Atonement musings

Since Elul began last month, I've purposely been doing a lot of introspection and, in many ways, have found myself changing - ever so subtly and slightly, but changing nonetheless. It's not so much that I'm learning new things: the positive things I need to implement in my life and the negative things I need to omit from my life, are things which I have always known and things I knew I needed to do. Call it laziness/procrastination/downright complacency, I've just never done what I needed to do. But Elul came about, and, with it, came a forceful push to look at myself properly, and, more than that, get the ball rolling on changing. With the introspection came, for the first time in my life, a hand-in-hand approach to change. I married the two together in my head, and, so, couldn't do one without the other. It was a conscious decision to do this - and while the journey of introspection will never be over, my current push for introspection/self-evaluation/change was all geared towards the coming of this awe-inspiring Day of Atonement which begins in a mere few hours.

Yom Kippur: the final realization of these past six weeks.

I've been thinking alot about perfection in general and I posted a blog about this elusive state of perfection a few weeks ago. Perfection, to me, is a very relative and personal thing. What can be considered to be perfection by one, is perhaps  utter imperfection to another. We all have different standards, different goals, different outlooks, different purposes, different abilities, different talents, different experiences, different personalities, and, as such, we all have differing views on what perfection entails. A six year old child draws a picture of a horse and, to her, that is perfection. Leonardo da Vinci paints a painting of a mysterious woman, and to him (and many in the world) that is the (or, one) overarching standard of perfection. Much as personalities, values and goals change with time, so too does personal measures of perfection. The six year old child who drew that picture of a horse may look back when she is ten and be astounded that she ever thought that was the highest she could achieve. Perfection (or, let's use the word contentment, but to me, they are interchangable as they are both desired states where we wish do to be, but oftentimes, are not) is a clean, orderly, yet cluttered room and rainy weather - whereas to someone else, it would be sunny weather and a minimalist decor. Perfection depends on the person. Happiness depends on the individual. I'm not sure if there is an overriding Standard of Perfection somewhere out there in the universe, but somehow I don't think there is. I think life is simply too varied for there to be a particular, generic standard. Life isn't the ISO; it is not always ordered like a stately British manor. Life is chaotic and unpredictable; life abounds with differences and uniqueness. This is what makes Life beautiful: that in it's chaotic and many varied differences, life doesn't present us with only one type of perfection, because Life has seen to it that we are all different.

Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder.

In many ways, Judaism as a spiritual pathway agrees with me on this point. We are not given a model of someone to emulate and follow. There is no WWJD equivalent in Judaism; there is no hadith to tell us which side of the bed we should sleep on or how many women we can marry because our chief prophet did so. Instead, the Tanakh captures the stories of very many individuals, each of whom went through very different, very unqiue experiences; each of whom were faced with different goals to accomplish, different hurdles to cross; each of whom whose stories captured their imperfections and failures, but, in so doing, highlighted their greatness precisely because of their ever-steady quest to achieve their missions. There was never One Prophet in Judaism - there were Prophets and great people; each of whom had a unique story and a unique purpose to fulfill. Ask a roomful of Jews who the most important prophet in Judaic history was and you'd be greeted a compendium of answers: Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Deborah, Herzl. We were not given one man/woman to look up to - we were given many. Many men and many women, whose greatness was in their journeys, whose greatness was in their attempts to achieve their missions/unique perfections, whose greatness was in their constant determination to try, to try and to try again.  This is what makes Moses, Ruth, David, Abraham, Daniel, Esther and all the rest great. This is what made them worthy of being remembered. They didn't try to emulate anyone else; they were ever faithful to charting their own course/story and trying to achieve their personal best/perfection. This is what we must emulate: we must find our own unique destinies, our own unique missions and try to fulfill it using our unique abilities, skills and talents. God did not intend for me to emulate anyone else, because He made me who I uniquely am, just as much as he didn't intend for you to be Sarah or Joshua. If He had wanted us to emulate any of the great prophets or sages or great people who populate the wide scope of Jewish history, well, He would have made us exactly like them, in exactly their time, with exactly their life circumstances, and exactly their genetic make-up.

I am who I am. You are who you are.

Find your unique perfection and strive to embrace it, while being inspired by others, but not trying to be them.

Yom Kippur, to me, is more than just my atonement of my past transgressions. It's the culmination of an annual journey - a day to do more than beg forgiveness. It's about realizing that mistakes made in the past are just that, past. Judaism is a verb - it is a religion of doing more than it is a religion of faith. It is easy to have faith, easy to believe, easy to know what's wrong and right - but it is much more difficult to do, to act. Forgiveness is not just in saying sorry, it's about doing sorry - showing that one has realized the mistakes of the past and will actively not seek to repeat them in the future. Yom Kippur is the final day of a six-week journey that we are blessed with each year to look closely at ourselves and to evaluate where we are and where we want to be. It's the time when we pick up that puerile picture of the horse we drew this past year and realize that we can do even better, and, thus, set an even higher level of perfection for ourselves.