During Yom Kippur and the Ten Days of Repentance that lead up to it we are commanded to take stock of our selfhood, to confront our failings and weaknesses. In a world populated by billions of human souls, no one is completely alone. Our thoughts and feelings are literally electromagnetic impulses. They ripple out across the universe through everyone and everything like radio and television signals. By that measure, the energy of our own thoughts and intentions has travelled nine trillion kilometers in every direction since this time last year.
One’s inevitable moments of weakness, of baseless hatred, of self-sabotage combine to form only a drop in the bucket of humanity’s collective suffering. However, there are many drops there, and it is a big bucket. It helps to have a strategy or a philosophy to take on the enormity of what stands between each of us and our days of reckoning. We see so little of the big picture, yet the reach of our spiritual energy is enormous. There is much to know, and we are compelled to know more than one might think is humanly possible to know.
In “Kol Dodi Dofek, [My Beloved Knocks]” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik – The Rav – contemplates the Jewish ethos of self-examination in relation to the most extreme of contexts – the presence of evil in the world. In an address on Israel Independence Day in 1956 he frames our quest to narrow the gap between what one can see and what we all must know as follows.
In man’s finite, limited view, the absolute good in creation is not apparent. The contrast is striking and undeniable. There is evil that is not susceptible to explanation and comprehension. Only by comprehending the world in its totality can man gain insight into the essence of suffering. However, as long as man’s perception is limited and fragmented, so that he sees only isolated portions of the cosmic drama and the mighty saga of history, he cannot delve into the recesses of evil and the mystery of suffering.
Fifty years later Rabbi Yair Kahn cites the Rav’s challenge of “comprehending” specifically in the context of the Ten Days of Repentance. He applies the third chapter of Maimonides’ [Rambam’s] Hilchot Teshuva as follows
…the Rambam abandons the discussion of man confronting a specific transgression, and begins a discourse on the assessment of man’s overall standing. Who is a “tzaddik,” a “rasha,” a “beinoni” (righteous, evil, and middling person)? He then proceeds to apply similar criteria with respect to states, and indeed to the entire world.
Overall, it is a daunting task to look outward like this and contemplate one’s part in the expanse of an infinite universe. The Rav teaches us that we must leave no stone in our path unturned in the search for meaning – e.g., every limitation, every fragment. Rambam teaches us that we must define our terms and apply a system to our inquiry – specifically a process like self-examination or teshuva.
During the high holidays, the rituals and services give us a broad formula for self-examination. There is something for everybody. However, a formula is only part of a process. Each of us needs to bring something personal to the process that reaches into the microcosm as much as The Rav and Rambam reach for the macrocosm.
The following is an example of what that might look like in practice.
It is likely that only four people other than me have read or ever will read every word of my doctoral dissertation: i.e., three of the professors who examined me on it, and the theses librarian – who read it only for format, not for philosophy. In addition to writing every word of it, I proofread and edited it countless times. Still, we all missed something. About seven years after it was approved and published, I discovered that my dissertation contained a glaring typographical error. It contained an incomplete sentence – academically a sin of omission, no doubt. I tried to mark the page with a sticky note, but somehow it fell out or got separated. I have not re-found the error, but I am forever certain it exists.
Even if I find the typo again, I likely will never know what I had written that went missing. However, I believe that the hand of Gd is in everything. Maybe it was a mistaken idea that should never have been there in the first place; if so, Gd did me a favour by causing it to be ‘annulled’. Maybe it was profound and transcendent – eclipsing the published 103,508 words. If so, Gd did me a favour by removing a stumbling block over which I know I would end up tripping – my ego. Like The Rav, my examining committee of philosophers helped me explore outward as far as I could manage. Like Rambam, the librarian – a stickler for process – provided a formula that freed me up to focus on the task at hand.
The way to make the daunting cosmic process of self-reflection manageable is to reflect often on the small things that we know well about ourselves. These are the things I call in my dissertation “moments of opportunity” for dialogue. It is in these things that we find personal ways to bridge the microcosm with the macrocosm of our everyday lives. This is the dialogue between I and Thou – the I who is here/now, and the Thou who yearns for teshuva and redemption. The key is to always remember that our every intention, every reflection, and the things that we got right and the things we got wrong all factor into Gd’s judgment of us. They also become our personal moments of opportunity to elevate our future and change Gd’s assessment of us for a better judgment.
G’mar Chatima Tova,
Dr. Terry Neiman with Rabbi Rosenblatt
