotten.

Rav Alkalai begins with a powerful question. Chazal appear to present us with two seemingly contradictory descriptions of the future redemption. On the one hand, there are teachings indicating that the Jewish people will not be redeemed and return to Eretz Yisrael until they have done complete teshuvah. Yet elsewhere in Chazal, and even in explicit descriptions of redemption in Tanach, the Jewish people appear to return to their Land while still spiritually deficient. They return as sinners who remain very much in need of repentance. So which is it? Must we do teshuvah before we return, or will we return before we have done teshuvah?

Rav Alkalai’s answer is extraordinary because it changes the meaning of the question itself. He explains that there are actually two different categories of teshuvah: teshuvah peratit, individual repentance, and teshuvah klalit, national or collective repentance. Teshuvah peratit is the form with which we are most familiar. It is the teshuvah codified by the Rambam in Hilchot Teshuvah: recognizing our sins, regretting them, confessing them, abandoning them, and resolving not to repeat them. We repent for violations between ourselves and Hashem and repair wrongs committed against our fellow human beings. Every Jew has his or her own spiritual accounting to make.

But Rav Alkalai explains that Klal Yisrael also possesses a collective identity. We are not merely millions of individual Jews who happen to share a religion. We are a nation. And just as individuals can sin, a nation can sin. Jewish history contains national failures whose consequences extend far beyond the individuals who originally committed them: Mechirat Yosef, the sale of Yosef; Chet HaEgel, the sin of the Golden Calf; and perhaps most significantly for this discussion, Chet HaMeraglim, the sin of the spies. If there are national sins, Rav Alkalai argues, there must also be national teshuvah.

And here comes the remarkable answer: the great teshuvah klalit of the Jewish people is returning home. Our return to Eretz Yisrael is itself an act of teshuvah. After generations of exile, dispersion, and national disintegration, the Jewish people physically returning to their Land constitutes the collective return of the nation. The Hebrew word teshuvah literally means “return.” Rav Alkalai takes that idea with breathtaking seriousness. There is a return of the individual soul to Hashem, and there is a return of the Jewish nation to the place Hashem gave it.

Suddenly, the apparent contradiction disappears. Will the Jewish people return only after doing teshuvah? Yes. Will the Jewish people return while they are still sinners? Also yes. There is no contradiction because we are talking about two different kinds of teshuvah. On the national level, the return itself is the teshuvah. A Jew does not have to become perfectly observant before coming home. He does not need to complete his personal spiritual transformation before making Aliyah. Whether he is frum or not, learned or ignorant, righteous or struggling, his return to Eretz Yisrael participates in the teshuvah klalit of Klal Yisrael.

At the same time, arriving in Eretz Yisrael does not magically erase one’s personal sins. The Jew who returns home still has work to do. He still needs teshuvah peratit. He must still improve his relationship with Hashem, his observance of mitzvot, his treatment of others, and his own character. National teshuvah does not replace personal teshuvah, and personal teshuvah does not replace national teshuvah. We need both.

This distinction provides an extraordinary lens through which to understand what we have witnessed during the past generations. Jews returned to Eretz Yisrael from every corner of the earth. Some came carrying Torah scrolls; others came carrying socialist manifestos. Some arrived with peyot and tefillin; others barely knew how to say Shema. Some came because they believed they were fulfilling biblical prophecy; others came because they were fleeing persecution or simply wanted to build a Jewish national home. Perhaps we have made a terrible mistake when we look at Jews returning without religious observance and conclude that their return cannot represent redemption because “they haven’t done teshuvah.” Maybe we were looking for the wrong teshuvah.

Yechezkel describes Hashem gathering the Jewish people from among the nations and bringing them back to their Land, and then cleansing them, giving them a new heart, and placing a new spirit within them. The sequence is remarkable. The physical ingathering and the spiritual transformation need not occur simultaneously. Returning to the Land can itself be part of the process through which the subsequent spiritual awakening unfolds. The fact that Jews returned while still carrying spiritual deficiencies is therefore not necessarily evidence against the redemptive nature of their return. It may be precisely the sequence that the prophets described.

This also transforms the conversation about Aliyah. Too often, Aliyah is treated as the reward at the end of one’s spiritual journey: first become sufficiently religious, sufficiently inspired, sufficiently financially secure, and sufficiently prepared, and perhaps eventually you will be ready to live in Eretz Yisrael. Rav Alkalai turns that thinking on its head. Coming home may not be the prize for completing teshuvah. Coming home may itself be the teshuvah.

This becomes especially powerful when we remember the sin of the spies. Their failure was not primarily that they denied Hashem’s existence or abandoned Torah observance. They rejected the command to enter the Land. They preferred remaining where they were—even under miraculous Divine protection—to confronting the difficulties involved in taking possession of Eretz Yisrael. The most obvious way for their descendants to repair that national sin is therefore to do precisely the opposite. Where they said that they could not go up, we go up. Where they feared the difficulties of the Land, we embrace them. Where they rejected Eretz Yisrael, we return to it. Perhaps that is teshuvah klalit in its purest form.

None of this absolves anyone from personal religious responsibility. Quite the opposite. Once the nation has begun returning physically, the next stage is to return spiritually. The prophetic process does not end at Ben Gurion Airport. Kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, is not the conclusion of Jewish history. It is part of the road toward a nation fully reunited with its Land, its Torah, and its God.

We are therefore living in an extraordinary period in which the two forms of teshuvah can unfold together. Millions of Jews have already participated in the national return, while every one of us remains responsible for our individual return. Perhaps this is precisely why the generation of return can simultaneously appear so profoundly redemptive and so painfully incomplete. We have begun one teshuvah while still struggling desperately with the other.

This Yom Kippur, when we hear the word teshuvah, perhaps we should expand the question we ask ourselves. Of course we must ask what we need to change in our personal lives, which sins we must abandon, whom we must ask forgiveness from, and how we can come closer to Hashem. But Rav Yehuda Alkalai challenges us to add another question: Where do I need to return? For nearly two thousand years, that question could seem almost theoretical. Today it is not. The gates are open, the Land is waiting, and the Jewish nation is coming home. Perhaps the greatest teshuvah in Jewish history is already happening before our eyes—and perhaps it is time for the rest of us to join it.