When exactly did you drift away?

Not every relationship breaks with noise. Some simply disappear quietly.

There used to be conversation, then less. Prayer once had heart, then became routine. There was time at home, then life became crowded. There was no dramatic decision to grow distant - and precisely because of that, there was no moment when we realized we needed to repair something.

Haazinu says: “You forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deuteronomy 32:18). Spiritual forgetting is not always lack of knowledge. A person may know exactly what matters, while that knowledge is no longer present in daily life.

That is what makes quiet distance dangerous: there is no alarm.

Teshuvah does not always require turning everything upside down. Sometimes it means returning one thing to its place: prayer to the heart, Torah to the day, presence to the home, gratitude to routine.

If we drifted away one millimeter at a time, we can also return one step at a time.

Which relationship in your life did not break - but has simply been weakening quietly?

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A man once met, after many years, a friend who had been very close to him in his youth. They had once been almost inseparable. They studied together, consulted one another, knew each other’s families, and hardly a week passed without a long conversation between them. Now they happened to meet at an event. They embraced, were genuinely happy to see each other, and after a few minutes one of them asked, “Tell me, what actually happened to us? Why did we stop being in touch?”

They both tried to remember. Had there been a quarrel? No. Had someone been hurt? They could not remember any injury. Had there been a disagreement? Not that either. They searched for an event that could explain the distance and found none. Finally one of them said, “Apparently nothing big happened between us. One time I did not call, then you did not call either. A month passed, then a few months. Life became busy, and at some point we simply got used to the fact that we no longer spoke.”

Then he said something painful: “Strange. If we had fought, perhaps we would have made peace long ago. Precisely because nothing happened, there was never a moment when we understood that something needed fixing.”

Some distances are created by an explosion, and some are created by silence.

The silent distances can sometimes be more dangerous, because there is no moment that sets off an alarm.

In the Song of Haazinu, Moses says to Israel: “You neglected the Rock Who bore you, and forgot God Who brought you forth” (Deuteronomy 32:18).

Rashi explains the word “teshi” in the sense of forgetting, and also brings an interpretation according to which Israel weakened, as it were, His power when He came to do good for them (Deuteronomy 32:18). But the very picture Moses paints is remarkable: Israel is not described here as standing up one day and declaring, “I no longer want the Holy One, blessed be He.” The Torah uses a much quieter word: “and you forgot.”

Forgetfulness.

There is not necessarily rebellion.

There is no declaration.

There is no ceremony of separation.

Something that was once at the center simply begins, slowly, to occupy less and less space.

And this may be one of the things Moses asks us to fear even more than a one-time fall. When a person falls dramatically, at least he knows that he fell. Something hurts. Conscience cries out. He knows there is a problem.

But what happens when nothing cries out?

A person did not stop praying. He simply began arriving a little later. Then he became accustomed to skipping certain parts. Then the prayer became quicker. He still prays every day, so from the outside it is difficult even to point to the moment when something changed.

A person did not stop learning Torah. Once he had a fixed study period; then there was a pressured season and he missed it a few times. Later he decided he would make it up, then he no longer made it up, and a year later he would still say sincerely that Torah is very important to him. It really is important to him. It just receives less and less actual space.

A person did not decide to grow distant from his wife. He just became busy. He did not decide to stop speaking with his children. He was simply tired in the evening. He did not decide to stop taking an interest in his parents. He only told himself that he would call tomorrow.

And that is how life can move important things from the center to the margins without anyone ever deciding to do so.

This is a powerful question for Shabbat Shuvah: what disappeared from my life even though I never decided to give it up?

Perhaps this is an even harder question than “What did I do this year?”

Because there are things we did not do, and yet they happened.

I did not decide that prayer would become less important, but it became less important.

I did not decide that learning would be pushed aside, but it was pushed aside.

I did not decide that home would receive my leftovers, but that is what happened.

I did not decide to stop giving thanks, being moved, listening, or missing people.

I simply stopped paying attention.

And the Torah calls this “and you forgot God Who brought you forth.”

We need to understand what forgetfulness means in the Torah. The Torah repeatedly commands: “Remember,” and on the other hand warns: “Take care lest you forget the Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:12). Can memory be commanded? Sometimes a person simply forgets.

But when the Torah speaks about remembering the Holy One, blessed be He, it is not speaking only about a mental act of recall. A person can answer every theological question correctly and still live as though the Holy One, blessed be He, occupies the margins of his day.

Spiritual forgetfulness does not necessarily mean that I do not know.

It means that what I know is no longer present.

This explains another verse in Deuteronomy. Moses warns: “Then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8:14). The person did not attend a lecture that convinced him there is no Creator. He simply reached a point where life became so full of himself, his power, his success, and his affairs that the Holy One, blessed be He, was pushed out of awareness.

He believes.

But he lives less out of that belief.

That is an enormous difference.

Perhaps that is why the Ten Days of Repentance are called specifically teshuvah. Not invention. Not building a person we never were. Return.

Something was close and became distant.

Something was central and moved aside.

There was a voice we once heard and that has grown faint.

And the Holy One, blessed be He, says: come back.

We do not always need to search for a new sin to stop. Sometimes we need to look for an old and good thing to bring back.

The prophet Hosea says: “Return, Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your sin” (Hosea 14:2). Notice: if one can return, it means there is a place to which we belonged before. Teshuvah is movement back into relationship.

But here there is a trap. We wait to feel a great awakening before returning.

A person says: when I feel more desire, I will begin learning again. When I am more focused, I will pray well. When there is less pressure, I will invest in my home. When I begin to feel again, I will begin to act again.

Perhaps the order is reversed.

Sometimes we do not act because we do not feel, but sometimes we do not feel because we have not acted for a long time.

Relationship is built through presence.

If a person wants to restore a relationship with a friend, he does not sit at home waiting for the closeness of twenty years ago to return. He calls. He meets. He talks. Closeness returns through action.

The same is true in serving God. Sometimes the way to bring the heart back is first to bring the action back.

Set a time again for Torah.

Arrive at prayer a few minutes earlier.

Say one blessing without rushing.

Open again a book that used to be part of life.

Sit with the child.

Call a parent.

The small action tells the soul: this is becoming important again.

Our Sages say concerning the verse “In all your ways know Him” that this is a “small passage upon which all the fundamentals of Torah depend” (Berakhot 63a). Not only in the synagogue. “In all your ways.” The work is to bring the Holy One, blessed be He, back into the ordinary roads of life.

Because sometimes the problem is not that we do things against the Holy One, blessed be He.

The problem is that we do more and more things without Him.

Work without Him.

Plan without Him.

Succeed without Him.

Struggle without Him.

And only when the time for prayer arrives do we remember that there is a relationship.

“And you forgot God Who brought you forth” says: do not turn the One Who gave you life into a guest who receives a few minutes inside your life.

And this brings us to a very practical question before Yom Kippur. Instead of accepting twenty resolutions, we can ask: what was once a real part of my service of God and disappeared along the way?

Perhaps you once learned ten minutes after prayer.

Perhaps you once said Shema more slowly.

Perhaps you had a fixed class.

Perhaps you once called your parents every Friday before Shabbat.

Perhaps there was a Shabbat meal at home when you truly talked.

Perhaps you were more careful about the way you spoke.

Perhaps you once knew how to be amazed.

You do not have to bring everything back.

Choose one thing.

But do not invent a resolution only because Yom Kippur has arrived. Sometimes the deepest resolution is not to add something that never existed, but to restore something good that we lost without noticing.

And here we return to the two friends from the beginning.

They had not fought. Therefore there was no reconciliation either.

No one slammed a door, so no one felt the need to open it.

The relationship simply weakened until they both became accustomed to the distance.

Perhaps some people’s relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He, looks like that. They are not angry with Him. They have not abandoned mitzvot. They never decided to move away.

It has simply been a long time since they truly spoke to Him.

A long time since a verse touched them.

A long time since they opened a siddur and felt that they were standing before Someone.

A long time since they asked themselves what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants from them, and not only what they have to get done today.

Then Shabbat Shuvah arrives.

It does not come to shout at a person: how did you leave?

It asks him quietly: when exactly did you grow distant?

And perhaps he does not know how to answer.

That is all right.

We do not have to know when we moved away in order to know that it is time to come closer.

We do not need to identify the day when the relationship weakened.

We need to choose the day on which we begin strengthening it.

And that day can be today.

“You neglected the Rock Who bore you, and forgot God Who brought you forth.” Moses is not describing only an ancient sin of another generation. He warns against one of the most human movements of all: great things can disappear from our lives not because we rejected them, but because we stopped holding on to them.

So teshuvah does not always mean overturning life.

Sometimes it simply means returning one thing to the place from which it moved.

Return prayer to the heart.

Return Torah to the day.

Return presence to the home.

Return gratitude to routine.

Return the Holy One, blessed be He, from the margins to the center.

Because some relationships break with noise, but some relationships disappear in silence.

And on Shabbat Shuvah we ask for one thing:

Do not let the silence become distance.

If we moved away millimeter by millimeter, we can also return step by step.

And the first step is not to ask when exactly I moved away.

The first step is to decide:

From today, I stop drifting away without noticing.