It’s Time to Grow Up

Bye Bye Rote

How many times have we been exhorted to stop performing our mitzvahs or any other manifestation of our Yiddishkeit by rote?  Whatever the answer, we’re talking calculators here because fingers and toes simply won’t do.

This isn’t about quantitatively charting new territory in avodas Hashem by learning the Daf or being careful to daven within the z’man tefillah and the like.  By rote is qualitatively oriented and it’s a major speed bump for those who have already taken on these things and much more.

And the word performing wasn’t an idle insertion either, because if we’re in by rote mode that’s exactly what we are doing.  We are acting out (performing) a certain facet of our lives in accordance with a script that we have memorized many years ago.

Rav Shimshon Pincus z”l reminds us that this is what we must work on in Elul:  To do away with the rote, to stop doing things by habit.

The operative word here is newness and he admonishes us to internalize such a feeling by approaching every aspect of our avodas Hashem as if it were the first time.  

You picked up a siddur to daven?  You should marvel at it in wonder as if you had never seen one before.

You ate bread and then benched?  You should be so overwhelmed by the text of the Birchas Hamazon that you become cognizant of the real blessing, the one that Hashem has just put before you.  And so it goes for everything you touch; every brocha, every word of Torah, and every shmeck of ruchniyas that pulsates within you. 

This is the avodah of Elul and it means being a completely new person, for as we quoted Rav Yitzchok Berkowits, in EmunahSpeak: A Real Deal Teshuva, The growth process of (Elul culminating in) Yom Kippur is about changing you.

Change your desires.  Change your ideals.

Very sound advice to be sure, but how did we all come to be living our spiritual lives as if we were on auto pilot to begin with?

Rav Pincus lets us hear that our perception of Hashem, of the siddur, and the Chumash, is that of a five year old child.  And in the name of the Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, Alter of Kelm, he tells us why we generally are not moved and excited by things that we learned in childhood, i.e. that G-d created the world and runs it, the story of Yetzias Mitzrayim (the Exodus) and Keri'as Yam Suf (the splitting of the Red Sea) etc., even though these are exceedingly wondrous matters.

The Alter says that it is because we first heard these things in our childhood when our intellect was weak and undeveloped.   Therefore the knowledge and understanding that we attained of them was that of a feeble mind.  This feeble understanding then became part of us.  As a result, we go through our whole life with this infantile perception.

We first learned Chumash when we were five years old.  That is the paradigm upon which all of our subsequent experience rests.  Whether we are ten, twenty or forty, we tend to relate the more advanced knowledge that we are now gaining to what we knew when we were five years old.

And it's the same story with the rest of our avodas Hashem.   We have been doing the same old same old by rote for a very long time and we do it with all the enthusiasm of five year old.  

Enough already.

It’s time to grow up.