Shooie: "What? What for? What's wrong with me? I like myself exactly as I am!" "Why should I change? What in the world is the matter with ya, Shmelke? "I'm alright the way I am! I don't have to change! How could I change? How, I ask ya? How?"

Schmelke: "Holy Moses!"

You know how we all love starting a new notebook, starting first grade, starting a new packet of candies, wearing a new outfit. There's something exciting about starting afresh. So how do we do that? How do we get rid of our bad feelings about things we've done or said in the past year and clean our slate so that we can start again?

In fact, hidden in the Hebrew word Teshuva, is what we're supposed to do and how to do it. The meaning of the word 'Teshuva' is "to return". To return to our true selves, to return to G-d. How do we do this?

Rambam (Maimonides), one of our great Rabbis and teachers of the 12th century, tells us what steps we need to take in order to return to the right path and start afresh:

Step 1 : Admit our mistake.
Step 2 : Feel sorry for the wrong we have done.
Step 3 : We ask forgiveness from the people we have hurt.
Step 4 : We make up our minds that we're going to to better next time.

Teshuva is about us changing from the inside. In order to get there we have to do a "Cheshbon Nefesh" - which means an accounting of the soul. Just as a shopkeeper, at the end of the day, carefully counts his money, accounting for every penny, Rabbi Nachman says that at the end of every day, before we go to sleep, we should think over all our actions of that day and see what we can improve for the next day.

Rosh Hashanah is the time of year when we have to do an accounting of the whole year, in order to gear ourselves up for the New Year and start afresh with a new account.