By: Rabbi Chaim Yeshaya Freeman
Pressing Rewind: The First Step of Teshuva
The parsha begins with the din of Eishes Yefas To'ar. If a person is in battle and sees an attractive woman among his enemies, the Torah permits him to take her as a wife under certain conditions. Yet the Torah then describes a tragic chain of events that can follow. A marriage entered into for the wrong reasons can eventually lead to resentment. That resentment can damage the relationship between husband and wife. It can then affect their children. The Torah warns that the father may ultimately favor one child over another and attempt to divert the inheritance. Finally, the child can become so affected that he becomes a ben sorer u'moreh.
Chazal describe this progression with the well-known principle of aveirah goreres aveirah. One sin leads to another. A poor decision does not always remain isolated. It can create a chain of consequences that reaches places we never imagined.
There is another powerful lesson we can take from this as we enter the month of Elul and prepare for the Yamim Noraim. Very often, when we find ourselves dealing with a difficult situation, our first instinct is to address the problem directly in front of us. But perhaps Elul asks us to do something deeper. Perhaps we need to press rewind. We need to go back and ask ourselves: How did we get here? Where did the problem begin?
To borrow the example from our parsha, imagine a parent who is struggling because a child has chosen a path in life that is very different from what the parent had hoped for. The natural reaction is to focus on the child. We want to understand what went wrong and how we can change the child's behavior. But perhaps we need to press rewind.
Maybe the child's struggles are connected to the relationship between the parents. Perhaps there has been tension in the home. Perhaps the parents have become distant from one another or from their child. If we go back even further, perhaps we will discover that choices made years earlier contributed to the situation we are facing today.
This does not mean that parents are responsible for every choice their children make. Nor does it mean that we should live with guilt over the past. Rather, it means that we should have the courage to examine our own actions and recognize what is within our ability to change. Even when the past cannot be changed, the future can.
That is one of the fundamental messages of teshuva. When something goes wrong, our instinct is often to point a finger. We look for someone else to blame. We explain why the situation is not really our fault. But teshuva begins when we stop making excuses and start taking responsibility.
We say every day after Shemoneh Esrei: "אין אנו עזי פנים וקשי ערף לומר לפניך צדיקים אנחנו ולא חטאנו" - We do not have the audacity or stubbornness to stand before Hashem and claim that we are righteous and have not sinned. The first step of teshuva is the willingness to acknowledge that something went wrong and to ask ourselves what role we played in creating the situation.
As we enter Elul and prepare for the Yamim Noraim, let us have the courage to press rewind. Let us look beyond the obvious problem and search for its source. Let us stop looking for excuses and start looking for opportunities to change. Teshuva means having the courage to go back, identify where we went wrong, and then choose a different path moving forward.
May we be zocheh to use these days of Elul to examine ourselves, correct our ways, and return to Hashem.
Taken from the Kollel Avreichim Hollywood
