Remember on Dec. 31 when you sat down and wrote all those New Year Resolutions like, ‘I shall lose 15 lbs. by the end of January?’
And what happened? Probably very little. But no one will ever hold me responsible for these resolutions so it doesn’t really matter if I don’t keep them. They are all about me and no one else, so who cares?
But what of our spiritual New Year’s resolutions? What about the decision to be a better person in the year ahead so that G-d will decide it’s worthwhile keeping us in this world another 365 days?
It just seems so overwhelming – we have done so many things wrong for which we have to ask forgiveness, we don’t know where to start. There was a time when on Yom Kippur, we just beat our chests and ran through the Vidui prayer and thought to ourselves: ’Well I never stole anything so that doesn’t apply to me. I was never really deceitful. I never made anyone else sin …’
But now we have these very detailed explanatory booklets to accompany Vidui which makes me realize that I’m not that totally innocent.
Jumping on your sister’s bed when you get home at 3 a.m. because you want to tell her about your evening, that’s stealing her sleep.
Sitting, drinking iced coffee while on the phone telling someone you’re stuck in traffic is lying/being deceitful.
Truth be told – when I go through that booklet I see that I‘ve done something in almost every category…HELP.
It would be easy to get despondent and think “What’s the use – I’ll never make amends for all these things. I’ll never manage to go through a whole year without doing any of them again. Hashem will never forgive me.”
WRONG.
G-d knows we are human and all humans sin. He is just waiting for a small sign, even a tiny one, that we want to be better people. We are told not to make grandiose Kabbalot (resolutions) that will for sure be difficult to keep.
A young boy went to one of today’s gedolim and told him that he was taking upon himself to have real kavana (complete concentration) when saying the Amidah prayer, and the gadol replied, “If only I could; I try very hard to concentrate just for the first bracha.”
According to the Vidui explanation booklet of Ner Tamid, we confess to sinning through our speech in some way 194 times during the Yom Kippur prayers, so it’s worth thinking of some small way we can acknowledge our shortcomings and attempt to rectify them. But you can limit your resolution. Don’t say “I’ll never speak lashon hara again;” that’s setting yourself up for failure. Instead, try something like “For one month, when I speak to my friend on the phone in the evening, I won’t speak lashon hara about our teacher”.
If you don’t normally keep Shabbat, decide that you’ll check the time Shabbat starts, and for two hours after that, you won’t use/look at your phone.
The important thing is to take upon yourself something, however small, that will be easy for you and that you can really stick to.
We have mitzvot that are between us and Hashem and those that are between us and people we interact with.
Rabbi Avigdor Miller z”l suggested 3 very simple ways to show that we want to improve our relationship with both G-d and our neighbors.
- Spend 30 seconds a day thinking of Olam Haba (the world to come). It is such an important tenet of Judaism but we usually only think about it after someone has died. Thinking about the next world will inevitably lead us to thinking about mitzvot and aveirot ( sins) and our purpose in being in this world.
- Do one thing a day for someone else without them knowing. Rabbi Miller suggests washing a few dishes so your wife/mother doesn’t have so much work to do or perhaps tidying the living room. If you see something on the sidewalk that someone could slip on, throw it away or kick it to the side of the road.
- In one of our most important prayers, the Shema, we are told “… and you should love the Lord your G’d with all your heart….” Rabbi Miller suggests once a day we say quietly but consciously, “I love you G-d.” This is fulfilling an important mitzvah.
A powerful idea we are told is that if someone annoys or upsets you and you just let it go without making that sharp retort that was on the tip of your tongue, Hashem will do the same when looking at your shortcomings — he’ll let them go.
To me, that sounds like a very worthwhile deal.
