How to Keep The High Holidays Alive All Year - Rabbi Uri Pilichowski

His excitement was palpable. It was the first time this had ever happened to him in life before. He was a young man and he was at the Western Wall. And he saw the cars pull up. It's never seen that before. Cars pull up all the way up to the Western Wall. Crowds and crowds of Hasidim streaming down the ramp down to the Western Wall. He couldn't believe his eyes. Out of the car he kept hearing people say, "The Gerer Rebbe, the great Gerer Rebbe had arrived." And so to pray at the Western Wall. People were rushing in to meet the Gerer Rebbe, to shake his hand, to get a bracha, get a blessing from this great Hasidic Rebbe. And he pushed his way forward. He wasn't a Hasid by any shape of the imagination, but he wanted to get a blessing from the for the Gerer Rebbe. He walked up to the Gerer Rebbe and he said, "Rebbe, could I please have a bracha, a blessing?" And he said to him, he said, "What do you do? What do you do during your day?" He said, "I study in Yeshiva." "Which Yeshiva?" And he said, "The famous Or Sameach Yeshiva, but I'm not about Chabad." The Gerer Rebbe looked at him, stepped back and said, "What a shame. That's too bad." The boy looks at him, "What do you mean?" The lesson to everybody around him was obvious. We should all be baalei teshuvah. We should all be people that repent. It's not just reserved for the special class of people who grew up one way and changed their entire lives a different way. But even people that grew up, quote unquote, frum, grew up religious, they too should declare themselves to be baalei teshuvah. They too should be proud repentants, people that can boast that yes, I did used to do things that were wrong, but I'm always trying to do things that are better. We always have this great feeling when Yom Kippur ends, when that shofar finally sounds. Not the great feeling of that first cookie that goes in our mouth, or the great feeling of that cold orange juice when we break our fast, but that great feeling that we have where we know we're starting with a clean slate. We know that our records have been wiped clean. We know that we've reached that atonement. That's the faith that we have to know that on Yom Kippur our days, our sins have been wiped away from us. But how do we take that energy, that level, that feeling, that excitement, the passion? How do we bring that to every day of our lives? How do we take Yom Kippur and bring it to every day? It's an impossible level. There's no way we could do that every day. Tshuva, repentance, is about improving ourselves. It's not about grandiose moves of fasting for 25 hours, of pretending that we're angels, of trying to strive for these great spiritual heights that we know, if we're realistic, are only going to happen on Yom Kippur. But it's about the incremental changes. It's the incremental improvement that makes ourselves so much better. There are four steps to repentance. There's leaving the sin and not doing it again. There's regretting the fact that we did the sin in the first place. There's accepting upon ourselves that we're not going to do it again. And then, what could be either the easiest or the hardest part, is talking to God and saying to God, "God, please, I sinned. I faltered. I made a mistake. This is what I did. And I regret it. I'm embarrassed by it. And now I accept upon myself that I'm never going to do it again." That formulation, what we call the confession, the vidui, that's a necessary fourth step. And that [snorts] that confession, that's not just limited to Yom Kippur. A lot of times we think about vidui, we imagine those lists and lists and lists at the end of every single one of our prayers of of Yom Kippur, where we lean down and we struck our chests in acts of of of repentance. But that's not what the confession is. The confession is those few silent moments that we step aside and we think to ourselves that we've done something wrong and we don't want to continue it and we address God privately. Me and God quietly in a corner talking to God saying, "I'm not going to do it again." Practically, teshuva can be done and should be done every single day. Yes, on Yom Kippur there's a mitzvah to do teshuva, but teshuva is a a mitzvah for every single day. It sounds strange cuz we're not used to it and we don't hear people talking about it and we definitely don't see it and we're not supposed to. Teshuva is private between me and God. Only in rare cases do our sages talk about public confessions and I wouldn't advise it without talking to a Torah scholar first. But teshuva that we could have privately on Yom Kippur, that can be brought to every single day. First and foremost through self-reflection. Every single [snorts] day thinking to ourselves and not just before we go to sleep. Quiet moments on the bus, on our commute, on our drive waiting at the doctor's office. What was I involved in this week? What could I have been doing better? The most important question we can ask ourselves is, "What's causing us to do this?" So often we just look at our actions and the consequences of our actions. But we're not really thinking about why I'm acting this way. Why do I repeatedly want to speak the way I'm speaking when I don't want to speak this way? Why am I eating things I don't want to be eating? Why am I talking to people in a way I don't want to be talking to them in this way? What brings me to do this? That question of what's causing me to do this, we We ask ourselves over and over and should be every single day of our lives. Lastly, the most important thing to bring Yom Kippur to our everyday lives is asking ourselves do I really have an attitude of improvement? Do I want to improve? And we know each person, just with the fact you're watching this video, you know the answer to that question is yes. So, what steps are we going to take? What steps are we going to make in our lives, the improvements, to make sure that every day has a little bit of Yom Kippur to it. Yom Kippur is one day a year for a reason. It's because we can't get to that level every single day. There's a special prohibition of keeping two days of Yom Kippur. We're told not to do that. We have two days of Sukkot outside of Israel, two days of Pesach outside of Israel. But nobody has two days of Yom Kippur. It's to get onto that high, to get onto that level was too difficult. But a little bit of Yom Kippur we can bring to every day. Shalom.