Approaching the Bar and Moving it as We Go

It was the season of the High Holidays a few years ago.  After many days of reciting slichot, the special prayers for forgiveness, someone turned to me and paraphrased the famous line from “Love Story” and asked, “I know love is not never having to say I’m sorry, but do I always have to say I’m sorry?”  

The truth is that, even months and months after the High Holidays, we Jews are in a perpetual state of asking for forgiveness and working toward repentance.  Three times daily, we praise God for being open to our change by reciting the bracha of הרוצה בתשובה  and three times daily, we ask for forgiveness when we say סלח לנו .  

How is it that 6 times a day, we cannot get it right?  How can it be that behaving the way we should is so elusive that we have to mention it so often throughout the day?  

The first and most common answer is that no matter how hard we try, we will never hit the standard we want and that God wants from us.  This approach is grounded in the assumption that we, at our core as humans, are fallible and imperfect creatures.  No matter how hard we try, we will never be as compassionate as we want to be, we will never be as generous as we want to be and we will never be as loving as we want to be.  Because of how we are wired,  we do not have the capacity to always reach the bar that we set for ourselves.  Our prayers remind us of how far we need to go to reach our best selves. This is a model of self improvement that has us constantly working toward moving our character forward closer to the set bar.

Yet, Chovot HaLevavot shows us that there is another way to look at the issue of teshuva.  Rabbeinu Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, who wrote the book almost 1000 years ago, explains that there are מצוות השכל, commandments for intellectual growth.  He says that there is no limit to this acquisition of knowledge.  Because of the dynamic of these mitzvot, people would fill their entire days with teshuva.  It was not a desire for teshuva that arose from their hearts, it rather arose from their heads because it was through study, every day they would learn more about God and about their requirements in their lives.  Due to the strong capacity of the intellect, every day they would realize how much more needed to be done to live a life of holiness.   This is a different model of self improvement, it is not about us taking our fallible selves and trying to move our actions closer to a bar, it is about tapping in to our intellectual gifts to learn more about just how high the bar should be. When we do that, we actually are moving the standard higher and higher that we set for ourselves.  When we see that new standard, the rules change of how far we need to go to hit our goals.

This may be why our tradition puts a teshuva and self improvement bug in our ears all day long.  It is because we constantly need to work to be our best and also constantly redefine what the best can be.

A worthy chase indeed.