Think about the last time you walked out of a room and immediately started tallying. “How did I do? Was that too much? Not enough? Did I say the right thing?” Many of us carry a little scorecard everywhere we go, and we’re forever balancing it. Adding points, subtracting them.
It’s an understandable experience and there isn’t anything wrong with self-awareness. We all want to be our best self, to be accepted, to feel loved, to feel fulfilled and seeing ourselves clearly is part of the path. But relentless self-editing, self-adjusting, and curating is less about becoming our authentic selves and more like we’re bracing for some verdict we’re sure is coming.
But, as we prepare to welcome Rosh Hashanah, I have to ask you: who exactly is handing down that verdict?
Why the Month of Libra?
In Kabbalah, every month of the year carries a distinct energy and a specific opportunity that is available to all of us. Libra is the month of Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, and its symbol is the scales. It’s an interesting symbol for the month that brings us a new year.
We arrive at Rosh Hashanah having already done the audit. Virgo is the season of the honest inventory: taking stock, naming what we missed, looking clearly at where we fell short. We didn’t come here to be measured. We came here to be made new and that requires handing ourselves and our lives over to the Creator.
Because if we’re honest, our inventory is going to be mixed. Every one of us is a little generous and a little withholding, a little brave and a little afraid. Some days we showed up as the person we most want to be, and some days we really didn’t. There’s a teaching in the Talmud about three books that open at the start of the year—a book of life, a book of the opposite, and, where most of us actually live, a book in between. Read literally, it sounds like a cosmic accountant is sorting us into columns and we’re waiting to hear the ruling… but that’s not what it’s about at all.
Here’s what actually happens on this day. We take that whole mixed inventory with the good, the not-good, and everything in the middle and we hand it all over. All of it, to the Creator. And the teaching is astonishing: the Creator takes every misstep, every wasted hour, every way we weren’t our highest selves this past year and turns it into Light.
That’s what Rosh Hashanah is. A chance to set down everything that pulled you off course and ask, genuinely, to be made new. It’s the reason we want to be as unflinching in our practice of teshuvah as possible, not to punish ourselves but to bring the full picture of who we are today and to transform at the highest level.
This day exists to remind us that we are not finished and as we surrender the last year and all its darkness and light, we are better able to connect to who we are meant to be.
Being made new is offered to every one of us on this day… and so is the responsibility of actually becoming that person.
We aren’t coming to Rosh Hashanah to gain something that we think we lack. We come asking to become the person who can receive the blessings we’re hoping for. We make our connection to the Light and the next morning, pick up one foot and then the other, and you start being that person. Not in some dramatic overnight transformation. In the ordinary, daily choice to live as the self you just asked to become.
You Don’t Get There by Erasing Your Flaws
We assume the person we’re meant to be is whatever’s left after we subtract all the parts we don’t like. Not exactly.
Rav Ashlag taught that a righteous person isn’t someone who only does good and never stumbles. It’s someone who can look at every single thing in their life from the joy to the heartbreak, from the blessings to the things they never would have chosen and find the goodness in it. The parts of yourself you most want to erase aren’t meant to be removed. They’re meant to be elevated. It’s in our falling and our failings that the greatest parts of us are revealed. If you’ve seen Moana, you’ll remember this moment. She spends the whole story certain the light she needs is somewhere out on the ocean, until she remembers it was inside her the entire time. That’s the shift. Not becoming someone else. Remembering who you already are.
Three Ways to Become That Person This Year
With other people. The next time you feel a verdict forming about someone, notice it and set the gavel down. Choose curiosity instead—curiosity about what you’re seeing and curiosity about your impulse to judge. Seek to understand before you decide what anything means.
With your circumstances. When something lands on what feels like the wrong side of the scale, a plan collapses, a door closes, a year doesn’t go the way you’d hoped, resist the instant conclusion that it’s all bad. Stay open to the goodness you can’t see yet. That certainty, before the proof arrives, is its own kind of becoming.
With yourself. This is the hard one. There’s no case we build more relentlessly than the one against ourselves. Virgo was for the honest inventory. Rosh Hashanah is for something else: handing the whole ledger over, celebrating the ways you did good and are good, and stepping through those very qualities into the person you’re meant to be.
A Brand New Year Is Being Written
You didn’t come here to be sentenced. You came to hand over everything you’ve created in the last year—the good, bad, and in-between—to be made new, and to walk out as someone with a brand new year in front of them that hasn’t been written yet.
There is no score being kept somewhere above you. The only one who can shift your consciousness if you. Lay everything at the Creator’s feet and put the pen back in your hand. As the sun sets, begin to write the story of yourself into the life you actually came here to live. Then wake up and be that person with every breath, every choice, every step.
Shana Tovah. May this be the year you stop bracing for an imaginary verdict and start living your most fulfilled life.
No comments:
Post a Comment