From the Rabbi’s Study

Taking a Look at Ourselves

 The story is told about a gung-ho drill sergeant who always demanded the highest and best from his soldiers. One day he stared in pained disbelief at a sloppy squad of new recruits wearing their uniforms for the first time. For a moment the sergeant was speechless, yet enraged. Then he blurted out, “Just step out here and look at yourselves!”

The sergeant’s indignation obviously interfered with the clarity of his language, but his order embodied a significant truth. There is a time when all of us should step out and look at ourselves. The beginning of a new year is an excellent time to do just that. The ways in which we ring in the New Year 2022 may still not resemble those of pre-pandemic times, yet we all should find a way to celebrate life, our blessings, and our resilience. Yet when the merrymaking and its aftereffects are over, we have to settle down to the sober business of living. Each new year comes to us carrying a basket filled with opportunities and challenges. Above all, it urges us to step out and take a real hard look at ourselves.

One of the convicted co-conspirators in the Watergate scandal made a remarkable confession: “I have lived 50 years of my life without ever really coming to grips with the very basic questions of what is and what is not important to me; what is and what is not right and wrong; what is and what is not valuable and worthwhile.”

This criminal was on the cusp of doing teshuvah, turning his life around, and finally realized that, at the age of 50, he had not yet taken a real hard look at himself.

In addition to the “very basic questions” he mentioned, here are ten others we might each ask ourselves as we use the new year as a fulcrum on which to measure the years of our lives:

• Have I grown more caring or more callous?
• Have I become more forgiving or more vengeful?
• Have I become more accepting or more critical?
• Have I become more generous or more self-centered?
• Have I strive to become better or only better off?
• Have I lived the principles I have deemed precious or have I abandoned them?
• Have I changed for the better or for the worse?
• Have I grown as a person or have I become smaller?
• Have I gained in respect from others, or more distanced from them?
• Have I taken up opportunities for learning and growth or avoided them?

Lewis Mumford, the American philosopher and historian, called us “unfinished animals.” We have the capacity to work on the raw material with which we start life, and we need never stop improving it, transforming it, perfecting it.

When the time comes, each year, to launch ourselves into another new year, we might be lavishly rewarded if we heeded the drill sergeant’s words and took time to step out and look at ourselves–a real hard look. It could help to make us happier with what we see, eventually, when the new year’s grown older and, especially, when it comes to an end.