It is that time of the year. The air is becoming cooler, and daylight is fading away as the days of the week are getting shorter. Autumn is knocking on our doors, and it carries on its wings a spiritually significant time for us: the month of Ellul and the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is time to celebrate the Jewish New Year, enjoy honey cakes and look forward to the powerful sound of the shofar. It is also time to think and plan how we are going to overcome the twenty five-hour fast on Yom Kippur. This is the peak season in the Jewish calendar and for many of us it is also a time to reconnect to our Yiddishkeit, Jewish traditions, customs, practices and ideas, and the Jewish way of life.
In Biblical times the main concern of Jews who lived in agricultural societies in Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) was the end of summer and the beginning of the rainy season. The Middle East is known for its fluctuations in the amount of rain, and no rain will have meant no crops, resulting in famine and death. The High Holydays therefore signify at that time a time of pleading to God for a new year of rain, food and fortune. Communication with God was conducted in the Jerusalem Temple through animal sacrifice by the Temple priests.
Over the years the core idea behind the High Holydays was preserved yet it lost its sole focus on agriculture, and it gained a new focus on personal and communal. The substitutes to sacrifice that we offer are: teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah – repentance, prayer and acts of charity.
The High Holydays are a high spiritual time where we, as individuals and as a community, must engage in ‘cheshbon nefesh’. Cheshbon nefesh literally means spiritual accounting and stock taking.
Once a year every business needs to produce a set of financial accounts. It helps the business to take stock of assets and liabilities, to know whether it is making a profit or a loss and to determine how much tax it should pay.
The 18th Century Italian Rabbi Luzato gives us good cheshbon nefesh advice. “You should always check your deeds and inspect your ways in order to not let bad habits settle. You should be vigilant with your spiritual paths just as a merchant should always be vigilant with his business paths in order that business remains viable.”
Every day of the year we live our lives; we attempt to make a difference in the world. We have our successes and failures, yet we do not pause to ‘take stock’. Cheshbon nefesh before and during the time of the High Holydays gives us the opportunity to assess our distance from God and God’s commandments, examine our spiritual state and plan for the future. Unlike corporate Balance Sheets and Profit and Loss accounts I cannot offer you any cheshbon nefesh templates. Each individual will have to create his or her own template. Yet I can perhaps provide some guidelines. In Judaism we tend to divide the mitzvot into two sub-categories: Between us and God (ritual) and between us and others (ethical).
On the ritual side we need to think about our connection with God, with spirituality and with Judaism. Did we attend synagogue, light Shabbat candles, engage in study, prayer and other forms of spirituality? Did we encourage others to do so? We need to determine what stops us from reaching our maximum spiritual profit and what steps we need to take to overcome them. A good outcome could be: remember to light Shabbat candles once a week, record my favourite TV programme so I can attend Friday Night service, try to attend the monthly Shabbat morning study session.
The ethical side could be broken down to sub-categories: family, friends, colleagues, my community and even society as a whole. Here we need to determine whether we became closer or got further away from people, whether we conducted ourselves properly or we did anything we now regret. Honesty is essential in this process as human tendency is to shift the blame of our ethical failures onto all but ourselves.
One rule of thumb that I have in conducting cheshbon nefesh is to avoid asking the question: ‘whose fault was it?’ and ask the question ‘what can I do to fix it?’
There are two guiding questions that can help us with our annual cheshbon nefesh. The first: What is my primary aim in life? And the second: If I only have a year to live, what would I want to achieve within that year?
The end result of cheshbon nefesh should be a meaningful action list for the days, weeks and months ahead. It could be asking for forgiveness from someone we wronged, attending synagogue once a week, or reducing pollution by recycling and conserving energy.
Annual stock-taking is so important that some businesses even take me out one day in the year day while they take stock. So it is with our spiritual stock-taking of cheshbon nefesh. The High Holydays offer us a good opportunity to pause, reflect and take ritual and ethical stock in order to realign our spiritual life for the year ahead.
Wishing you Shanah Tovah and a successful cheshbon nefesh.
