Are We Trying Hard Enough? The Essential Yom Kippur Question

The morning back in high school that I took the SAT’s, I packed my number 2 pencils and was about to leave the house when my mother said to me, “Remember.  All you can do is the best you can do.”

She said that to me numerous times as I was growing up.  Before tests.  Before I went onstage to act in a show.  On my wedding day…

All you can do is the best you can do.

Sometimes the comment made me more nervous.  Though overall it was a helpful thing to hear and I think my mother said it because she wanted me to understand that the most important measure of my success was the knowledge that I’d done my best.

However, with enormous respect for my mother, may she rest in peace, I’m going to begin my comments by modifying hers a bit and encouraging us to evaluate ourselves using what I believe is a more effective measure.

Truth is, not every situation calls for “the best we can do.” 

When our kids were growing up and we would get dinner ready, we realized it didn’t have to be our best.  It just had to be reasonably nutritious and something they would eat. We knew we could do “better,” but with all of the other competing priorities we chose not to.  We didn’t aspire to be Wolfgang Puck while we were making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their school lunches. 

When we cleaned up at the end of the day we realized we didn’t have to do our best.  We just had to make sure it was neat enough and we determined what neat enough was.

On arguably the holiest day of the year, when we’re supposed to take a look at ourselves, and a look at the world, and ask appropriate self-reflective questions about how we relate to the world, I propose the following question that we can ask today, and all year long, about different situations.

Are we trying hard enough? 

In each realm of our lives, the mundane and the unusual, the individual and the societal, are we trying hard enough?

Open Our Hearts - A Plea for the New Year

At the end of the Amidah, which is part of our daily prayer, we each say the words:

פתח לבי P’tah libi.

Dear God – Open my heart.

Why do we have to pray for this?

Why don’t we just do it?  

A 6 year old boy named Alex who lives in Westchester sent a letter to the president of the United States.  He had seen the picture of a 5-year old boy sitting in an ambulance in Aleppo, wiping blood off of his face, a picture many of us have seen.  Alex wrote to the president that he wants the boy to come live with his family.  Alex wrote that he is prepared to share his toys with the boy.  He ended the letter by saying, “We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”

It’s very inspiring to hear about the pure open-heartedness of a 6-year old boy.  A boy who is ready to open his home, his toy box, and his heart to someone roughly his age.

But our view of things gets more complicated as we grow into adolescence and adulthood.   We experience fear again and again.  We experience disappointment again and again. 

We understand how complicated situations are socially and politically.

Our expectations lie unfulfilled.   Our hearts get broken.

And little by little, in different situations, over time, our hearts harden – they close up. 

So maybe that’s why we each pray to God ptah libi – open my heart – because we wish our hearts could remain open despite all of the internal and external forces that can keep our hearts rigid and closed.  And because it’s not so easy to keep our hearts open.

It is truly understandable for us to harden our hearts in so many situations.  We are often perfectly justified in being suspicious, or wary, or fed up. 

At the beginning of this New Year, I want to explore some of the political and personal reasons why we harden our hearts.  And I also want to explore why and how and in what situations we should strive to keep our hearts open.  Long past the relative innocence of childhood, can we face the world as it is, can we face life as it is, with hearts that remain appropriately open?  I hope so.