Shanah Tovah! A Happy New Year to You All

Tonight brings with it Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Despite its special significance this event receives no special mention in Pirkei Avot, a tractate that shows no favouritism towards calendar dates.  That does not mean, however, that Avot has nothing to teach us.

Tasked with answering the question “Which is the good path for a person to follow?”, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel (Avot 2:13) advises us that it is the path of looking to the future in order to look for likely outcomes. This is valuable counsel for anyone who wants to make something positive of the year ahead.

For better or worse, God has placed us in His world and has given us the choice of whether to believe in Him and how close or distant to Him we want to be. This means that, to make the most of our lives, we have to work out what sort of relationship with God we want. But there’s more to life than accommodating God. We also have to accommodate other people, each of whom is also endowed with freedom of choice and with whom we can cooperate or compete. Finally we have to live with ourselves, to be comfortable inside our own skin and to be able to look ourselves in the mirror without feeling that we are looking at someone who has routinely failed us and who will probably continue to do so.

There is no simple formula for life that can enable us to strike a perfect balance between these three sets of relationships. If however we follow Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel’s advice and try to look ahead and predict the likely consequences of what we say, what we do and what we let ourselves think and feel, we may be able to improve our chances of navigating the New Year in a state of relative equilibrium.

I wish all Avot Today blog readers a happy and prosperous year 5783.

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