Don’t close the book in the middle of the story

Many people close the book of their own life in the middle of the story. They look at a difficult chapter, a repeated failure or a year that did not become what they hoped - and decide they already know how the story ends.

But all we really know is what happened up to this page.

Haazinu moves through rebuke, concealment, failure and pain, yet it still reaches atonement. Torah itself refuses to let the hard chapter become the final word.

A person may say: I failed. That can be true. He may say: I fell again. Also true. But the moment he says “this is who I am” or “this is how it will always be,” he is no longer describing the past. He is allowing the past to write the future.

Shabbat Shuvah does not promise that everything will suddenly become perfect. It reminds us that the pen is still in our hand.

Do not declare an ending just because the middle hurts.

Which difficult chapter of your life have you mistakenly started calling “the end”?

Read in depth

They tell of a famous author who once received a letter from a young reader. The reader wrote that he had begun one of the author’s books, reached about the middle, and decided to stop. “I already understand where the story is going,” he wrote. “The hero has lost almost everything, made serious mistakes, the people closest to him have grown distant, and I do not like stories that end badly.”

The author replied in a short letter: “I respect your decision to stop reading, but there is one thing you cannot say: that the story ends badly. You can say that the place where you stopped was bad. You do not know the ending, because you closed the book in the middle.”

There are people who do exactly this not with a book, but with themselves.

A person reaches Shabbat Shuvah, looks at the year that passed, and sees things he is not proud of. He made decisions and did not keep them. He promised himself things on last Rosh Hashanah, and now a year has passed and he is again standing almost in the same place. Some people have struggled with the same character trait for twenty years. Some have fallen again in something they were sure they had left behind. Then, without noticing, they make a very dangerous shift: they stop talking about what happened and start talking about who they are.

“I am just like this.”

“I do not change.”

“I already tried.”

“It will not work for me.”

But who told you that the chapter you are in now is the final chapter?

The Song of Haazinu is one of the most unsettling sections of the Torah. Moses describes a difficult future. He describes forgetting, ingratitude, distancing, and punishment. There are verses in it which, if we stopped there, could make us think the story was over.

But Moses does not stop there.

Near the end of the song it says: “Rejoice, nations, with His people, for He will avenge the blood of His servants, return vengeance upon His enemies, and atone for His land and His people” (Deuteronomy 32:43).

After everything said in the song, the final word is not abandonment.

There is atonement.

That is something we need to hear especially on Shabbat Shuvah. The Torah does not hide sin. It does not beautify failure and does not say that nothing happened. Haazinu says very hard things. But it refuses to give sin the right to write the ending of the story by itself.

That is an enormous difference.

Repentance does not say the past did not happen. Repentance says the past does not have to become the future.

Maimonides writes in the laws of repentance: “A person who has repented should not imagine that he is distant from the level of the righteous because of the sins and wrongdoings he committed. It is not so; rather, he is beloved and pleasant before the Creator as though he had never sinned” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 7:4).

Read those words slowly. Maimonides is speaking to a person with a past. He does not deny his sins. And yet he tells him: do not make a mistake. Do not take what you did and infer from it how far you are from the Holy One, blessed be He, after you have returned.

Later Maimonides writes something even stronger: “Yesterday this person was hated before God, detestable, distant, and abominable; today he is beloved and pleasant, close and dear” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 7:6).

Notice one word: “today.”

Yesterday and today can be two different worlds.

The same person. The same past. The same memories. But not the same direction.

That is one of the great innovations of repentance: the Holy One, blessed be He, gave a person the power not only for his next actions to change, but for the meaning of the entire story to change.

The Gemara in tractate Yoma says in the name of Reish Lakish: “Great is repentance, for deliberate sins become for him like inadvertent sins,” and elsewhere in the same discussion it says that through repentance from love, “deliberate sins become for him like merits” (Yoma 86b).

This is difficult to grasp. How can a past that already happened take on a different meaning?

Perhaps because if the fall itself caused a person to wake up, change, draw close, and become deeper, then when the whole story is viewed from the end, the fall no longer stands alone. It became part of a path of repentance.

Not because the sin became good. Sin remains sin. But because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave a person the possibility to take even a low place and decide that it will not be the final station.

We recognize this even from ordinary life. Two people can go through a similar failure. One says: “I failed; that proves I am incapable,” and stops trying. The other says: “I failed; now I need to understand why,” and he learns, repairs, and continues. Ten years later the same event looks entirely different in the two stories. For the first person it was a wall. For the second it became a turn in the road.

The event was the same. What came afterward changed its place within the story.

That is why one of the most dangerous words in the work of repentance is the word “always.” I am always like this. I always fall. I always return to the same point.

Is that really true?

Even if you failed a hundred times, the hundred-and-first failure has not yet happened. Even if you have had the same trait for twenty years, today you still have a choice. The fact that the past repeats itself does not grant it ownership of the future.

King Solomon says: “For a righteous person falls seven times and rises” (Proverbs 24:16). The verse does not say that the righteous person does not fall. On the contrary. He falls, even repeatedly. But one word prevents the fall from becoming his definition: “and rises.”

What makes him righteous inside the verse? Not the fact that he has no floor. The fact that the floor does not become his home.

This is very important before Yom Kippur, because there is a kind of despair that sometimes looks like fear of Heaven. A person says: “I know myself. How many times have I already accepted something upon myself? How many times have I asked forgiveness for the same thing? I do not want to lie to the Holy One, blessed be He, again.”

That sounds very honest.

But sometimes a mistake is hidden there.

The Holy One, blessed be He, is not asking you to promise that you will never fall. He is asking you to be truthful now. Today’s regret is not a lie because tomorrow may contain another struggle. If at this moment you truly want to return, that desire is real.

Maimonides defines repentance: “What is repentance? That the sinner leave his sin, remove it from his thoughts, and resolve in his heart never to do it again” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 2:2). He speaks about the person’s real decision now. A person is not his own prophet. He is not required to know with certainty how he will stand in every test that comes in the future. He is required not to lie at the moment he stands before the Holy One, blessed be He.

Here I want to ask a different question from those we asked before: what sentence about yourself have you been saying for so many years that you stopped checking whether it is even true?

“I do not know how to learn.”

“I cannot change.”

“I am an angry person.”

“I have no patience.”

“My prayer will never be serious.”

“This relationship is already lost.”

Sometimes a person has already repented for his actions but has not yet repented for the story he tells himself about himself.

And that story can be the strongest prison.

If I am convinced that I am “this kind of person,” why try? If I am certain the ending has already been written, why open a new chapter?

Then the Song of Haazinu comes and says: do not close the book in the middle.

The song itself passes through very hard places and nevertheless reaches atonement. The people of Israel will go through severe descents in history, but the covenant will not disappear. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not read one chapter of our history and decide that it is the entire book.

If that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, reads our story, perhaps we too need to learn not to read ourselves by our worst page.

That does not mean running from responsibility. On the contrary. As long as I say “this is who I am,” I do not have to do much. But when I say “this is what I did, and this is what I must repair,” responsibility returns to me.

“I am like this” closes a door.

“I did this” leaves the possibility of choosing differently.

Perhaps this is one of the things Yom Kippur asks of us. We say confession again and again. We mention sins. At first glance one could think that the whole day is meant to hold us inside the past. In fact, the entire confession is built on the opposite assumption: if there were no possibility to continue differently, there would be no point in confessing.

The very fact that Torah commands me to say “I sinned” means it does not want me to end the sentence there.

I sinned, and therefore I return.

I fell, and therefore I rise.

I grew distant, and therefore I come back.

Maimonides writes: “Yesterday he was… distant; today he is beloved and pleasant, close and dear.” What a gift there is in the word “today.” A person can carry decades behind him, and the Holy One, blessed be He, still gives him a new day that is not a compulsory copy of yesterday.

Perhaps this is what we need to take into Shabbat Shuvah. Not a dramatic promise that we will change everything. Something far more fundamental: to stop giving the past authority to decide in advance who we will become tomorrow.

You have a past, but you are not only your past.

You have falls, but you are not only your latest fall.

There are chapters you would gladly erase, but the book is still open.

And if the book is open, you can still write.

You can ask forgiveness from someone you have not spoken to for years. You can begin learning again even after ten beginnings that ended. You can work on a character trait even if it has accompanied you for decades. You can return to prayer after a long period of dryness. You can rebuild trust in small steps.

Not because we know how the story will end.

But because we know it has not ended yet.

This brings us back to the reader at the beginning. He closed the book in the middle and said: “I know how the story ends.”

The author answered: you know only where you stopped.

Perhaps someone is sitting on Shabbat Shuvah feeling that he knows exactly who he is. He has already seen himself fall. He has already seen resolutions fail. He knows his weaknesses well.

The Torah asks him not to lie to himself and not to erase anything.

But it also asks him not to lie in the opposite direction.

Do not call the past “the future.”

Do not call a chapter “the book.”

And do not call a fall “the end.”

The Song of Haazinu passes through severe rebuke and ultimately reaches “and He will atone for His land and His people.” Because in the story the Holy One, blessed be He, writes with the Jewish people, even after very hard chapters there remains room for atonement and return.

Perhaps this is the great call of Shabbat Shuvah just before Yom Kippur: as long as the Holy One, blessed be He, gives you the ability to stand before Him, confess, ask, regret, and choose, He is telling you that the pen is still in your hand.

Do not promise that from now on you will write a perfect book.

Write the next page correctly.

Because sometimes all that is required to change an entire story is not to erase the previous chapters, but to stop allowing them to write the next chapter in your place.