It’s Shabbos Shuva: Taking one step at a time
Approaching Shabbos Shuva, I have a notepad in front of me with a list of things I need to work on. I am looking down at it now, and I see lashon hara. That is not an easy one for me. Sometimes congregants vent to me, and in my desire to please and keep my shul members happy, I will carry on with a conversation.
There are other things on this list that I have not taken a single step toward working on. More kavana during Shemoneh Esrei is one of them. It just seems too difficult, and Yom Kippur is only days away.
I am reminded of the Chazon Ish, the great halachic authority of the last century, and a walk he once took with Rav Nissim Karelitz. The Chazon Ish had just come through a difficult illness, and the two of them were walking together from one part of Bnei Brak to another. Rav Karelitz later wrote that the Chazon Ish moved at an almost unbearably slow pace the entire way, still weak, still recovering.
Just before they arrived, the Chazon Ish stopped and said something Rav Karelitz never forgot.
“Look how slowly we’re walking.”
And then, “But in the end, we got there.”
He explained what he meant. If he hadn’t been willing to take that first painful step, and then the next one, and then the one after that, they never would have arrived anywhere.
It sounds almost too simple to be a chiddush. But the Chazon Ish wasn’t just describing a walk down the street. He was describing how anything difficult actually gets done.
• • •
Rav Karelitz says he only fully understood this years later, during another illness, one so severe that the Chazon Ish’s doctors forbade him from speaking at all. Not from getting out of bed. Not even from opening his mouth. At some point, the doctors relented slightly and allowed him exactly three words a day.
The Chazon Ish had a talmid sitting with him, and he pointed to a notebook on the table. Bring it here, he motioned. Then he dictated three words and asked that they be written down.
The next day, three more words. Write them down too, he gestured, wanting to continue the thought he had started the day before.
And so it went, three words a day, for what must have felt like an agonizingly long stretch of time.
Eventually, those scattered three-word entries, collected one small piece at a time, formed a complete section of Torah thought on the laws of Shabbos, now printed in his published writings. A chiddush built three words at a time, by a man who was not permitted to say more.
He could not finish the thought that day. He could barely begin it. But he wrote the three words anyway. Then he came back the next day and wrote three more.
• • •
The Rambam, in Hilchos Teshuva (3:4), makes an extraordinary claim. A person should see themselves, and the entire world, as perfectly balanced between merit and sin. One mitzvah, the Rambam writes, can tip the scales, for that person and for the whole world.
One mitzvah.
That is a remarkable way to think about teshuva because we tend to approach it in exactly the opposite way. We look at everything that needs fixing at once. We think about the person we should be, compare that person to who we are right now, and see the enormous distance between the two. Then the size of the project itself becomes the reason we never begin.
The Chazon Ish did not look at the distance across Bnei Brak. He took the next step. He did not look at the pages of Torah he wanted to write. He wrote the three words he was allowed to say that day.
Maybe that is how I need to look at my list.
• • •
I am probably not going to transform my Shemoneh Esrei before Yom Kippur. But tomorrow, I can choose three words and really mean them.
I am probably not going to solve every struggle I have with lashon hara before Yom Kippur. But tomorrow, there can be one conversation where I stop myself before it goes somewhere it shouldn’t.
Those things can feel almost embarrassingly small compared with everything still written on the page. But perhaps that is exactly the point.
A few days before Yom Kippur, I don’t need to look at my list and ask how I am possibly going to get all the way there.
I need to take one thing on it seriously enough to begin.
“Look how slowly we’re walking.”
“But in the end, we got there.”
May we all be zocheh to a gmar chasimah tovah.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.
