Our 'To Do' list for Yom Kippur
Kol Nidre: September 24, 2004/5765
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

If I had a dollar for every "to do" list every person in this room made since last Yom Kippur, I could give a lot of money to tzedukkah (charity) and still buy that Fender Stratocaster guitar I've been looking at all year. We are very good list makers. But tonight, I would like to suggest that for all our experience with list-making, we make lists of the wrong things. I'm not suggesting that you stop writing "To Do" lists everyday. If so, the University, and much of the world as we know it, would probably grind to a halt. But there's a different kind of list that's more important than the one on your desk, or on your refrigerator, right now. I'm talking about the Yom Kippur list and while it's important to write the paper due next Thursday, or pay your phone bill, completing things on the Yom Kippur list will ultimately have a greater impact on your life, bringing you more fulfillment and satisfaction. Here's the problem: When we make lists to manage and organize our time, we put urgent things on the list; but we rarely put important things on the list. As I continue my theme for these holidays, dealing with the passage of time, this Kol Nidre I would like to talk about the difference between using our time to complete things that are urgent as opposed to the things that are deeply important in our lives.

I once did an exercise in a time management seminar that changed the way I thought about my life. If this was a pen-and-paper kind of evening, I'd do it with you right now. Here's how it goes: sit down and take the time to make a list of everything you both want to do , and have to do in your life. This might take about an hour. Don't be concerned with what is possible or realistic. Everything that you want to, and have to do, goes on the list, from getting an A in organic chemistry to climbing Mount Kilamanjaro, from learning Hebrew to going on that long postponed road trip with your brother. The things that weigh on you this week and the things that you dream about. It doesn't work to just think about them: you actually have to make a list.

After that, the next step is to go through and mark each item with the letter A, B or C. Category A is for things that are deeply important to you. These are things that bring us satisfaction, that keep us healthy, that fulfill our dreams. The things in category A bring love, reconciliation, meaning and passion into our lives. This might be running a marathon, making a film, writing the letter to make things right with a friend, going to Africa to work in the Peace Corps. It might be deepening your relationship with your father, or your mother. But nothing in category A has a deadline, an urgent time by which it has to be completed. Category B is for the urgent things we have to do every day: the paper we need to write, the report due for work, the laundry when we have no clean clothes left to wear. Finally, category C is for things other people ask you and want you to do. A key problem in many people lives, and I would call it a spiritual problem, is that we allow tasks from category B and C to totally take over our time. We confuse "urgent" with "important" and then leave ourselves little or no time to pursue things in category A, the dreams that, in our hearts, we know are so essential, so important in our lives.

I know we're busy. It rarely feels like we have enough time. The central metaphor of Yom Kippur is the image of a shortening day, a day when the gates of teshuvah, of repentance and change are slowing closing. Tonight, I want to begin to ask: how do we use our time to do the things that are truly important in our lives, the A priorities that will bring us satisfaction, fulfillment and deeper happiness?

My first suggestion is both simple and difficult. You remember how time was created and ordered in the Jewish tradition. I know, it was long ago, but you still remember. God created day and night by naming them , by saying it out loud, b'd'varo, by God's word. "God called the light Day and the darkness night, and there was evening and there was morning" I don't think this passage is about the physics of creation, I think it's teaching a deeper truth: we bring many aspects of our lives into being, we make them real, by having the courage to name them. Saying them out loud, acknowledging their importance, actually brings them into the world.

So here's the first thing you do with the list with the A, B and C priorities. You take a small wallet-size card and on it you write all of your A priorities. The things you want to do before the gates close, before you die. You want to learn Hebrew? It goes on the card. You want to get to a better place with your father or spend more time with your children? It goes on the card. Write a book? Medical school? Run the Boston marathon? Be honest and courageous. But you actually have to write it down and say it to yourself. Then you keep the card in your wallet, on your person, with you everyday and refer to it regularly. The first step to using your time to do the things that are truly important to you is to name them and then keep your dreams in front of you, close to you everyday.

You see, there's a problem with time in our lives. Time appears to be linear. Things appear to happen sequentially. This gives us the idea that we can put off certain things and do them at some later, undefined time. But I'm beginning to realize that time isn't quite as sequential as it appears. So, if something is truly important to us, a life priority, a dream, we have to be engaged in creating that dream every day. In fact, the rabbis have been teaching the same lesson for the last two thousand years. A quick look at the Torah would have you think that creation happened once and very long ago: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." But the rabbis had a more integrated understanding of the process of creation. In the daily prayers, God is praised for creating the world continually, every day "Ham'chadesh b'tuvo b'chol yom tamid maaseh v'resheet." Praised are you God "who is constantly, every day, engaged in the work of creation." The creation of the world is an ongoing process and so too with our lives.

We can't say that something is really important and then set it aside believing we will eventually get around to it. We have to find a way to take small parts of our dreams and integrate them into our actions each day. Let me start with an example from music, then move up to love and chocolate. I'm not going to really talk about chocolate, I just like to include it when I talk about essential aspects of life.

I am a guitar player. I love everything about guitars; how they sound, how they look, how the strings feel under my fingers. If you want to learn how to play the guitar; do not, I repeat, do not put your guitar in a case under your bed or in a closet. Put your guitar out in your room where it calls to you. Lean it against the wall or buy a stand and put it in the corner of your room. Then, you will see it and you'll pick it up for short periods during the day. Three ten minutes periods of playing guitar during day will have much more impact on your playing that one two- hour practice session every week before your lesson.

I often think of the story of Rabbi Akiba, one of our greatest sages and one of the most learned scholars of his time. To hear him teach, one would have thought that he studied at the best academies, starting when he was three years old! The fact is that Rabbi Akiba was a poor man, a laborer, not exactly high on the social or financial ladder. He always wanted to study but never had the time or the money to begin. The story is told that once he was sitting next to a fountain of water and he looked under the fountain and saw that where the water was dripping, the stone was worn away and there was a deep groove in the rock. And he thought, a workman must have carved out this channel so the water could flow from the fountain. But when he looked more closely, he saw that the groove had been actually made by the dripping water, year after year, wearing away the rock below. And he thought: is my mind harder than this stone? Surely, if the slow drip of water can change this stone, then I can learn Torah, drop by drop. And that's what he did, beginning when he was forty years old. He couldn't afford to stop working but he studied a little bit every day and over the years, he learned all of the written law and the oral law. By integrating his dream, little by little, he transformed himself into a great scholar and sage.

The rabbis fully understood the difference between completing urgent and important things in our lives. In the Mishna the rabbis said, "Don't say you'll study when you have time. Maybe you'll never have time." Which is to say, we rarely find the "perfect time" to do something. In regard to study, the rabbis addressed this problem creatively. They took a number of passages, from the Torah and the Talmud and put them into the beginning of the daily service. So, even if you didn't get around to studying that day, you had already read some texts and immersed yourself in a little bit of studying, integrating that experience and value into your daily life.

Now to love: I think of couples who love each other but get so busy that they can't slow down enough to focus on one another. They simply stop expressing love in their everyday lives. They begin to say, "As soon as we can, we'll plan a romantic weekend and go away without the distractions of school, or work or children." Romantic weekends are wonderful, but they don't replace gesture of love and affection right in the middle of all the craziness of everyday life: pausing for a kiss, taking a person's hand, writing a note. Of course, this applies to friendship too. The real connections in friendship don't only happen when it's convenient for us. Of course, part of friendship is being respectful of others' time, but in true friendship, actions of support and connection permeate the relationship. They don't only come at compartmentalized times, when it's planned or convenient.

You don't have to wait until the long delayed backpacking trip with your father to move closer to him. Next time you speak with him, tell him something that's important to you. Ask him about his work or his life since you've left for school. Those small but essential actions will lay the groundwork for going away together, and begin the process of bringing you closer. The first step in training for the Boston marathon is to run around the block. Running a couple of miles is how every marathon begins. Running a couple of miles doesn't guarantee that you'll run the marathon but never running a couple of miles guarantees that you won't fulfill that dream. If you have always wanted to learn Hebrew, you don't have to wait to begin until you can go to Israel some summer or after graduation. Your going to take thirty or forty courses at college: one of them can be Hebrew One, where I guarantee you'll learn more in one semester than you did in six years of Hebrew school.

I believe that we already know many of the things that are really important to us in our lives. When we look deeply into our hearts, when we're not afraid to listen to what our hearts tell us, many things become clear. And it's good that Yom Kippur reminds us that our time is limited. And if we do nothing, the gates will close and our dreams, the things that are so important to us, get shut behind those gates. And nothing is more painful than being shut off from our true selves. But as soon as we make a step, as soon as we turn, as soon as we begin, the gates open wide for us.

The rabbis teach that once, there was a year when no one in the Jewish community knew the day that the new year began. And they said, if we don't know Rosh Hashanah, we can't figure out when it's Yom Kippur! And the people entreated so passionately that the angels went before the Holy One and asked God, "When does the New Year begin?" And God answered, "I don't know. That's not up to me. Every man, every woman decides when, and if, a new year starts. When people commit to change, when people turn towards those things that are really important in their lives, that's the moment when the New Year begins." We don't have to wait to begin our dreams. The gates are open and we have time to do what's important. May you be sealed for blessing, for peace, for fulfillment in the book of life. Gemar hatimah tovah!