Empty Your Pockets - A Rosh Hashanna Thought

A short High Holiday thought

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

The Pocket-Emptying Ritual

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Chanat Tova. Every night when I get home, I have a routine. Probably like you. I stand at my dresser, I empty my pockets, keys, a receipt from the grocery store I don't I don't remember needing. Maybe a crumpled note with a phone number on it that I can no longer identify. Loose change that migrates somehow from a pocket to dresser to a jar to nowhere at all. My hands know the choreography better than my mind does. Keep the keys, toss the receipt, the note. Well, I'll decide about that note tomorrow.

A Daily Practice Of Teshuva

SPEAKER_00 1:04

So why am I telling you about my pockets? Because I want to suggest that on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah, that's this little unremarkable ritual, sorting out the debris of the day, deciding what to keep and what to let fall away, might be one of the closest things we have to the daily practice of Teshuva of repentance. Not the teshuva of the shofar blast and the sweeping resolution that we all make. A smaller, quieter, nightly teshuva. Stay with me here.

Maimonides And The Midnight Ledger

SPEAKER_00 1:43

We're going to empty our pockets metaphorically. The Rambam, Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, was a physician by day, a philosopher, and a codifier of Jewish law. And he has a great deal to say about Teshuva, about return or repentance. Whole chapters. Hilchot Teshuva, the laws of repentance, is one of his most well-known and beloved works, still studied, argued over 800 years after his death. Now, here's something to note. Rumbam doesn't talk only about the grand Teshuva, the once-a-year confession, the fast, the beating of our chests on Yom Kippur. He talks about the daily practice, the nightly practice. Elsewhere in his writings, echoing an older tradition that goes back to the Talmud itself, he describes a person examining their deeds each night before they go to bed. What did I do today? Where did I fall short? What needs correcting tomorrow? This practice is called Khashbon Hanefesh, the taking account of one's soul. Khashbon comes from the same root as arithmetic or bookkeeping, as if the soul were a ledger, and every night you sit down and you check the columns. Not once a year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the whole congregation does it, while fasting and wearing white and eating apples and honey. No, every day. What is he

Why Big Resolutions Rarely Stick

SPEAKER_00 3:34

telling us? Simply this. We remember the holiday, but too often we forget the habit. Think about how we imagine Teshuva. The shofar sounds, we fast, we make resolutions the size of mountains. This year I will forgive my brother. This year I will stop a habit that I've had for a decade. This year I will become essentially a different person by sundown on Yom Kippur. Can you imagine? One day, one grand gesture, and poof, we are transformed. It's a beautiful, beautiful idea. It's also, if we're honest, almost never the way we change, because that's the what not the way change happens. Ask anyone who has tried to keep a New Year's resolution past the third week of January. Ask anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, to quit a habit, to mend a friendship in one dramatic leap rather than a hundred small steps. Maimonides, the physician that he was, understood something about the body that applies just as well to the soul. Healing rarely happens in one grand intervention. It happens through daily maintenance, a diet followed day by day, not a single miracle meal, a wound tended morning and night, not bandaged once and forgotten. And yet we've built an entire religious calendar around this grand gesture called Rosh Hashanah in Yom Kippur, the days of awe, as though Teshuva were a mountain you climb once a year and then descend clean and relieved, back into the valley of ordinary living for the next 50 weeks. But Rambam's Midnight Ledger tells a different story. It says the mountain isn't the point, the path is the point. And you walk the path one small pocket emptying at a

What Are You Carrying Today

SPEAKER_00 5:50

time. So let me ask, not to answer for you, because I think this is a question each of us sits down with privately at this time of year, at our own dresser and our own quiet. But let me ask you this: what is in your pocket this year? Maybe it's a word you said too sharply to someone who didn't deserve it. Maybe it's an email you didn't answer, not because you forgot, but because some small resentment made you not want to. Maybe it's five minutes of your attention you gave to your phone that you should have given to your child, to your spouse, to your own tired soul. Maybe it's nothing dramatic at all, just an ordinary day's accumulation of small carelessness, the kind that doesn't make headlines, the kind we often forget, the kind that doesn't require a rabbi or a courtroom or a public confession. Just a receipt in your pocket that you didn't notice you were carrying. There's almost always something, some small thing to sort out. The Talmud imagines a person reviewing the day's deeds before sleep precisely because sleep itself is a kind of small death, a nightly return of the soul to its maker. So why not settle the accounts before we hand the ledger over? It's not the grand pronouncement of teshuva that always makes the difference. It's the habit of Teshuva.

How To Do Nightly Self-Accountings

SPEAKER_00 7:35

So try this. Before you set down the keys and ask quietly, without fanfare, without the shofar fast or the public confession, what else am I carrying that I haven't sorted out? Maimonides didn't ask us to climb the mountain every night. He asked us to open a ledger. Small, daily, unglamorous. In truth, there is a return available for you this year, and it does not require waiting for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Metaphorically, this year, empty your pockets every day. Sort out what you need to keep and what you need to let fall away, and know that in the small, quiet, forgettable gesture, you are doing exactly what our tradition has asked of us in Sinai. Not leaping towards holiness in one dramatic bound, but by walking toward it, one pocket, one night, one moment, one small act of Teshuva at a

Blessing For The New Year

SPEAKER_00 8:48

time. I wish you a Shana Tova and a Gamarchatimatova. A good year, a year of prosperity, of health and peace, and a good and complete lasting seal.