You are asking for another year. What for?

We ask to be written in the Book of Life. Another year. More time. More possibility. But there is a question we cannot skip: what for?

An older man was asked what he would do if he could return to age forty for one day. He did not choose a major deal or a special trip. He wanted one ordinary evening with his children when they were small. “Back then I thought those evenings were interrupting my life,” he said. “Today I know they were my life.”

Moses says at the end of Haazinu: “For it is not an empty thing for you, for it is your life” (Deuteronomy 32:47). Life is not only the number of years we receive. It is also how present we are inside those years.

We postpone what matters until there is less pressure and more quiet. But the life we are waiting for is not on the way. It is already here.

Perhaps the deeper prayer is not only: give me more years of life. It is: give me more life inside the years.

If you were given another year, what would you want more of - not on your calendar, but in your life itself?

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People tell of a very old man who once sat with his son and grandson. In the middle of the conversation, the grandson asked him: “Grandpa, if you were given the chance to return to age forty for just one day, what would you do?”

Everyone expected a grand answer. Perhaps he would change a business decision. Perhaps he would repair a major mistake. Perhaps he would travel to a place he had always dreamed of seeing. But the grandfather was silent for a long time, and then said: “I would go back to one ordinary evening.”

The grandson did not understand. “An ordinary evening?”

“Yes,” the grandfather said. “One evening when my children were small. I would come home, put the phone and all my worries aside, sit on the floor and play with them. I would listen to all the stories that, when I was forty, I thought I did not have time to hear. I would look at their faces a little longer. I would put them to bed and not be in a hurry to go anywhere.”

The grandson asked: “And that is all?”

The grandfather answered with a devastating sentence: “Back then I thought those evenings were getting in the way of my life. Today I know they were my life.”

A person can hear a sentence like that and be moved.

But on Shabbat Shuvah it is not enough to be moved.

We have to let that sentence enter us and ask a question we may not want to hear:

What in your life today are you rushing to finish that one day you would give anything to receive one more hour of?

In the Song of Haazinu, after all the rebuke, history, sin, concealment and hope, Moses ends by saying to the people of Israel: “Set your hearts to all the words that I testify to you today... for it is not an empty thing for you, for it is your life” (Deuteronomy 32:46-47).

Rashi writes on the words “for it is not an empty thing for you”: “You do not toil in it for nothing, for great reward depends upon it, for it is your life.” And the Jerusalem Talmud expounds on the verse: “If it is empty, it is from you” (Jerusalem Talmud, Peah 1:1). If Torah seems empty to a person, the emptiness is not in it. Something in the way he approaches it has remained outside.

But immediately after Moses says, “for it is your life,” something jarring happens.

God tells him: “Ascend this mountain of Abarim, Mount Nebo... and die on the mountain that you ascend” (Deuteronomy 32:49-50).

Moses speaks about life while he himself is standing before the end of his life.

And perhaps precisely a person standing in that place can tell us what we, who are still inside the rush of life, find so difficult to understand.

We are accustomed to thinking that the opposite of death is life.

But perhaps spiritually there is another contrast.

The opposite of death is not merely that a person is breathing.

The opposite of death is that a person is present inside the life he has been given.

Because it is possible to be alive and miss life.

It is possible to sit with a child and not be with him.

It is possible to stand in prayer and not be in the prayer.

It is possible to sit beside your wife while living, at that very moment, in another world.

It is possible to open a volume of Gemara and think about the business.

It is possible to sit at the Shabbat table and wait for it to end so you can get to the next thing.

It is possible to be in synagogue on Yom Kippur and think about when the fast will end.

Then a person is present at all the important places in his life, but he is almost never actually there.

The body arrived.

The soul is still on the way.

And this may be one of the quiet tragedies of life: we spend a huge part of the present waiting for the future, and then when the future comes we miss a past we did not know how to live while it was present.

When the children are small, we wait for them to become independent.

When they grow up, we miss the years when they needed us.

When we are young, we want to advance quickly.

When we are older, we would give a great deal for time to move a little more slowly.

During the week, we wait for Shabbat.

On Shabbat, we are already thinking about Sunday.

At work, we want to get home.

When we get home, our mind is still at work.

Then ten years pass, and a person asks: where did they go?

And the answer is frightening:

They did not go anywhere. We went through them without being inside them.

Moses says in Psalms: “Teach us to number our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom” (Psalms 90:12).

Notice what he does not ask for.

He does not say: Master of the universe, give me more days.

He says: teach me to count the days You have already given me.

That is an enormous difference.

On Rosh Hashanah and throughout the Ten Days of Repentance we ask again and again: “Remember us for life, King who desires life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Your sake, living God.”

We want more days.

Moses teaches that we also need to know what to do with a day.

A person can be given another year from Heaven, and at the end of that year ask for another year, and at the end of that year ask for another year, while never asking the most basic question:

What am I asking for all these years for?

That is the hard question of Shabbat Shuvah.

We stand before God and say:

Give me life.

And the question that must burn inside us is:

And if He gives it to you, what will you do with it?

If all your requests are accepted, and with God’s help you are written and sealed for a good and long life, what will be different?

Will you simply have another year to be angry at the same people?

Another year to chase the same things?

Another year to postpone the same conversation?

Another year to say, “When I have time, I will start learning”?

Another year in which the children receive the leftovers of your strength?

Another year in which people far from you receive your patience while those closest to you receive your exhaustion?

Another year in which you ask for life but are too busy to live it?

This is a piercing question because even the prayer for long life can become technical.

I want to live.

Of course.

But why?

What do you want to do with that gift?

The Talmud in tractate Shabbat quotes Rabbi Eliezer: “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked him: Does a person know on which day he will die? He replied: “All the more so, let him repent today lest he die tomorrow, and all his days will be in repentance” (Shabbat 153a).

This teaching does not tell a person to walk around terrified, thinking every morning that perhaps he will die.

That is not the service of God.

Rabbi Eliezer teaches something far deeper: do not live as though the important things can always wait.

Because there is one lie life tells us every morning.

Its word is:

Later.

Later I will call.

Later I will sit with the child.

Later I will learn.

Later I will apologize.

Later I will talk to my wife.

Later I will visit my father.

Later I will work on that character trait.

Later I will pray seriously.

Later I will do what I have known for years I need to do.

The problem with the word “later” is not that it is always a lie.

Sometimes there really will be a later.

The problem is that a person can receive “later” thousands of times, and each time use it to create another “later.”

Then he reaches the point where he understands something terrible:

The life he was waiting to begin living has almost passed.

There are people who wait for their children to grow up so they will have time to live.

Later they discover that the grown children are exactly what they miss.

There are people who wait for retirement in order to learn.

There are people who wait for the business to calm down before beginning to attend a class.

There are people who wait for the atmosphere at home to improve before allowing themselves to be happy.

There are people who wait for everyone around them to change before becoming different people themselves.

All that time, life is not waiting.

It is happening.

Life is not what will begin when all your problems are solved. Life is what is happening while you are trying to solve them.

And perhaps this is the depth of the words “for it is your life.”

The Torah does not say: Torah will one day help you arrive at life.

It says: this is life.

Life is not a waiting room for something else.

And this is true in the service of God as well.

How many times does a person say: after the holidays I will begin a fixed learning schedule.

After this stressful period I will work on my anger.

After the children grow up I will pray more calmly.

After I finish this project I will have the mental space to learn.

But perhaps your service of God is not the service that will begin after life calms down.

Perhaps your service of God is learning to serve Him within the life that does not calm down.

Because if you are waiting for a life without interruptions in order to begin living correctly, you may be waiting for a life that does not exist.

And here I want to ask a much harder question.

How many of the things filling your head today will matter to you ten years from now?

The argument you are taking to heart.

The person who did not give you enough respect.

The deal you cannot stop thinking about.

The message that made you angry.

What people said about you.

Who was given a place before you.

Who was right.

Who won.

How many hours of life do we sacrifice to things that, a year from now, we may not even remember?

That is the absurdity.

We say life is precious.

But we give hours of life to anger worth five minutes.

We give days to worry about something that may never happen.

We give weeks to a dispute nobody even remembers how it began.

We give years to honor and ego.

Then we stand on Rosh Hashanah and plead:

Give us more life.

Maybe God does not need to ask us how much we want to live.

Maybe we need to ask ourselves:

How much of the life we beg for are we actually willing to stop wasting?

Here is a simple test.

If you were told you had twenty-four hours left, I am not asking what you would do. That is an easy question.

I am asking something else:

What would you stop doing immediately?

What would you no longer be angry about?

To whom would you no longer need to prove that you are right?

What insult would suddenly lose all its power?

What worry would suddenly look small?

What struggle would suddenly look ridiculous?

And if you know those things are not worth your final day, why are they worth so many of the days before it?

That is the blow.

Not: “What would you do if you were going to die tomorrow?”

But:

If something is not worth one hour of your life on the last day, why is it receiving hundreds of hours of your life now?

“Teach us to number our days.”

Teach us to understand what a day is worth.

Because the person who knows what a day is worth begins to know what is not worth wasting a day on.

And that brings us to an even deeper place.

Perhaps on Yom Kippur we do not need only an accounting of sins.

Perhaps we also need an accounting of life.

Not only: where did I transgress?

But: what did my life pass over?

Not only: where did I sin?

But: where was I absent?

Where did the child speak and I did not hear?

Where did I sit beside someone I love while my mind was somewhere else?

Where did God give me a Shabbat and I did not feel it?

Where did He give me a prayer and all I wanted was to finish?

Where did He give me a father and mother and I assumed there would always be time to call?

Where did He give me a body that can walk, eyes that can see, a mouth that can speak, a mind that can learn, and I became accustomed to all of it as though I had signed a contract guaranteeing it forever?

Perhaps one of the hardest phrases in the world is: “taken for granted.”

Because nothing is taken for granted.

Not health.

Not home.

Not the noisy child.

Not the person sitting beside you.

Not the ability to open a Gemara.

Not the ability to walk to synagogue.

Not the ability to tell someone, “I love you.”

Not the ability to say, “I was wrong.”

Not the ability to begin again.

We often understand the value of things precisely when they move from the present into memory.

And then it is too late.

Shabbat Shuvah says:

Do not wait for the gift to become a memory before understanding that it was a gift.

And this is where Maimonides’ words about the shofar take on a different force. Rabbi Moses ben Maimon writes: “Awake, sleepers, from your sleep, and slumberers, arise from your slumber; examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 3:4).

Who are the sleepers?

They get up in the morning.

They go to work.

They run a family.

They answer phones.

They accomplish things.

Maimonides is speaking about another kind of sleep.

A person can be very active and sleep through an entire life.

He can accomplish everything and never ask what for.

He can run very fast and never check where he is going.

He can fill the calendar and leave the soul empty.

And so the shofar cries:

Wake up.

Not: “Die.”

Wake up.

Because you are alive.

That is the whole point.

The shofar is not the sound of an ending.

It is the sound that says: this is not the end yet.

You can still call.

You can still apologize.

You can still open the book.

You can still sit beside the child.

You can still end an argument.

You can still say thank you.

You can still change your priorities.

You can still take an ordinary day and stop treating it as though it were a draft before real life begins.

Because perhaps this is the greatest message:

We do not have draft days.

Today is not a dress rehearsal.

This year is not preparation for life.

This is life.

And now we stand in the Ten Days of Repentance and ask:

“Remember us for life.”

I think we can stop there for one second this year.

“Remember us for life.”

Master of the universe, I ask You for life.

But this time I want to understand what I am asking for.

I am not asking only that my heart continue to beat.

I am asking that my heart be present.

I am not asking only for more days on the calendar.

I am asking not to sleepwalk through them.

I am not asking only for another year with my children.

I am asking to see them while they are still beside me.

I am not asking only for more Shabbatot.

I am asking to feel Shabbat.

I am not asking only for more prayers.

I am asking to stand before You once with full presence.

I am not asking only that You lengthen my life.

I am asking that I not shorten it myself by being everywhere except where I am.

And perhaps this is the one commitment to take from here.

Not twenty commitments.

One.

Choose one thing in your life that you know is precious, but you live as though it will always wait for you.

A person.

Learning.

Prayer.

A child.

A parent.

Marriage.

Kindness.

Something you know that one day you may regret not giving more space to.

Do not wait for that day.

Give it space now.

Because wisdom is not knowing what was precious after you have lost it.

Almost everyone knows how to do that.

Wisdom is knowing its value while it is still in your hands.

“Teach us to number our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.”

Master of the universe, do not teach us the value of life through what is missing.

Give us the wisdom to discover it through what is present.

Do not wait for the chair to be empty before realizing who sat in it.

Do not wait for the room to be quiet before missing the noise.

Do not wait until you cannot walk before thanking God for your legs.

Do not wait until there is no one to call before finding time for the conversation.

Do not wait for the years to become photographs before realizing you were standing in the middle of your life.

And in a few days we will stand at Ne’ilah.

The sun will go down.

The gates will close.

And the congregation will cry:

“The Lord is God.”

But perhaps before the gates close in Heaven, one gate needs to open inside us.

And we need to decide:

I am done waiting for life.

I am done saying “later” to the things I know are the main thing.

I am done giving the best of my life to what, at the end of my life, will not be worth even a memory.

I am asking for another year, but I am also accepting upon myself to be present inside the year I am asking for.

Because one day, with God’s help after many good years, a person will look back.

And the great question will not only be how many years he had.

The question will be:

How many of those years were truly his?

How present was he in them?

How much did he love?

How much did he give?

How much did he learn?

How much did he pray?

How much did he notice?

How many times was he beside his own life instead of running toward the next thing?

And perhaps this is the final blow to take from Shabbat Shuvah:

The great fear is not only that one day life will end. The great fear is that life will continue for many more years, and we will continue postponing it until tomorrow.

So when we say this year, “Inscribe us in the Book of Life,” perhaps we should add one prayer in our hearts that is not written in the prayer book:

Master of the universe, if You inscribe me in the Book of Life, help me to be present in the book You are writing for me.

Give me not only years of life.

Give me life inside the years.

It is possible to reach the end of a day and discover that we did not accomplish everything.

That is human.

It is possible to reach the end of a year and discover that we did not fulfill all our plans.

That too is human.

But we must not reach the end of life and discover that we postponed the most important thing again and again because we were certain there would be time.

The life you are waiting for is not on the way.

It is already here.

And the question of Shabbat Shuvah is not only how much more time you will receive.

The question is:

When do you intend to arrive at your own life?