Adding Eases Subtracting

It’s very foggy out there. It’s really hard to see our way forward. None of us knows where all this is headed. But what we can know for sure is where we are headed. 

If you’re like me, your hardest critic is you. You try to apologize. You try to repent. And, even after you succeed in doing so, you find keeping-it-up, sticking with it, to be hugely challenging. In other words, your conversation with your neighbor goes okay. Your conversation with God does too. It’s your visit with the person you’ll meet in the mirror next week that will be hardest. 

Tonight and tomorrow, spiritual health trades places with physical health. A fellow-learner wrote me this week about one of her favorite Daily Letters. It likened physical and spiritual health, saying just as physical health depends on 3 things: 1) good diet, 2) rest, and 3) exercise, so too spiritual health depends on 3 things: 1) good deeds, 2) companionship, and 3) living in accord with your higher purpose. Then she then added, “You can immediately choose to do a kind deed and then instantly you feel your soul smiling!” The key word here is, she added.

Like a gymnast’s rings, the best way to let go of one, is to take hold of another. Adding something kind, eases subtracting something less kind. A thou shalt will reliably displace a thou shalt not. I take the sage’s maxim: “a positive command overrides a negative one” (עשה דוחה לא תעשה) to mean: the surest way to subtract something that’s not good for you is to add a thing that is. 

Here’s the key: we come to synagogue not to overachieve. But to try and be a little bit better. Just a little bit. That is, to know we’re headed in the right direction. May a Yom Kippur moment for you this year, mobilize for you a new sweep of momentum that’s good for you and those around you.