I subscribe to the emails from Jewtina.org, a website whose mission is:
To celebrate, elevate, and expand Latin-Jewish community while strengthening identity, leadership, and connection to Global Jewry.
As a person living in a multiracial family with Hispanic members this mission is close to my heart. Last Friday I received an email from Jewtina with a message from Violeta Castro Stolpen, Director of Operation. Her thinking about teshuvah is close to my own. Teshuvah translates as RETURN. But to what are we returning? And why must we return every year? Read on. 
Every September, the Jewish High Holidays (beginning Sep. 11) and Latin Heritage Month (beginning Sep. 15) arrive together. For Latin Jews, that overlap can feel like a pull in two directions, as if celebrating one means stepping back from the other.
Standing at this threshold, I am reminded of an autumn memory: watching butterfly after butterfly sweep across the glass of the building where I was working — black, orange, and white wings, one after another, like the building itself had come alive. It turns out I was watching one of the annual monarch butterfly migrations. These butterflies, many of which have never made the journey before, find their way home without memory or map, guided by an internal compass pulling them toward a place they have never been but somehow already know.
The butterflies’ unlearned homecoming is the closest thing to how teshuvah feels to me: a pull back toward the person I actually am, to my most honest and fullest self. None of us has taken this exact journey before. And yet, we are never really taking it alone. Knowing that generations of Jews, going back thousands of years, have kept this same season sacred brings me closer to community, even across time, carrying, like the butterfly, an inward pull toward home.
Our teshuvah was never meant to happen alone. It is communal work. Our return lifts not just us, but everyone to whom we return, drawing on the same pulls that have carried our people forward even when we couldn’t fully explain them, not unlike the monarch.
You can read my full reflection in the Jewish Living Delaware’s September issue here. As we enter this sacred season, may we embrace these moments of return to our fullest, truest selves, honoring our Latin-Jewish joy and resilience in synagogues, across tables, and in the streets, and may we each experience a sweet and holy return this High Holy Day season.