The Difficulty of Navigating to Yourself - Rabbi Ori Strum

Today, we have the great luxury of easy directions. If you need to get from point A to point B, [music] all you need to do is take out your Google Maps or Waze and type in your address. And within seconds, you'll not just be given one route, but several routes. Want to avoid tolls, take the scenic route, [music] or make a stop along the way? No problem. Need to know if police are in the area? Sure thing. Interested in nearby restaurants or gas stations? Yep. With the press of a button, you can have directions to pretty much any place [music] on planet Earth. Yet, something fascinating and shocking happens when you plug in the address you're currently at as the [music] two and from location. Take your home address, for example, and put that same address in the two and the from location and see what happens. I tried this out myself, [music] and you know what happened? It gave me a message, "Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions." I thought to myself, "What do you mean you can't calculate directions? This is the easiest thing for you. This is what you do all the time. And what's so hard about this?" And then I realized there's a powerful message here. Sometimes the hardest direction [music] in life is our home address. It's getting to ourselves. It's the hardest place to get to. But we're in a time of year where we're trying to find that address. We're trying to go home. We're trying to discover our true selves. On Rosh Hashanah, the day when Adam Harishon was created, was also the day when Adam Harishon sinned and subsequently hid from Hashem. And Hashem calls out to him, "Ayeka, where are you? Don't you realize you are not your sin? You are not your mess-ups or mistakes. Of course, you have to deal with that, but the real you is above all of that. I want you. [music] Where are you?" Our true identity, the real me and you, is above and beyond any sin whatsoever. And indeed, that holy place, our home address, is sometimes difficult [music] to navigate to. Yet, comes along the sounding of the shofar, which is really a calling of Ayeka, and it takes us to that holy place. It navigates us and gives us the directions to our home address, allowing us to discover our true selves.