What if nobody stops you?

It is possible to drive very fast on the wrong road. The highway may be open, the engine excellent, there may be no traffic and no warning lights - and still every kilometer takes you farther from the destination.

One of the most dangerous mistakes is to assume that if something is working, it must be right. If the door opened, if the money is coming, if nobody is stopping us, perhaps that proves we are in the right place.

But sometimes reality allows us to continue even in a direction we will later regret.

Haazinu says: “I will see what their end will be” (Deuteronomy 32:20). The question is not only how quickly I am progressing. The question is where.

Maybe we are waiting for a crisis to stop us. What if none comes? What if everything keeps working?

Before asking for an open road, check the destination. And if you discover you are going the wrong way, do not mourn the hour already spent. Be grateful you discovered it before spending a lifetime there.

Is there an area where you are measuring how fast you are moving, but not where you are going?

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A man set out on a long drive late at night. He had almost four hours of road ahead of him and wanted to arrive quickly. He entered the destination into his navigation system, put the phone aside, and began driving. The road was almost empty. The car was running perfectly, there were no traffic jams, no problems, and he was even pleased to see how quickly he was progressing. After more than an hour he stopped at a gas station, and when he turned the screen on again he discovered something strange: the destination was now farther away than it had been at the beginning of the trip.

He was certain there was a malfunction. He checked the address again, zoomed in on the map, and then understood what had happened. When leaving the city, he had taken the wrong interchange. For more than an hour he had driven at an excellent speed, on an excellent road, in an excellent car, without a single traffic jam and without a single warning light. There was only one problem: he was driving extremely well in the wrong direction.

And the first thought that came to him was almost ridiculous: how did I not feel that something was wrong? Everything was going so well.

But that is exactly the point. Nothing was supposed to feel wrong. The engine does not know where you want to go. It only knows how to drive. The road does not ask what your destination is. It allows you to advance. And if you chose the wrong direction, sometimes you can advance in it very quickly.

There is a moment when this stops being a story about a road and becomes a story about life.

Because we are accustomed to thinking that if a person is walking on the wrong path, at some point something must stop him. A warning light will come on. A door will close. The plan will fail. Reality will signal: stop, you made a mistake.

But what if it does not?

What if a person can choose the wrong path and the business actually succeeds? What if he can neglect something very important and for years nothing dramatic happens? What if he can damage a relationship at home and the home continues to function? What if he can drift spiritually and still get up in the morning, go to work, earn a living, smile, and continue with life?

And what if the greatest danger is not that the Holy One, blessed be He, will stop you?

What if the greatest danger is that no one will stop you?

In the Song of Haazinu, the Holy One, blessed be He, says: “The Lord saw and rejected, because of the anger of His sons and His daughters. And He said: I will hide My face from them; I will see what their end will be, for they are a generation of reversals, children in whom there is no faithfulness” (Deuteronomy 32:19-20).

There are very frightening words in this verse, but I want to stop specifically at four words: “I will see what their end will be.”

As it were, there is a state in which a person walks a certain road and the Holy One, blessed be He, allows that road to arrive at its own result.

Not because there is no judgment, and not because there is no providence. Rather, one of the greatest and most dangerous gifts given to a person is choice. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not turn us into puppets whose steering wheel is invisibly turned every time we go left instead of right.

The Gemara in tractate Makkot (10b) says a famous and unsettling sentence: “On the path a person wishes to go, they lead him.”

The Sages do not say merely that he is allowed to walk. “They lead him.”

The Gemara derives this from the story of Balaam. At first the Holy One, blessed be He, tells Balaam: “You shall not go with them” (Numbers 22:12). But when Balaam continues wanting to go, in the end he is told: “Arise, go with them” (Numbers 22:20). A person’s stubborn desire can bring him to a point where the road he himself chose is opened before him.

This should shake us, because sometimes we use the very fact that something succeeded as proof that it was right.

A person says: if the Holy One, blessed be He, had not wanted it, it would not have worked out.

Who said?

Balaam received permission to go.

A door that opens is not always proof that you are meant to walk through it.

The fact that you are able to do something does not mean that you should do it.

And the fact that no one stopped you does not mean that the direction is right.

Sometimes a person asks for a certain thing again and again, pushes toward it, insists upon it, removes every obstacle, and when he finally succeeds he says: there, that proves it was meant to happen. The Sages teach us to be very cautious with that calculation. Sometimes you are simply given the possibility of walking on the road you insist so strongly on choosing.

And here begins a question that I think is worth taking into Shabbat Shuvah: what in my life is succeeding, but may not be right?

We know how to examine ourselves over failures. When something falls apart, we stop. When a business fails, a person examines himself. When there is a crisis at home, he begins asking questions. When the body sends a signal, he goes to the doctor.

But who examines himself over something that is succeeding?

A person works from morning to night and the business grows. Everyone praises him. He earns more from year to year. From the outside, this is a success story. But perhaps inside that success the children have learned not to wait for him in the evening. Perhaps his wife has already stopped telling him things because he is always busy. Perhaps he himself no longer remembers the last time he sat for an hour with a Gemara without the phone interrupting him.

Is the business succeeding? Absolutely.

But is the person succeeding? That is already a different question.

Another person always wins arguments. He is sharp, he knows how to speak, he knows how to prove his case, and no one can stand up to him. He ends every argument with the final word. You could say he is very successful.

But one day he may discover that he won every argument and lost the people he was arguing with.

There are successes whose price arrives late.

And that is one of the reasons they are so dangerous.

If every time a person hurt someone he lost that person immediately, he would learn very quickly to be careful. If every time he wasted time he immediately felt that part of his life had been taken from him, he would stop. If every prayer said without concentration lit a red warning light in the siddur, perhaps we would pray differently.

But life does not work that way.

You can waste a day and feel no pain.

You can waste a year and keep going.

You can neglect a relationship for a long time before it breaks.

You can allow a habit to take root for years before realizing how difficult it is to uproot.

The price is not always charged at the register at the moment of purchase.

Sometimes the bill arrives much later.

That is why Moses says: “I will see what their end will be.”

Do not judge a path only by how it feels at the beginning.

Ask where it leads.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest definitions of wisdom in the Song of Haazinu. A few verses later Moses says: “If only they were wise, they would understand this; they would comprehend their end” (Deuteronomy 32:29). The wise person is not only the one who understands what is happening now. He can bring the end into the decision of the present.

And this question cuts deeply: if nothing changes, where am I going?

Not if there is a disaster tomorrow. Not if something stops me. The opposite. Assume everything continues exactly as it is.

If I speak at home for another ten years the way I speak today, what kind of home will I have?

If I give my children the same amount of time I give them today, what kind of relationship will we have when they grow up?

If I study Torah over the next ten years exactly as I study now, what kind of Torah scholar will I be in ten years?

If my prayer remains exactly as it is now, where will my heart be in a decade?

If I continue with the same anger, the same jealousy, the same screen, the same wasting of time, and the same excuses, where does this road end?

This is a hard question because it removes one great excuse: the hope that something outside us will eventually change us.

We tell ourselves: one day I will have more time. One day the pressure will decrease. One day I will feel inspired. One day the children will grow. One day the business will stabilize. One day I will begin learning seriously. One day I will work on my anger.

But what if no “one day” ever comes?

What if life simply allows you to continue?

Rabbeinu Yonah of Gerona opens Shaarei Teshuvah by describing the great kindness of the Holy One, blessed be He, Who opened a path for sinners to return even after they rebelled and sinned (Shaarei Teshuvah, Gate One, 1). The very possibility of teshuvah is kindness, because a person does not have to remain captive to the route he created for himself.

Teshuvah is the ability to say: I am not waiting for the wall to stop me. I am stopping before the wall.

I am not waiting for the home to break before changing the way I speak.

I am not waiting for the child to stop talking to me before I begin listening.

I am not waiting for the body to force me to understand that life is limited.

I am not waiting for the habit to become second nature.

I am not waiting for the wrong road to reach its end before admitting that I chose the wrong direction.

And this may be a tremendous depth of these days. We call them the Ten Days of Repentance, not the Ten Days of Disaster. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not ask us to wait for something to break before we return. He gives us a period in which we can stop by choice.

What a gift that a person can do teshuvah before the price arrives.

What a gift that one can say sorry before the relationship is destroyed.

What a gift that one can return to a child before he is no longer a child.

What a gift that one can establish a study time before another ten years pass.

What a gift that one can stop a bad habit while it is still a habit and not yet the whole personality.

But this requires a special kind of courage.

It is much easier to change when life forces us. When there is no choice, we all know how to make decisions. Wisdom is changing while there is still a choice, while everything appears fine, while no one is pressuring us, and while it would be perfectly possible to continue exactly as yesterday.

That is teshuvah from freedom.

Then Yom Kippur arrives. We will say again and again: “For the sin we have sinned before You.” But perhaps before the confession it is worth adding, silently, a question that is not written in the machzor: Master of the Universe, where in my life am I interpreting Your silence as approval?

Where am I telling myself: if this were really serious, they would have stopped me already?

Where am I using the fact that everything continues as usual in order not to ask whether it is continuing correctly?

This is a piercing question.

Because not every quiet is peace.

Not every comfort is a blessing.

Not every open door is an invitation.

Not every success is approval.

And not every clear road is your road.

Sometimes the most compassionate thing a person can do for himself is not to wait for a sign.

Open the map.

Check the destination.

And ask: not how fast am I advancing, but where?

The man at the beginning drove more than an hour in the wrong direction. When he discovered it, he could have said: I have already driven so far; it would be a shame to turn back. I invested fuel. I invested time. I am already dozens of kilometers away.

But what sense does it make to continue on the wrong road merely because you have already invested an hour in it?

And how many people do exactly that in life.

I have behaved this way for years.

I already built my life this way.

Everyone already knows me this way.

I already tried to change and failed.

Precisely because you have traveled far, do not drive another kilometer just to justify the kilometers you already drove.

Turn around.

That is the meaning of teshuvah.

Not to erase the road you already traveled. It cannot be erased.

Not to convince yourself that you did not make a mistake. If you were wrong, you were wrong.

Teshuvah is the moment a person says: I will not allow yesterday’s mistake to choose tomorrow’s direction for me too.

And here, in my eyes, lies the great blow of thought in Shabbat Shuvah.

We pray that the Holy One, blessed be He, not bring difficult things upon us. We ask for a good year, health, life, livelihood, peace, and contentment, as we should.

But perhaps we need to add one more prayer.

Master of the Universe, do not let me use the good year You give me in order to keep running away from You.

Do not let me turn success into an excuse not to examine myself.

Do not let me think that because You did not stop me, I must be right.

And above all, give me the courage to stop myself before life stops me.

If I am driving fast in the wrong direction, do not let me be impressed by the speed.

If I am winning in things because of which I am losing my home, let me understand that this is not victory.

If I am gaining things for which I am paying with time that cannot be returned, give me the wisdom to calculate the price as well.

And if there is a place in my life where deep down I already know that the direction is wrong, give me the strength to stop waiting for disaster, crisis, or a warning light.

Because perhaps the most frightening question of Yom Kippur is not: what will happen if the Holy One, blessed be He, stops me?

The more frightening question is:

What will happen if He does not stop me?

What will happen if I receive another year and everything keeps working?

What will happen if I have livelihood, health, strength, and success, and I keep going in exactly the same direction?

Where will I be next Yom Kippur?

And where will I be in ten years?

“On the path a person wishes to go, they lead him.”

That can be wonderful news if the road is right.

And it can be a terrible warning if it is not.

So before we ask the Holy One, blessed be He, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, “Give us an open road,” perhaps we first need to ask:

Master of the Universe, give us the desire for the right road.

Because it is not enough that the engine works.

It is not enough that the road is open.

It is not enough that we are moving forward.

First of all, we need to know where we are going.

And if you discovered that you are on the wrong road, do not mourn the hour you already drove.

Thank the Holy One, blessed be He, that you discovered it before you spent an entire life driving there.