A New Start

With all the talk of ‘war’ and ‘decrees’ and ‘imminent geula’, I tried so hard to be good in the run up to this past Rosh Hashanah… I tried so hard to ‘catch’ a lot of the outstanding issues that I still have, and to at least make a start on them… I tried so hard to not judge anyone, or to only judge people favorably.
 
But since just before Rosh Hashanah, I feel like Hashem kind of shoved me off the proverbial spiritual cliff.
 
First, there was the very hard conversation that I had with someone who came to my door asking for money, on the day before the New Year. I’ve written about it in Elul All Year Long, but in a nutshell, I gave the poor man some very tough mussar for half an hour, and then spent a lot of the next day trying to track him down to give him a bunch of a money, because I had a dream that told me I had to.
 
It was such an emotional and spiritual roller coaster ride, I went into Rosh Hashanah completely on the back foot. But I still had high hopes that Rosh Hashanah itself would turn things around.
 
But this year, that wasn’t G-d’s plan. A couple of weeks’ earlier, my husband and I had heard a Rav Arush CD where he was talking about the need for people to ‘clean house’ from all the secular culture they were immersed in. We don’t have TV, movies, internet, iPhones, iPods, magazines, newspapers, or Michael Jackson. What we did still have was a handful of children’s novels, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Anne of Green Gables.
 
I wasn’t 100% convinced they were so bad, but with the threat of war looming, I figured I’d rather err on the side of caution and get the stuff out of the house. My kids didn’t know, because we sneaked the books out to the bin while they were in school, and they don’t really read English anyway.
 
I felt pretty good that we’d managed to ‘clean house’. I probably felt quite smug and arrogant about it all. So you can imagine how bad I felt when the relative I’d invited to stay with us for Rosh Hashanah presented my kids with the Hebrew version of Anne of Green Gables just as the holiday was starting.
 
My oldest grabbed it, and started reading it obsessively. Neither of my kids made it to shul the first day – they were too busy discussing Gilbert Blythe, and play acting scenes from the book, and day-dreaming about having their bat mitzvahs in Avonlea.
 
I was determined to not have an argument or provoke either my kids or my relative on Rosh Hashanah, so I said nothing. But inside, I was devastated. Instead of talking Torah and teshuva, my kids spent two days’ solid talking obsessively about one of the books I’d just thrown out.
 
I tried to get more Torah happening in my house; but the odds were stacked against me, and as the holiday progressed, I really started to feel like quite a failure.
 
I wanted to try and stay for a whole service on Rosh Hashanah, so I’d set my alarm for 5am, to get up and pray with the netz, or sunrise minyan.
 
I woke up OK. I got to synagogue OK. I even davened OK – until I finished the amidah prayer, when a wave of sheer fatigue hit me, and I felt that I either had to go home, or fall over.
 
I got home and tried to so some hitbodedut – but also failed miserably at that, and ended up falling asleep for three hours.
 
I’d heard the minimum number of shofar blasts.
 
The next day, I tried a different minyan; I stayed four hours; I prayed some nice prayers – but the minyan went on until late afternoon, and I couldn’t leave my kids and guest waiting too long for lunch, so again, I left before I’d heard all the shofar blasts.
 
I consoled myself by thinking: “At least my husband is in Uman! At least he’s doing some good davening, Bezrat Hashem.” But I’ll admit that between Anne of Green Gables and my ‘half-missing’ prayers, Rosh Hashanah was starting to feel a bit disappointing.
 
Then, on the Shabbat, G-d threw me another curve ball.
 
This year, I’ve really tried to make tzniut, or modest dress and behavior, a priority, both for me and my girls. I wear socks. I try to get my girls to wear socks. I cover my hair 24/7; I try to get my girls to at least tie their hair back neatly; I police skirt lengths and shirt sleeves; I ask G-d all the time to help me and my girls to be more tzniut.
 
My relative doesn’t dress so modestly, but she’s a thoughtful person, and her clothing is usually within the realms of ‘OK’, especially when she’s coming to visit me. But on Shabbat, it really wasn’t. On Shabbat, she met me at one of the many kiddushes we went to wearing a dress that was very low-cut and see-thru.
 
I was aghast. She clearly had no idea that there was a problem (she’d even made the effort of wearing ‘sleevies’…) and I had no idea how to broach her clothing without causing a big scene and a lot of embarrassment. To make it worse, we were invited out for lunch at a house with an almost teenage-boy, and I just couldn’t think of any way of avoiding it.
 
I sat there, cringing, thinking about all the ‘issues’ I’d helped to cause that morning, by walking around my religious village (three times…) with a partially-dressed woman, on Shabbat Shuva, of all times.
 
It was the last straw.
 
I came back from lunch in a very down mood, and I had to go off for some immediate hitbodedut (personal prayer).
 
I looked back over the last few days, and all I could see was a big litany of failures: I failed to ‘clean house’ (big time…) from all the secular culture; I failed to get my kids to synagogue to hear shofar; I failed to hear all the shofar blasts myself; I failed to have my home full of Torah; I failed to uphold the basic minimum standards of tznius in my home; I even failed at the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim (welcoming guests) because by shabat, I was really starting to regret that I’d invited my guest to come stay in the first place.
 
In short, I failed. A lot.
 
It was only a few days’ later, when I was trying to do a big six hour session of hitbodedut to work out why I’d had such a trying Rosh Hashanah, that Hashem gave me at least part of the answer: the real failure I’d had was thinking it was all down to me.
 
G-d set me up. He set me up to fail – repeatedly. And my job, now, was to accept that G-d had His reasons for doing so, and that I just had to let it go and be happy with my lot.
 
It’s easy to say, but very hard to do.
 
Which is when I had my second realization: I couldn’t change what had happened on Rosh Hashanah; but I could certainly learn from it, and I could certainly try to make teshuva so that it hopefully wouldn’t happen again.
 
I could also make a new start, and appreciate that however it was, that was how G-d wanted it. He didn’t want me to beat myself up for a year, or worry that it was all a bad omen – it was simply G-d’s will, and that’s all.
 
Next year, Bezrat Hashem, things will be different. Next year, Bezrat Hashem, things will be better. I already know there are no guarantees, but I still have to do my bit, and that means that I’m going to start praying for that new start now.