Who moved my nest?

It is possible to travel the same route for years without really seeing it. To do the right things, say the same prayers and sit with the same people - while being present only physically.

A commuter rides the same train every day. One morning a delay forces him to look up, and he suddenly sees scenery that had been there for years. The scenery did not change. He simply stopped moving on automatic.

Haazinu says: “Like an eagle that stirs up its nest” (Deuteronomy 32:11). There are moments when a person does not need a new road. He needs to wake up inside the road he already chose.

Routine is powerful, but it can also put us to sleep. Prayer becomes words. Shabbat becomes a schedule. Children become another task. A spouse becomes obvious.

Before changing everything, ask: where am I already in the right place but no longer truly present?

Sometimes teshuvah begins not with a new direction, but with eyes opening again.

Where in your life are you still doing the right thing, but now doing it almost asleep?

Read in depth

They tell of a man who for years took the same train to work every morning. The same time, the same carriage, almost the same seat. He would board, open his phone, go through his messages, read a little news, and forty minutes later get off at his station. For years he traveled the same route, but barely saw it. He knew there was scenery outside the window, knew the train passed fields and houses, but everything had become part of the background. He no longer looked.

One morning the train stopped midway because of a malfunction. The engine was shut off, the air conditioning stopped, and the passengers were asked to wait. At first everyone became irritated. After a few minutes there was nothing left to do on the phone either. The man lifted his head and looked through the window. Outside, the sun was about to rise. He saw a wide field, a thin layer of mist, trees, and birds flying above them. He sat and watched for a few minutes, then said to himself: “I have been traveling here for seven years. How did I never see this?”

The scenery did not appear that morning. It had been there yesterday and the day before as well. The only thing that changed was that his normal routine stopped.

Sometimes this is the problem with routine. It does not necessarily make us do bad things. It does something quieter: it makes us stop seeing.

One can become so accustomed to a home that one no longer sees who is in it. One can become accustomed to health until one no longer feels it. One can become accustomed to prayer until the mouth says the words and the heart already knows how to pass them by without stopping. One can become accustomed to Shabbat, to a Torah scroll, to the synagogue, to children, to parents, and even to the Holy One, blessed be He.

We did not leave anything. We simply fell asleep inside it.

Then the Song of Haazinu comes and uses a remarkable image: “Like an eagle awakening its nest, hovering over its young, spreading its wings, taking them, carrying them on its pinions” (Deuteronomy 32:11).

The first word to stop at is “awakening.”

Rashi explains that the eagle does not enter the nest suddenly, because it fears weighing down upon its young. It first awakens them, hovers above them, and only afterward carries them (Deuteronomy 32:11). The image Moses paints is not of force crushing the nest, but of a parent gently awakening its young in preparation for movement.

But the very fact that they need to be awakened teaches something. The chicks are in the nest. The nest is a good place. It protects, warms, and keeps them safe. And yet there comes a moment when the very place that protects them can become the place in which they never learn to fly.

Here lies a great question for Shabbat Shuvah: what happens when the place in which I am comfortable becomes also the place that prevents me from growing?

We are accustomed to thinking that spiritual danger lies in bad places. But there is another danger, much quieter: becoming used to a mediocre place and ceasing to feel that anything is missing.

A person does not violate Shabbat. He prays, sets times for Torah, gives charity, and observes mitzvot. But if you ask him what has changed in his service of God over the last five years, he has difficulty answering. The same prayer, the same learning, the same anger, the same weak points, the same resolutions that return every year.

There is no rebellion here. There is sleep.

Perhaps that is why we need the High Holy Days.

Rosh Hashanah, the Ten Days of Repentance, and Yom Kippur do not come only for the person who left the path. They come also for the person who is inside the nest, inside the beit midrash, inside the mitzvot, but something within him already functions from habit.

The shofar does not teach us a new halachah. We know the laws before it is sounded. And yet Maimonides hears within the sound of the shofar a call: “Awake, sleepers, from your sleep, and you who slumber, arise from your slumber” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:4).

What a precise definition. Maimonides does not say: “Wicked people, stop being wicked.” He says: sleepers, wake up.

A sleeping person is not dead. Everything is in him. The heart is working, the mind exists, the powers are there. Only one thing is missing: he is not awake to what is in him and to what is happening around him.

Spiritual sleep can look the same. A person believes, but faith no longer shakes him. He prays, but does not hear himself. He says “Forgive us,” but already knows in advance that the words will pass by. He says “We thank You,” but does not stop to think of one thing for which he is grateful.

Then the shofar comes and says: wake up.

Not necessarily change your whole life today. First of all, open your eyes.

Perhaps that is why Shabbat Shuvah is such a special time. Rosh Hashanah has already passed. The shofar has already sounded. Yom Kippur is still ahead. There are a few days in which a person can ask not only “What did I do wrong?” but a question that comes earlier: what have I stopped noticing altogether?

Where am I functioning on automatic?

Perhaps in prayer. Perhaps in marriage. Perhaps in educating the children. Perhaps in honoring parents. Perhaps in the way I relate to time. Perhaps in Torah study. Perhaps there is a mitzvah I have kept for twenty years but have not thought for years about what it is meant to do to me.

That is a different question from an accounting of sins. Sometimes there is no specific transgression one can point to. There is simply an area of life that fell asleep.

King Solomon says: “How long will you lie down, lazy one? When will you rise from your sleep?” (Proverbs 6:9). In the plain sense the verse is about laziness, but the sages and Maimonides also use the image of sleep in relation to spiritual life, because there is a deep connection: a person can be very busy outwardly and still be asleep inwardly.

He runs all day, but does not ask where.

He accomplishes a great deal, but does not ask what matters.

He responds to everyone who demands his attention, but does not stop to ask what his soul is demanding of him.

This may be one of the great insights of repentance. Repentance is not always a U-turn. Sometimes a person is moving in the right direction, but he is walking in his sleep. He does not need to change roads. He needs to begin walking that road awake.

Here we need to return to the eagle. Rashi emphasizes that the eagle “does not enter its nest suddenly” but rustles and beats its wings over its young so that they awaken and have strength to receive it (Deuteronomy 32:11). The awakening itself is preparation for the encounter.

Perhaps that is exactly the work of these days. Yom Kippur is a great encounter. But for an encounter to affect us, we have to arrive awake.

A person can pass through an entire Yom Kippur and leave it mainly hungry. He can also enter it with one honest question, and then a single sentence in the machzor can open an entire heart.

That is why I do not think one needs to arrive at Shabbat Shuvah with a list of twenty things. Sometimes it is enough to identify one place where I fell asleep.

For example, a person realizes he no longer truly listens to his child. The child speaks, and he nods while looking at a screen. There is no sin here that fits neatly in a chart, but there is a relationship that has fallen asleep.

A person realizes that he has said blessings for years but almost never hears the words leaving his mouth. A person realizes that he attends a regular class, but he stopped coming in order to change and started coming because that is simply what Tuesday looks like.

The moment he sees it is already the beginning of awakening.

This matters because we can mistakenly think that awakening has to be a storm: great tears, a dramatic resolution, a decision that changes the whole order of life. Sometimes real awakening is far quieter. A person says to himself: I no longer want to do this thing in my sleep.

Tomorrow morning I will say one blessing while knowing before Whom I am speaking. Today I will listen to my child for ten minutes with nothing in my hands. In the next class I will leave with one practical point. In one prayer I will choose one passage in which I stop rushing.

That is not a revolution anyone sees from the outside. But it is a moment in which a person opened his eyes.

There is one more thing that must be said with great care. Sometimes life itself shakes us. Things happen that pull a person out of routine. But we have no right to explain to another person why the Holy One, blessed be He, brought a difficulty upon him, and we must not say that every pain was sent to “wake him up.” The calculations of Heaven are not in our hands.

But after something has already happened, a person can choose to ask himself not “Why did this happen to me?” but “What do I see now that I did not see before?”

That question does not explain the pain. It allows a person not to pass through it with closed eyes.

Sometimes a person comes out of a difficult period and discovers how precious his family is. Sometimes he discovers who is truly his friend. Sometimes he discovers how much time he wasted on small things. That does not mean this was “the reason” the event occurred. We do not know. But if our eyes have already opened, we do not have to hurry to close them again.

This may be the great message of “Like an eagle awakening its nest” for Shabbat Shuvah. There are moments in the calendar when the Holy One, blessed be He, as it were does not allow us to continue sleeping peacefully. The shofar sounds, the machzor opens, “the holy King” enters the prayer, Selichot are said, and Yom Kippur approaches. All of reality tells us: do not pass through this year too merely by force of habit.

Not because everything you did was bad.

But because it is possible to do very good things while asleep.

Perhaps the question to take from this is very simple: where in my life do I need to wake up?

Not where am I the worst person. Not what is my greatest failure. Where am I simply no longer seeing?

Perhaps I do not see the person living beside me. Perhaps I do not see the blessing I have. Perhaps I do not hear my own prayer. Perhaps I do not notice what time is doing. Perhaps I no longer remember why I began learning, why I wanted to build a Torah home, why things that once moved me now pass by unnoticed.

Maimonides tells us: “Awake, sleepers, from your sleep.” Moses tells us: “Like an eagle awakening its nest.”

Both voices say one thing: before you change the road, open your eyes inside the road.

Then perhaps we will discover that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not asking us on this Shabbat to become someone else. He is asking us to become truly present in the life He has already given us.

To see again.

To hear again.

To feel again.

And to choose again, instead of merely continuing by force of habit.

Because the greatest danger is not always that a person is walking on the wrong road.

Sometimes he is on the right road, but he fell asleep in the middle of it.

Shabbat Shuvah comes to tell him: the road is still here. The Holy One, blessed be He, is still here. You are still here too.

Now wake up.