Teshuva in One Sentence: "I Didn't Change, I Just Found Myself"

It's time to get serious. Now that we are exactly one week from Rosh Hashana, we can’t postpone the Teshuva work we all need to do. We all need fixing somewhere. Now don’t get me wrong. Being serious shouldn’t put us in a bad or somber place. To the contrary, taking stock of our personal lives is something that we can get into with positivity despite the short-term discomfort these reckonings must trigger, knowing that we and our loved ones stand to gain in the long term from adjustments that need to be made.

A quick story to illustrate this point. A teacher gathered her students together and asked them to form a large circle. Then she stretched a knotted-up rope across the circle and asked two students to grab on to its ends. She then cut away the knots in the center and retied the two severed ends. This forced all the students to take a few steps closer to accommodate the shortened length of the rope. When the students were asked what they noticed, they all replied with the obvious: the shortened rope had brought them closer.

Sometimes it's easy to feel like the distance we have created by our actions is unbridgeable. The truth is, regardless of whether it's our relationship to G-d, our spouses, children, siblings, parents or friends, cutting away those knots has the power to not only bring us back together, but also add a new element of depth and strength. This serves to bring us even closer than we ever were!

Wishing you peace and blessings on this last Shabbos of the year!