Repentance

 Please let me be the first to usher us all into the high holiday season with a thought about repentance. I have come up with an understanding which strengthens me in my yearly quest to improve and I'd like to share it with you.

I was sitting at my computer while eating a sandwich. My wardrobe was pretty much boring. A worn out, dark blue 3 button polo and black khaki pants of an indeterminate cut, waist or size. Athletic fit with a history of husky, I think. The sandwich was a whole wheat roll with some slices of slow roast turkey topped with yellow mustard. Boring, sure, but I was on the move and had to travel light* so turkey and not much else with a cuppa water on the side. It gave me time to sit, stare off into the dust over the Keurig and let my mind drift and at that moment I felt something end up on my leg, as if my sandwich had somehow released something onto me. Jarred back to reality, I looked down to see a glob of mustard. Big glob. Yellow mustard on my pants. These weren't my old knock around black khakis. Now, these were a recent purchase and I manipulated the wear/laundry cycle so that this particular pair could serve as the "day before" pants -- second place over all but no one was going to catch "traditional khaki" and maybe no one ever should.

So I grab the nearest semi clean paper napkin and smear right across it. Some sticks, some doesn't and some even smears, making it worse. So you wipe some more. You try different things. In similar situations, this worked. Maybe, this. And sometimes one DOES. But the next time and the next, it doesn't. You keep trying.

That's teshuva. We want to get back to that perfect "new" pair of black khakis so we try to fix and we do get a good percentage done on the first pass. But sometimes, fixing one thing has consequences that also have to be considered. And maybe we have stop-gap measures or we cover it up but eventually we are going to have to go to a place with more resources and other people who can help. Expand the time frame  -- immediately after something has happened we take care of most. Is that in the first moment or the first year? Daily repentance might get the spot fully clean or it might get an "it isn't perfect but I appreciate the work you did to get it to this point". But we also have special days at fixed intervals, we use the laundry machine or go to the dry cleaner. Different methods, same goal, all reflect effort. In every prayer and with every prayer we show intent, scratching at some corner before it becomes a stain.

And me? I'm not the same guy. I see the stain everywhere. I regret the decision to eat. I curse how distracted I was -- not that there isn't time for that but this wasn't it. And if the next time I wear clothes, I pay a little more attention, then that might not wipe the stain away, but it will show that you know how to keep yourself clean.

So we wipe ourselves clean after every meal with our prayers and the pants stay almost sort of kind of not unlike the black khakis that I love so much that I named them. I chose the name "Mick". If you were expecting anything else, maybe YOU are the problem. Anyhoo, teshuva is a steps-forward-steps-back kind of thing that we're all always doing, and we get so distracted that we forget that we need to keep our eyes open. It is a process not a place; there is no there there; it's all always here. The pants DO get cleaner on the whole and maybe they even get them back to the closest they can get to new, but what matters is that every attempt was a sincere attempt to get them clean. Maybe there's a stain on them, maybe not. Maybe it is one only I see. But I'll never stop trying to make it better.

Maybe I'm not the perfect Jew I was but I try every day to be as Jewish as I can be.

We can get credit for a job well done, or a job done well, or even a job well, "done." Or even just for showing up for work.

*as those of you who know me and my history know, there are other reasons for the beef based confusion which explains my poorest of poor boys but that's a story for another story