T'shuvah

T'shuvah (תשובה) means repentance in Hebrew. Etymologically, it comes from the root meaning "to return." One way to understand the logic of that etymology is this: if sin alienates you from both God and yourself, then atoning for sin means returning to yourself as a starting point for deepening your commitment to the life God wants you to lead. The poems in T'shuvah apply this framing to the question of what it means to "return" from the alienation that is inherent in surviving sexual violence, with the caveat, of course, that a survivor of sexual violence has committed no sin and that neither the moralizing nature nor the implicit politics of the phrase "the life God wants you to lead" need by definition to be part of that process.