(10/08/08)
 

Since I was a little boy, I had the dream of travelling through time!

Maybe some of you share this same dream of being able to travel 20 or 30 years into the future and seeing how our lives would be then?

I was thinking when I was a child of how old I would be in the year 2000 and also if I would be married with children or not.

I also remember people saying back then that when the world would reach year 2000, rockets would travel to the moon and to different planets just as easily as we drive our cars!

And as we got close to 2000, I recall all the intrigue as to what would happen to the business computers when we went from 1999 to 2000. 

But, tell me the truth, who has never dreamt of the possibility of taking a time machine and using it to, for example, know the results of next week’s football game?! Or whether the next President would be Obama or MacCain?  

Another nice “time movement concept” is daylight savings time -- a day that we move the clock forward with just the goal to make the day longer.

I remember in Argentina when, for the first time, I turned the clock back one hour, and magically, in seconds, I was living again between 11 PM and 12 Midnight!  And I asked myself then: “How could it be possible to live that hour again?!”  Yes, that was magic, real magic!  And that extra hour that day was a gift from heaven that I didn’t want to waste!  (You know, I’ve never understood the people who sleep during the daylight savings time changeover without taking advantage of that gift, that extra hour.)

And how many times, have we said: “If I had the opportunity to live that incident again, I would do it so differently”?

I’m sure many of you remember the movie Back to the Future with Michael Fox.   In the movie, Michael Fox and the doctor travel back and forth in time in that beautiful car trying to see their futures; how parents met; etc..  (Whenever this film plays on TV, I admit I love to watch it!) 

But I must confess, that in spite of travelling to the future, I would actually prefer being able to travel to the past to change those things that I would later regret and want to repent about on Yom Kippur.

Yes…if I had that the possibility, I would go right to the second before I made the sin and then stop from doing it!  Only just that small change...but with an oh so meaningful result in the present! 

I can imagine that all of us would like to have such an opportunity.

Indeed, if we are here during Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, it is because we want to recognize that over the last year, we’ve made mistakes that we want to ask forgiveness for; and we alsso want to change our attitude.

This process is the one that is called in our tradition teshuva – repentance. …and requires change and “repair” for it to be real.

But, really, could it be possible to go back in time to change our wrong actions?

Of course our first answer would be “no”.

But there is a way to change the past.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, leader of the modern orthodox movement, explained that we do have the possibility of going back to the past and changing it!

How? Pay attention to the explanation…

Rabbi Soloveitchik said that the future is what defines the present while defining the meaning of the past.

For instance, if you made a mistake in the past, that mistake could stop there and remain just that – a regrettable mistake; or it could be a mistake that we learn from!    In other words, our vision of the future gives relevance to the past; and the past becomes important related to what we decide to do with it in the future! 

And yet in simpler words…

We are not prisoners of the past, but are architects of our own future.

Nechama Leibovitch, a Bible scholar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taught many students.  When she died, one of her students remembered her with this story:

When Nechama was young, she was a teacher in an orthodox Israeli school for girls and was in charge of the 3^rd grade.

One day, another teacher approached Nachama and told her that there was a problem in her (Nachama’s) class -- that small things were disappearing and that someone was stealing these things.

Nachama’s first reaction was to do nothing; but when money disappeared, her reaction changed and she proceeded as follows:

When all the girls were in class, Nechama told them:

-         “What I have to say is a message for only one of you; but as I don’t know who that one is, I will tell it to all of you. Someone has been stealing things from other girls, and we (at this school) will not allow it.”

“If the things that disappeared will appear on my desk tomorrow before 8 in the morning, I will forget about it.”

“But if this does not happen, I want to warn the person who did it, that two things could happen, and both are not good ones.”

1)    “It could be that the person will continue stealing things from others until the day that someone will catch her, and then this person and also her family will be ashamed.”

2)    “It could be that the person will continue stealing things and will never be caught. But this is even worse because each day of her life, she will consider herself as a thief.”

“Now, consider very carefully…is this what you want? Do you want to consider yourself as a thief the rest of your life??”

All things that were stolen in the past appeared the next morning before 8 am on the teacher’s desk.

That’s the end of the story and what do we learn from it?

That a girl from third grade decided that her life would be appointed not by her actions of the past, but by her vision of how she wanted to see herself in the future.

Yes, it is our vision of our future, and not of the past, that defines how we live our lives!!

If we understand this message, we will understand the real meaning of teshuva, and the reason of its importance during Yom Kippur.

Teshuva is not just saying “I’m sorry” or “I promise I will not do that again in the future”.

Teshuva means: “I’m sorry… and when I see myself doing what I did, I don’t like that person and I don’t want to be that person anymore”!  

On this holy night of Kol Nidre, I invite you to also take a  moment for reflection on how to change yourself into the person that you want to be!

May G-d show us all the path to reach our real beings!

 TZOM KAL AND CHATIMA TOVAH!!!!