Forensic sudoku

During the Corona pandemic we were forced to amuse ourselves in order to retain our individual and collective sanity during a seemingly interminable sequence d of lockdowns and quarantines. My way was to try and learn new skills. One was to be able to peel a pomelo to professional standards. The other was to master the art of the killer sudoku (the ones that confront you with an empty grid and require completion without the aid of numerical clues).

At first I struggled a great deal but eventually I got the hang of them and was able to solve them more often than not. Initially I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of completing them. Later I realised that, however much pleasure this gave me, I was deriving more of a brain buzz from what I call ‘forensic sudoku’—picking apart a sudoku which I could not finish because I had made a mistake somewhere along the line, to see where I had gone wrong. This turned out to be a greater challenge. When faced with a blank grid, all you have to do is work out which number goes in which square. But when a sudoku has gone wrong, one has to address a grid that has many numbers on it, some of which are correct and others of which are not, and then work out which is which.

So it is too in our lives. It is usually easier to make a decision than to engage in an ex post facto analysis of what we have done, to see which elements of our ideas, acts and decisions were right and which were not. Just as a sudoku has rules, so too do our own lives—and we can’t cheat the system. A sudoku grid that contains errors is always wrong. The same applies to a life that is strewn with mistakes. Forensic sudoku shows us where we have gone wrong; so too does our detailed assessment of our past conduct. There is however a big difference. Crossings-out on a sudoku are not only unsightly but show anyone who sees them a snail-trail of errors. But for our own lives, sincere repentance can wipe out our errors in their entirety, leaving behind no trace on our personal record.

Pirkei Avot recognises the importance of looking back to see where we have gone wrong. At Avot 3:1 (per Akavyah ben Mahalalel) and 4:29  (per R’ Elazar haKappar) we are reminded that we will be called to account before God for everything we do and everything we say, and Avot 3:20 R’ Akiva notes that we are literally made to pay for it. But the beneficial effect of repentance is recorded there too: see Avot 4:13 (per R’ Eliezer ben Yaakov), 4:22 (per R’ Yaakov) and the anonymous teaching at Avot 5:21.

The moral of this post is a simple one: if you keep a record—even a mental note—of what you have done and why, it’s much easier to work out where you might have gone wrong and, if need be, how to deal with it.