Say that your net worth is $412,000 and a prophet comes along and promises you that in three years your net worth will double, to $824,000. You will rejoice.
Sure enough, three years pass and your net worth has doubled. However, the prophet now tells you: You will never accumulate another dollar the rest of your life. This unexpected big jump in your net worth is the end of the line. All of a sudden, the good news doesn’t look so good anymore.
Another metaphor:
On the golf course you regularly shoot in the 80s. Along comes a magic golf instructor and promises you that if you follow his program you will shoot a 74 — more than 10 strokes off the best of your career. Sure enough, you follow the program and shoot a 74. You’re on top of the world.
However, your golf instructor now tells you that you will never take another stroke off your best the rest of your life, no matter what you do. Again, the good news isn’t so dramatic anymore.
Another metaphor:
You’re in acting school. The competition to get a real part in a real movie is brutal, nearly impossible. Your instructor suddenly takes you aside and tells you some really weird techniques that, he says, are guaranteed to land you a real part. You put your faith in these techniques and master them. In six months you are the only student in the class to land a role in Hollywood. Wow! Your dream has come true.
However, after your first movie, your instructor informs you that these techniques are addictive and can never take you beyond a “B” movie. You’ll be in Hollywood all right, but stuck in the “B” groove for the rest of your career. What a downer.
The human being always wants more. Midrash puts it this way: No person dies with half of his desires fulfilled.
I am thinking of this as the High Holiday season draws to a close. Looking back almost two months to the days before Rosh Hashanah, to the month of Elul, I want to see a spiritual rise, an ethical improvement, a doubling of my spiritual net worth, so to speak. I want to see the best score I’ve ever achieved in life.
Well, suppose my retrospective is positive.
Suppose Rosh Hashanah did take me up a notch.
Yom Kippur did improve my interpersonal relations and relationship with G-d.
Suppose this is true for all of us.
Sukkos did infuse our lives with profound spiritual joy. We’re on a high.
Now what?
What might our imaginary prophet or golf or acting instructor say about our lives going forward? Will we face the coming year assuming that we have reached the summit and can go no higher? This is it?
Such is the danger at the end of the High Holiday season. There lurks a potential downer captured by a greeting I’ve heard the past few years. I don’t know where this greeting originated, but it is so dry, so nothing, so empty compared to the rich and inspiring days we now leave behind. As I leave the synagogue at the end of Simchas Torah I’ve been blessed with: “Have a good winter.”
This is commensurate to the drama of the holidays?
This is a blessing?
It depends.
If this holiday season has been a time-out, a separate arc, a one-time lens on the spirit, then “have a good winter” is, yes, a downer.
On the other hand, if the holiday season has given us some handle, some hook, some concrete plan, some specific spiritual or ethical exercise to carry us forward, then we are buoyed by the prospect of the coming months.
For me, the hook these past few years has been a well defined program in Torah study. I relish the prospect of delving deeper and deeper. But I admit, even this cannot fill the spirit the same way that all of the dramatic — and dramatically diverse — holidays just filled it.
I still need to work to infuse my own program with enthusiasm.
Perhaps that is the optimism here. Unlike the prophet who tells you that you’ll never have an additional dollar or the instructors that say you will never lower your golf score, or that your career is stuck in a rut, the Jewish holidays leave us with hope.
They might demand a lot of work going forward. Even so, we have been given the tools to build on the resolutions and inspiration we walk away with.
The holidays are not an isolated arc, not separate from the rest of our lives. The memories of this season can echo throughout the coming year — if we let them.
That is the hope.
That is the reward.
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg can be reached at [email protected].
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