New Year Resolutions

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 1 January 2022

It does not seem all that long ago that we were stood here, or in the Alyth tent, beating our chests, accepting responsibility, pledging our self-improvement for 5782. Less than four months into the year, I’m sure many of us have already experienced setbacks – already found ourselves falling back into old ways of doing things that we had perhaps vowed to leave behind.

Often, the task of improving ourselves – and the world – is a process of ‘two steps forward, one step back’. For the world, 2021 may have felt like that – even ‘two steps forward, one and three-quarters steps back’. Having started the year in the darkness of lockdown, but with the promise of vaccines on the horizon, by the middle of the year we were hopeful that Covid was in retreat. Yet this unwelcome new variant has us feeling very much, as Rabbi Hannah put it a couple of weeks ago, like we are back in March 2020.

At the COP26 climate conference, hopes of a more drastic step forward were tempered by the change from ‘phasing out’ to a ‘phasing down’ of coal. The election and inauguration of a new president in the US garnered hope, though images of a disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan soon dominated our news. Two steps forward, one step back.

Twice in the Talmud it relates the following teaching of R. Ilai the Elder: ‘If a person finds that they are overcome with illicit desire, they should go to a place where they are not recognised, don black clothes, and do what their heart desires rather than desecrate God’s name in public.’

There is disagreement in the commentaries as to the purpose of this teaching. Rabeinu Chananel, the first person to produce a complete commentary to the Talmud, argues that the things the person is instructed to do if they are ‘overcome with illicit desire’ are designed to stop them from sinning by delaying the process and making it more complicated, thereby inviting greater self-reflection – all in the hope that they might actually decide not to commit the sin.

Later commentators, including the Tosafot, argue that the teaching of R. Ilai the Elder is designed to mitigate the sin rather than prevent it from happening – if it must happen, it should be done in private so as not to encourage others to do the same. Medieval halachic authorities, the Rif and the Rosh go perhaps further, and argue that R. Ilai is referring to a sin that is actually beyond our control. This claim in turn creates quite a bit of controversy, as it could be suggested that it implies that free will has not been granted – that there are sins the temptation of which is so great that humans are unable to decide to do differently.

Either way, the Talmud is teaching us that it is understandable that we end up failing to live up to expectations – to our own expectations. The rabbis were sceptical of making vows in general, since they often bound people to consequences they did not expect, and it became the sages’ job to find loopholes that would allow them to get people out of the vows they took in the heat of the moment and later regretted. Like those vows we have been studying in the Alyth Chavruta Project – of husbands vowing not to have sex with their wives.

The traditional Kol Nidre prayer at Yom Kippur is a pre-emptive annulling of vows in the expectation that we will fail. Of course, this historically led to antisemites deciding that we Jews could not be trusted and could not be relied upon to fulfil our promises. And yet, to acknowledge that we are human, imperfect, fallible, is not to assume that we callously allow ourselves to let others down. Indeed, how often do we damage ourselves (and thereby practice a degree of self-neglect) in striving to fulfil our promises to others?

Rather, to acknowledge our likely failure to perfectly fulfil our ambitions is also to emphasise the extent of our ambition. Because if we only ever aimed low in the hope of never falling short, would we expect to achieve anything at all? This requires us to stop thinking of goals, objectives and resolutions as absolute, and to start conceiving of them as movable targets – as goals that have to be constantly revised and reconsidered as we learn more about our limitations. To do this is not to admit defeat, but to gain as much success as we can.

In our Torah reading this morning, we encountered Moses expressing an impediment to success – when God tells him to go and advocate for the Israelites, Moses protests and says he is aral sefatayim, a man of impeded (literally uncircumcised) speech. Yet Moses perseveres, adapting and taking his brother Aaron with him to do the talking. He accepts a limitation and moves on – he does not allow the limitation to detract from his higher goal.

By contrast, Pharaoh’s ability to exercise free will and have compassion on the Israelites is denied – God literally hardens his heart. According to Maimonides, this is the most sever punishment that can be given to a person by God. Pharaoh is literally unable to exercise the most powerful tool a human being has – teshuvah, the ability to reflect on our behaviour and do things differently. The hardening of the heart is not, however, simply something that originates with the Divine, but which we can impose on ourselves too. The hardening of the heart is an inability to live with our imperfections and with our human limitations.

We will fail at our new years’ resolutions. As much as we will it, however much we plan and scheme, the likelihood is that we will not meet the expectations we set ourselves. But that does not mean that we should not aim high. Perhaps it means we should give ourselves more opportunities throughout the year to revise our expectations. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur give us one such occasion, then a few months later the secular new year gives us another. A few months after that, we precede our celebration of Pesach by hunting for the chametz – the leaven – in our lives. Understood spiritually, chametz is another way of understanding limitation and failure. We gather it into one place, acknowledge it, burn it, and move on. Once again, Pesach is an opportunity to self-reflect, to take stock, to adjust our expectations of ourselves, and to move forward.

There is perhaps also a political lesson here, in the expectations we have of our leaders, and the process by which we judge them. So often we judge politicians on their ability to make promises and stick to them – and yet, surely there is much greater strength in having the ability to recognise when the trajectory of events means having to alter course; when the limitations of reality mean that we cannot have it exactly as we hoped, but we can work towards an alternative ideal.

After all, the tablets we ended up with were the second set – the tablets that were rewritten after the first set that Moses smashed when the Israelites immediately started to fail following the exodus. Indeed, our tradition is not content with just one expression of the covenant – throughout the Torah, there are more and more restatements of the covenant, including at the beginning of today’s reading. Not only is there no harm in reiterating the promises of the covenant, there is even strength in re-establishing it – in recommitting ourselves even as we fall backwards.

So, as we move into 2022, may we all wish each other the best in what ever we resolve. But may we also bless each other with the strength to let go of those resolutions if we need to, or to adjust them in the face of reality – for that is strength and not weakness.