Is a wedding or a graduation to be discounted because the excitment peaks only on one day?
This year we seem to be hearing a refrain much more often than usual. It is a pessimistic refrain: “Why try to change this year? We try every year at the High Holidays and we just fall back into the same old bad habits. Why attempt teshuvah? It doesn’t last.”
Actually, this may be so only if measured on the micro level: this habit, this sin, this failing, this damaged relationship keeps coming back. The difficulties and failings persist. But if measured on the macro-level — a change in general spiritual orientation and personal transformation — we think that if most people look back over their lives they will see, very gradually, a permanent impact of the High Holidays as their effect adds up, year by year.
Even if this is taken to be a false distinction, and the old habits just resurface and there is no gradual, overall change, please consider:
Yom Kippur is unique in its power, spirituality, focus and community binding. There is nothing like Yom Kippur. The fast itself creates a powerful binding, both horizontally and vertically — toward the people we stand next to in intensive prayer and the G-d we look to directly via our prayers. There is nothing like Yom Kippur, and if it impacts us for only one day it is worth it.
Do we discount our wedding day because it was only one day? At some special moment — from a World Series win to a child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah — do we discount it because it was only one day? A graduation, a major promotion, a financial windfall — do we discount them because the excitement peaked only on one day?
Every moment of Yom Kippur is to be taken advantage of because, at a minimum, this unique day contains within it the potential to affect us all year. Unlike other special moments that in their nature last only a day, the impact of Yom Kippur can extend itself and surely for many the special melodies continue to haunt us for another day or three, and the themes of forgiveness and personal reconstruction continue to occupy our minds, at least for a while. Then, at unpredictable moments throughout the year, far from Yom Kippur, a teaching about forgiveness suddenly pops into our mind and may seriously shift our behavior.
The idea that Yom Kippur is a failed effort because old habits return may be a function of an unrealistic view of how people grow and change for the better. The idea that in one fell swoop we can become wholly different, utterly improved and emptied of every spiritual inadequacy or bad habit, is in almost all cases unrealistic. The more spiritually and psychologically realistic idea, especially as Yom Kippur closes, is to settle on one permanent improvement, however small, so that as the years go by the small, incremental changes can build up.
Yom Kippur is a singular opportunity in timing and nature that should not be squandered on the usually unrealistic ideal of a total transformation in all our relationships. Consider:
Tradition says that “the day of Yom Kippur itself atones.” There is a character to the actual time of Yom Kippur, to its duration. It is not just a set of 26 hours like any other set of 26 hours, except that we fast and pray. No, “the day itself atones.”We need only step into it, open ourselves to it, and then it flows through us. Even if we take absolutely nothing from it past its time, it is more, infinitely more, than worth it.
May we all be sealed in many books this coming Yom Kippur, the book of life, the book of health, the book of sustenance and success, the book of spiritual awareness and practice, the book of forgiveness and renewal.
Copyright © 2018 by the Intermountain Jewish News
