Looking Forward
I recall when I was in Slabodka in Europe how on Rosh Chodesh Ellul they began saying a mussar shmuz every day; instead of three times a week, now it was every day. And not a short shmuz – it was an hour and a half each time. We spoke constantly about the Yom Hadin – even among ourselves. The entire month was spent in preparation and the air was saturated with gravity, a seriousness. All of our thoughts were, “We’re approaching the Day of Judgment. Are we prepared?”
The truth is that some of the great men in the not so long ago didn’t even wait for Ellul. One month alone should be enough to prepare for Yom Hadin? The Alter of Slabodka, zichrono levrachah, already in the middle of the month of Av used to go to Kelm to prepare for Ellul. Others did similar things. They didn’t wait for Ellul – already in Av they were busy preparing.
But now we are already in Ellul and so the question is what do we do now? We’re already behind schedule and so to delay anymore would be foolhardy. And therefore we should do the best we can, bli neder, and spend some time now preparing for Yom Hadin. Anything else would be reckless.
Looking Backwards
So we’ll begin by saying that the first thing to do before the year comes to a close is to look back on the past year and to thank Hakadosh Baruch Hu that last Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur He inscribed us for another year of life.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows. I remember once there was a member in my synagogue who went to sleep. In the morning, his wife came and said, “Mordechai! Wake up!” Mordechai didn’t move. “Mordechai, wake up!” He didn’t move. It was all over; he had passed away in his sleep. This happened to a young man by the way. Don’t take it for granted! I’ve seen so many cases where people suddenly left the world, lo aleinu. Friends, family, acquaintances, members of my shul; so many people are taken away unexpectedly. And therefore that’s number one – we should be happy and full of gratitude to the One Who gave us life.
Otherwise, how can we even think about appearing before Hashem on Rosh Hashanah? Imagine a person is going to stand in shul and ask, “Hashem please inscribe me in the Book of Life!” Shouldn’t he first discharge his obligation to say thank you for what he was written in for this past year? Always ‘give me, give me.’ Every year you come and ask for more; more and more. What about thanking for what you got up to now? Is thanking such a small thing?
First Things First
It’s not small at all. Just the opposite; the most important function of a person in this world is to recognize the chasdei Hashem to him. It’s such an important statement, I’m going to repeat it. Of all the things that are expected of us in this world, the foremost is the obligation to thank Hashem.
And so if it comes into your head during these days, “What should I do to prepare?” so now you know. The first obligation is to think about how you lived a year up until now. You survived! You’re here to tell the story.
Of course you have to do other things too. A person has to make time to think about his sins; there’s a lot of teshuvah you have to do, various aveiros you have to spend time considering. You have to make resolutions, and you have to find ways and means of making sure your resolutions will have a kiyum. You can finish mesichtas too, why not? Absolutely there’s a lot of work to do. But more than anything else, the top of the list before Yom Hadin, is the requirement of thanking Hashem, of giving gratitude to Him for the past year.
“I gave you another year of life,” Hashem says, “and it was much more than life in general. All the needs of your life I gave you.” If you’re still here, it’s a result of thousands and thousands of benefits, thousands and thousands of miracles. Your kidneys were working. Your pancreas was working. Your heart was pounding away every day. Your liver is functioning - did you once this year thank Hashem for your liver? You never even thought about it. All year long your blood circulation was working. Do you know how many miracles there are in your blood? Even your blood clotting - just the fact that you didn’t bleed to death every time you got a cut this past year is a miracle! There are nissei nissim in the process of blood clotting. Every process in the body is so deep and profound that it’s astounding what Hakadosh Baruch Hu is doing for us all the time.
We Want it All
And we want it again. We want a lot! We don’t want a little bit; we want everything. We want to be healthy not only in our blood and our pancreas. We want to be healthy in our eyes and healthy in our ears and healthy in our teeth. We want to be healthy in our throats, in our pharynx, in our larynx; going down and down - we want to be healthy in our gullets, healthy in our stomach, healthy in the intestine, healthy in the bladder, healthy in the heart, and in the spleen and the colon.
There are a lot of things we need and each one is a very big achievement by itself. Because if a man has health in all of the organs except one chas veshalom he’ll discover it’s not enough. Oh boy will he discover it then!
Here’s a man who tries to use the bathroom one morning and he discovers that he can’t. He tries but nothing happens. But he has to! Now, that’s not a comfortable feeling at all. And even though everything else is functioning but this one thing is too important. You can’t fool around with such a thing!
So he calls out to his wife, “Something is wrong! Emergency! I have an emergency here!” So they take a taxi or an ambulance, whatever it is, and they rush to the hospital. A true story, a man in my shul. I heard that story – he was telling me about it with tears in his eyes and I was thinking about how important every function in the body is, how there are thousands of functions and processes that we need to work smoothly.
Uhum?
And therefore life means a lot of things and it’s all of those things that we’re going to ask for on Rosh Hashanah. After a whole year of receiving benefits we are going to be standing and asking – write us for a year of life and all the things included in life. It means the millions of things that we need. “Can we have another year?” So Hashem is looking at us, “Uhum? What about the past year? You forgot that?”
So at least we should be able to say that we spent the last month of the year thanking. It’s true we got a late start but we’ll do it now for a month and we’ll try to make up for the whole year. And so our hands are full; there’s a lot of work to do. You have to start a new career, the career of meditating in the kindnesses of Hashem (Tehillim 107:43).
Rabbeinu Yonah (Shaarei Teshuva 3:17) quotes those three words from Dovid Hamelech and he says we see from there that it’s a duty to look back on all the happiness that you had in the past, all the successes in the past; to look back and enjoy all those weeks and days and nights and hours. And so if we’ll listen to him, that’s already enough to keep you busy the rest of the month.
Five Times Thirty
Even if you put it into practice for five minutes a day, you’re superior to everyone else because the world doesn’t do it. They talk about it sometimes but talk is cheap - we’ll be the ones who do it. Five minutes a day - five minutes on the clock for thirty days - we’re going to set aside for this project of looking back in gratitude at the road we traveled from last Rosh Hashanah till now.
Remember Tishrei? Each day is something to consider. Each day was a glorious cacophony of pleasures, of successes, of life. There were two days of Rosh Hashanah and then you were busy preparing for Yom Kippur. Ah, Yom Kippur! The day our aveiros were wiped clean and we became reconciled with Hashem. And then after Yom Kippur, we sat down to the meal at motzei Yom Kippur; how good the food tasted. Did you think about that? Ah! It was a pleasure to eat that meal. You filled your stomach and it was fun!
And probably you continued eating after motzei Yom Kippur too. Almost three hundred and sixty five breakfasts you ate this year. Did you enjoy breakfast? Now don’t tell me you didn’t. If you didn’t, then you have to take a course in living a normal life because everybody should enjoy breakfast. Almost three hundred and sixty five times this year you ate supper. And most of us ate three hundred and sixty five lunches. Not to mention what you did between meals. You think it’s possible to fit that into five minutes of thinking?
Room and Board
What about all the occasions when you slept? You know there are some people who can’t sleep. And most of us slept three hundred and sixty five nights. I don’t think you were up in mishmarim all night. I don’t want to be choshed b’kesheirim but I think you were sleeping almost every night.
And you didn’t sleep on the railroad tracks or a park bench; you probably slept in a bed almost every night. Here’s a poor woman, homeless, bedraggled and a little bit demented. All her worldly possessions are in the shopping wagon; she has nothing. She doesn’t have a bathroom, she doesn’t have a kitchen, she doesn’t have a bed to sleep in. I see her on Ocean Parkway and she’s trying to fall asleep on a park bench. It’s mammish a heartbreak to look at her. If she could only have a place to sleep.
And you, all year long you had a bed and a roof over your head. Maybe your landlord is a tough fellow; maybe the rent is too high. But you have a roof and beds and running water. How lucky she would be if she could have a little place, a shack with a roof over her head; she’d be the happiest person right now.
You put on garments every day. You took baths once in a while. What didn’t you have? Think of all the months that passed by, one after the other. But not wholesale. Wholesale thinking is not enough because each month has so many days in it and Shabbosim, yomim tovim. The truth is every day was a yomtiv. If your heart was pumping, it was a glorious day. If you went to the bathroom successfully, it was a glorious day.
Look Back In Joy
And so when we look back now with gratitude we should include all of those glorious days, all of the successes we had, all of the simchahs that we had, all of the pleasures we had in our private lives. Believe me, that’s enough to keep us busy for a long time; a month is not enough.
But at least with that you should go into the yomim noraim. You had an entire year, a good year, and you made an effort to look back and express gratitude to Hashem. With details! At least you’ll have that under your belt – you spent the last month of the year appreciating all the various kinds of happiness that Hakadosh Baruch Hu gave you this past year, before you had the boldness, the chutzpah, to ask for another year.
