Once upon a time, I hated the period of Elul, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In fact, when this season began to roll around, I dreaded it.
Each and every year, when the teshuvah season approached, I would think to myself, “Ok, here we go again.” Every year, we go through the same process – feeling guilty about the things we do wrong, saying the prayers, telling ourselves things will be different, and then realizing that they won’t. It was such a depressing and frustrating feeling telling myself every year that I need to change, but then finding it impossible to change.
My attitude towards this time of year is now drastically different. I love it. I relish it. I am excited about it. I look forward to it.
The reason is simple: I started learning about ways to really change. And there is no greater feeling than telling ourselves that we need to change something about our lives and actually doing it. It’s the most exhilarating feeling possible. Once we figure out the way to make change stick, we can experience this incomparable feeling of elation.
The Mishnah in Pirkeh Avot teaches us, אל תאמין בעצמך עד יום מותך – “Do not believe in yourself until the day you die.” The conventional reading of this adage is that we can never assume that we are safe from spiritual and moral challenges. At any age, we are susceptible to succumbing to our negative tendencies and vices, no matter how good we’ve been our entire lives. However, somebody once shared with me an alternative reading of this Mishnah. Our Sages here are telling us not to believe ourselves when we say things like, “I shouldn’t even bother”; “I can never do that”; “That’s not for me, that’s for people who are better than me”; “This is how I’ve always been, so I’ll always be this way”; “There’s no point in trying, I’m never going to change.” The Mishnah instructs us, אל תאמין בעצמך – we should not believe our own minds when they tell us these things, because עד יום מותך – we have until the day we die to change. As long as our bodies and our brains are functioning, we can do amazing things. We can make ourselves better. We can change. We can be the kind of people who we want to be. We have to ignore the naysayer in our head that tells us we will always be the same and can never change. Because we absolutely can.
An all-too-common obstacle to change is the toxic belief that it’s impossible, the assumption that “this is who I am, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
We know this isn’t true, because Hashem doesn’t think it’s true. And He’s never wrong.
In the Ne’ilah prayer recited in Yom Kippur, we declare, אתה נותן יד לפושעים – “You lend a hand to sinners.” Hashem does not expect us to improve by ourselves. He is there helping us.
The phrase אתה נותן יד לפושעים has been explained by way of an analogy to a person drowning in a river. As long as the person can keep his head above water, he can shout for help so somebody can save him. And even once his head is submerged, he can still lift his hand out of the water and hope he is seen. But once he cannot even keep his hand above water, he has virtually no chance of being seen. When it comes to teshuvah, however, we can always be helped. Hashem is נותן יד לפושעים. Even if we’ve “sunken” so low that our hands are underwater, so-to-speak, Hashem sticks His hand, as it were, into the water to pull us out. Even if we’ve fallen to the point where it seems there is no way of recovering, Hashem will help us. Of course, we need to help ourselves; we need to grab the “hand” that He offers us so we can lift ourselves up. Teshuvah must come from within ourselves. But He is always there ready to help us, no matter what we’ve done or how far we have strayed.
This means that Hashem always believes in our capacity to change and improve, no matter how far we have fallen. He never gives up on us, because He knows we are capable of being better. And if He believes it, then we should believe it.
We really can change, even if we think we can’t.
I would like to present here three strategies to help us with this process, to help us make real changes that last. We should begin by identifying one thing in our life that we want to change. Perhaps it’s improving one’s marriage, or his relationship with his children. Perhaps it’s improving the atmosphere in one’s home. Perhaps it’s being more disciplined with one’s time. Perhaps it’s improving one’s relationship with his parents, in-laws or siblings. Perhaps it’s improving one’s prayer – for some, this means being more careful to recite all the required prayers, while for others it might mean ensuring to pray with a minyan and with greater concentration. Perhaps it’s being more sensitive, more patient or more generous. Perhaps it’s being more careful to avoid foul language. These are just a small handful of dozens of suggestions that could be offered. Regardless, we should begin by choosing one specific area in which we want to grow and improve. Once we’ve identified that one area, we can proceed to the following three strategies.
Step 1: Changing the circumstances
Researchers once conducted an experiment in an effort to learn more about people’s eating habits, giving two groups of people popcorn as they went into a show. Both groups were given the same amount of the same low-quality, stale popcorn. The only difference was that one group was given their popcorn in much larger buckets. They received the exact same amount as the first group, but in a larger bucket. The researchers found that the people in the group with the larger buckets ate considerably more than the people who were given smaller buckets. Having a larger bucket, for whatever reason, caused people to eat more.
Leaving aside the specific psychological conclusions that this study might lead us to, it shows that circumstances affect the amount we eat. By changing the circumstances, we can change our behavior.
There was a time when I had very bad eating habits. I would drink a can of orange soda and eat a bag of potato chips every single night. The only exceptions were fast days. On every single other night, I had my soda and potato chips. It was a terrible habit. But I don’t do this anymore. I was able to make this change not by changing myself, but by changing my circumstances – I don’t keep that stuff in the house anymore. It’s that simple.
The Hovot Ha’levavot expresses this idea in the Sha’ar Ha’teshuvah section, by way of an intriguing analogy. He tells the story of a man traveling with a large bag of coins who came to a river which he needed to cross. Seeing that the water was deep, and there was no bridge nearby, he had to come up with a plan. He decided to take the coins in his bag and throw them into the river to create a type of dam that would block most of the current. He started throwing the coins, but they had no effect on the current. He kept throwing and throwing, until finally he had just one coin left, which he figured he should keep. To his dismay, it didn’t work. The water was still too deep.
Just then, he saw a boat sailing nearby. He called over to the sailor, asking if he could get a ride across the river in exchange for a coin. The sailor happily agreed. The traveler paid the coin, and in just a few minutes he was across the river.
Sometimes we expend large amounts of time and energy on accomplishing a goal, when in reality there is a much simpler solution. In my case, having soft drinks and junk food readily available around the house, and my just staying away from it, was not a realistic solution. That was like pouring hundreds of coins into the river to try to stop the current. The simpler solution was to change the situation.
One common example today is technology. People who struggle with the challenges posed by technology could change their situation by installing a filter. People who find themselves drawn into nasty conversations, or conversations with foul language, on social media or on chat groups can change their situation by leaving those social media sites and chat groups.
If somebody is trying to study more Torah, he can ask a Rabbi to call him before every class to remind him or motivate him. If there is tension in marriage because the husband feels overwhelmed by the mess and chaos in the home, they can spend a little bit of money to hire a housekeeper. Very often, a simple change in the arrangement can bring the desired change in behavior.
A clear example of this concept is a halachah concerning the qualifications for serving as a witness. A habitual gambler, the Gemara teaches, may not serve as a witness, because he is not trusted. Once a gambler quits the habit, he is allowed to serve as a witness – but only after he shatters his dice or whatever other instruments he used for gambling. Our Sages understood that breaking a gambling addiction is very hard. And they insisted that someone trying to kick the habit has to change his situation. He has to put himself in a situation that makes it unlikely, or at least difficult, for him to gamble again. This is the way we make changes last.
I once met with a couple that was experiencing difficulties in their relationship, to the point where they assumed it was beyond repair. After speaking for a while, it became clear to me that the root of the tension was a certain financial arrangement that they had. Once they rearranged the finances, the tensions went away and the marriage was revitalized. It was that simple.
This should be the first step towards change – to ask ourselves if there’s some situation that we can change that will remove the obstacles that prevent us from improving.
Step 2: Motivation
If there is no simple change that can be made in our situation, then we need to move on to step 2.
The inner struggle that we all experience between our yetzer ha’tov and yetzer ha’ra – our inclination to do the right thing, and our evil inclination – has been compared to a fellow riding an elephant. As long as the man and the elephant both want to go to the same place, everything is fine. But if the man wants to turn right and the elephant wants to turn left, they will turn left. The elephant calls the shots. The only solution is to make the elephant want to turn right. Somehow, the driver has to train the elephant by motivating it to turn the opposite direction.
Our yetzer ha’ra is a large, powerful “elephant.” It wants to take us in the wrong direction, along the wrong path. It’s stronger than our yetzer ha’tov. The solution is to motivate it to go in the right direction, to convince ourselves that we are far better off in every way following the proper path.
In the Shema section which we read several times each day, the Torah commands us to love Hashem בכל לבבך – “with all your heart.” Rashi, based on the Gemara, explains this to mean that we must love Hashem בשני יצריך – with both our good inclination, and our bad inclination. We do this by bringing our yetzer ha’ra on board, by convincing it that proper behavior is the right way to go, that it is the best thing we can do for ourselves, that we only win by following the correct path. There’s a voice inside us telling us that we can benefit from acting wrongly; we need to silence that voice and bring it to our side, and we do this by repeatedly emphasizing how happy we will be if we did things the right way.
In 1995, Samsung sent its new cell phone as a gift for New Years to thousands of its employees and customers. It was soon discovered that the entire line was defective. The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-Hee, directed his workers to empty the shelves and bring all 150,000 devices in stock to an empty lot. Over 2,000 staff members were instructed to stand around the enormous pile. The chairman then had the pile set on fire.
“If you continue to make poor-quality products,” he announced, “I’ll come back and do this again.”
This was a pretty dramatic way to build motivation, and it worked.
I’m not urging people to start going around setting fires, but the message from this story is that in order to effect change, we need to build motivation. Making a list of things we want to change is not good enough. We need to think long and hard of how better we would look and feel if we achieved our goals. We need to generate inspiration and ambition by continually impressing upon ourselves how important our desired change is, and how much better we would feel about ourselves if we made that change. We need to tell the “elephant,” our evil inclination, to go the other way, that it is our own best interests to do the right thing and kick bad habits.
I have two large pictures hanging on the wall in my study at home. One is of Rav Moshe Feinstein, and the other is of my grandfather, Charlie Seruya. Rav Moshe Feinstein was the leading Torah sage in America in the 20th century, and my grandfather was an inspirational figure who worked tirelessly with the youth of our community. I know I will never be as great a scholar as Rav Moshe Feinstein or as successful a teacher as my grandfather, but I want to be motivated and driven to be like them. I hung their pictures in my study so that I will be inspired by their example and stirred to work harder and achieve more.
This is a simple but critical step that will lead us to change – building our ambition and drive, going beyond just taking note of what we need to change, and explaining to ourselves just how important it is.
Step 3: Clarity
But when we explain this to ourselves, we need to be perfectly clear and very specific.
A common impediment to change is lack of specificity. We tend to make resolutions in very general terms, telling ourselves things like, “I should be a nicer spouse,” “I should be more patient with my kids,” “I should spend more time learning,” “I need to attend minyan more frequently,” “I need to be more careful about berachot,” or “I should be more careful with the way I speak.” Rarely do these kinds of resolutions get us anywhere. We need to make our commitments more specific and concrete. If, for example, we want to improve our relationships, such as with our spouse or kids, we can think back to a number of particular incidents when we spoke or acted improperly to them, and make it very clear to ourselves how we will react differently when a similar situation presents itself in the future. If it’s improving our recitation of berachot or prayers, we can think of one or several berachot or prayers regarding which we have been lax, and make very specific goals for improvement. If it’s Torah study, we should make a specific commitment, such as to attending a certain class, or designating a certain half-hour or hour each day to studying a given text. Whichever area of life it is in which we want to improve, we need to make very specific goals and commitments that we can achieve.
Reaching Out to Ourselves
Rav Shach told the story of two girls who grew up together and were best friends through high school and seminary. Soon thereafter, however, they drifted apart. One of the girls quickly found a stable, fulfilling job, as well as a wonderful husband, and she was busy tending to her beautiful, growing family and enjoying her job. The other, however, had no such success. No job or date worked out. She found herself struggling to find work, and one year after another passed without her finding her soulmate. She felt lonely, frustrated, embittered, and helpless.
One evening, she was walking to her building and saw a letter in her mailbox. She put down the bag she was carrying and went to see the letter. She was surprised to find that it was a personal letter. She opened it with great curiosity, and was thrilled to see that it was written by her old friend. The friend wrote about how she was talking to her young daughter about her childhood, and she mentioned their close and special friendship. This got her thinking about her old friend, and wishing that they could get back in touch.
The girl read the letter over and over again, with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.
She looked over at the bag she was carrying, which she had placed on the ground. It was filled with drugs that she had purchased in order to end her life. She immediately took the bag and threw it into the garbage bin.
The letter literally saved her life. Seeing how her old friend cared enough to reach out lifted her spirits and gave her a renewed feeling of joy and purpose. She immediately called her friend, and they scheduled a time to get together. She instantly became part of her friend’s family, spending time at their home and getting to know the children.
This story has so much to tell us about the power of reaching out, and about the importance of not leaving anybody behind, and ensuring that no person is ever left alone. But I would suggest also using this story as an analogy for the forgotten part of our own beings.
We’ve all had dreams and aspirations that have long been forgotten and neglected. We’ve all set goals that were never achieved. We all have part of ourselves that are neglected. Hashem has given us this period of the year as a beautiful gift, a wonderful opportunity to reach out to ourselves, to remember that long-forgotten goal or dream, that vision of our lives which at some point was discarded and replaced with what we have now. It is not too late to write that letter, to go back to our “old friend,” to our old aspirations. We really can change.
Hashem never gives up on us. If He did, He would not have given us this period of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He made these special days for all of us, no matter who we are, lovingly giving us an opportunity to make ourselves better. He believes in us and in our ability to change – and so we should believe in ourselves, too.