Three big no-nos: not so bad after all

Here we are in the month of Elul, when all Jews who take their religion seriously prepare for the impending Days of Awe, for repentance, divine judgement and a chance to start the new year with a clean slate. Many of us undergo a sort of spiritual spring-clean, shaking the dust off our complacency, throwing out old bad habits and ideally exchanging them for brand new, good ones. This exercise comes with a caution: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Netivot Shalom, writing on last week’s Torah reading from Parashat Shofetim, reminds us that everything we have comes from God, and that includes our bad habits too. Since it is axiomatic that, God being good, everything that emanates from Him is good too, we must remember to check out the inherent virtue in even our character traits that are ostensibly bad.

By way of example he cites the Mishnah at Avot 4:48 at which Rabbi Elazar HaKappar says: “Jealousy, lust and glory remove a person from the world”. Yes, they do—but only if they are abused. Jealousy between scholars leads to more scholarship, and not only among Torah scholars. Lust is a precondition for the continued repopulation of the world. The Netivot Shalom gives no example of the benefits of glory, but the Hebrew word in the Mishnah, kavod, equally well translates as “honour” or “respect”, both of which are fine if you give them to others and only damaging when you seek to receive them.

So, when checking out even your worst tendencies and habits, don’t eliminate them from your behavioural make-up without first seeing which bits of them can be put to good use.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Avot, Elul and repentance: It's not too late

Many years ago I worked with a major law firm which prided itself on the enthusiasm with which it dedicated itself to its clients’ welfare. The lawyers worked long hours and rarely used their generous holiday allowance. Only on 1 January did they all desert their desks and return to their families to celebrate the new year. During my first year with the firm I told the partners that, for the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, I would be unavailable for work for two consecutive days. “Wow”, said one of my colleagues, “two days? You must have one enormous hangover after that!”

But the new Jewish year is not like that. It opens with Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement. We face God, as it were, and give an account of ourselves. This is an awesome prospect, but we do not stand before Him unprepared. The month of Elul is our time for reflection on what we have (or have not) done and how we plan to address the challenges of the year ahead.

Two mishnayot in Avot deal with giving God an account of our actions, but in contrasting ways: one addresses our past, the other our future. Rabbi Elazar HaKappar (Avot 4:29) reminds us that there is no escape. In our ordinary lives we can dodge court appearances, fail to submit tax returns, and take evasive action when our fellow humans call us to account. But from God there is no escape. Just as a life is created, is born, lives and dies, so too will we have to answer to God for everything we have done, said, thought and been. That’s a tall order—and when we make all our excuses, God quite literally has all the time in the world to listen and judge accordingly.

Akavya ben Mahahalel (Avot 3:1) takes a different line. The time to think about what you are going to tell God is actually before you contemplate doing anything wrong. That way, you will avoid wrongdoing, your conscience will be clean and you won’t be punished. No-one needs to make excuses to explain away something they didn’t do wrong after all.

Looking at the Jewish calendar, we see that Elul is a festival-free space in which we can practise justifying our wrongs and if—as is most likely—this proves impossible, it’s a time to practise repentance too. Rabbi Eliezer (Avot 2:15) kindly tells us we only need to repent the day before we die; but, since that could be tomorrow, we effectively repent each day. Elul is also prime time for turning the exercise of stocktaking of good deeds and not-so-good ones into a golden chance to improve our performance for the year to come.

Roughly two-thirds of Elul has passed and, for many people, Rosh Hashanah still seems a long way away. Some of us have not long returned from our summer vacation or have been busily settling in children for the new school year. There are bills to be paid and so many terrestrial priorities to see to. But there’s still time to pause, to reflect and ponder, to ask what sort of person we are and what sort of person would we like to be, if we were only prepared to make the effort to do so. Let’s invest in Elul ahead of the Day of Judgment that lies ahead.

Rabbi Akiva, free will and God's foresight again: a mishnah for the month of Ellul

Our previous post looked at one of Rabbi Akiva's somewhat enigmatic teachings, one that has been given all sorts of interpretations over the generations because no-one knows what he had in mind when he taught it. Because it is so vague, its flexibility allows it to be applied to situations and scenarios that lie entirely outside the traditional scope of Avot. For example, the table below relates Rabbi Akiva’s words to the period between the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul (a period traditionally marked by introspection and self-improvement) and Yom Kippur.

Time	Avot 3:19	Relevance
Chodesh Elul	Everything is foreseen but free will is given	Man must examine his past deeds and future plans honestly, since God knows them too. Does he have the willpower to break bad habits or to take new and better commitments upon himself?
Rosh Hashanah	The world is judged for good	We reappoint God as King and accept Him as our judge, praying that He will fasten on to our good points and forgive those that are not.
Yom Kippur	Everything depends on the rov hama’aseh	God weighs us in the balance. If the preponderance of our deeds and intentions are good, we trust that we will be acquitted

Readers are invited to try their hand and find their own scenarios in which the great rabbi's words can shed some quite unexpected light.