We're a couple of weeks into Cheshvan now, and I've been thinking about Mar Cheshvan, this month without any holidays. This month can be a big relief, or it can be kind of anti-climactic. Our year-cycle offers us build-up to the High Holidays, starting in Elul – or even starting with the three weeks leading up to Tisha b'Av. I tend to think of Yom Kippur, and specifically Ne'ilah, as being the climax of the High Holidays. After that, we have Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah as a way to wind down and wrap up the holiday season. But then Cheshvan comes – and no holidays. So what happens to all the teshuvah we did during the High Holiday season? Does it just fade away? Do we drop back into our old habits?
I was wondering what kind of guidance our tradition has for how we should approach Cheshvan. So I started by looking in the Bible for mentions of Cheshvan. As far as I could find, it is mentioned only four times, under two names: “Hachodesh Hashmini” (the eight month), and Bul, which is an older Hebrew name for the month. It's mentioned in 1 Kings 6:38, as the month in which Solomon finished building the Temple; in 1 Kings 12:32-33, when King Jeroboam ordains a feast day for the Northern Kingdom that is kind of like a second Sukkot for the Northern Kingdom so that his subjects won't go down to Jerusalem for the regular Sukkot and get tempted to stay in the Southern Kingdom; in Zechariah 1:1, which says that prophecy came to Zechariah in the eighth month, and in 1 Chronicles 27:11, which tells the names of the commanders whose army division served King David in the eighth month.
None of these references really helped me think about what happens to teshuva after the chaggim!
What I remembered when I was looking, though, was a teaching that I heard once about when the period of teshuvah actually ends. We think of the gates of Heaven as closing at the end of Neilah, but there is another tradition (in the Zohar, Va-Yehi120a; and Terumah142a) that says that the verdict is not delivered until Hoshana Rabba or until Shmini Atzeret. Yet another tradition (from the Tzemach David, Bemidbar 7:84) says that we have another opportunity to finish our teshuvah – on Hanukkah. And we do teshuvah all year round, as is evident in our daily liturgy (for example in the Weekday Amidah and in Tachanun). Also, other customs give us ways to engage in structured teshuvah at times other than the high holidays: for example, some people observe Yom Kippur Katan before every Rosh Chodesh, and others participate in mussar study and practice, which is a way of cultivating specific positive middot in a structured, ongoing way.
So on the one hand, our yearly calendar sets aside a very specific chunk of time for dedicated teshuvah, and on the other hand, we seem to have a desire to extend and extend the period in which teshuvah is possible – we want lots of second chances, we never want it to be too late to make a change. I think that this all points to a bigger tension between two aspects of the nature of human change and transformation. One one level, change is always possible – and indeed, change takes place constantly. On the other hand, as human beings, when we try to improve ourselves constantly, we have a tendency to get tired and give up. In that sense, it's more effective to set aside a specific time of the year to focus on self-improvement and transformation.
While I recognize the power of the High Holidays as peak experiences that help us transform our lives, I think that this model for change can also be dangerous. Instead of thinking of change and transformation in a sustainable, integrated, long-term, realistic way, peak experiences encourage us to make sudden, large changes in our lives, which may not be sustainable in the long term. This can lead us into a discouraging cycle: we feel ambition and excitement when we set a new goal, but then we feel a sense of disappointment and failure when we can't maintain our new habit.
I think this type of discouraging, ineffective teshuvah is heavily influenced – in negative ways – by general American conceptions of morality and moral change. We have a tendency to think of change as a matter of increasing our effort, discipline, and self-control. This has its roots, believe it or not, in a Calvinist, Puritan notion of Original Sin (along the lines of what Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic). Humans are fundamentally sinful and our desires are dangerous, which is why in order to improve ourselves, we must constantly work hard to counteract our natural tendencies.
This conception of human nature sets us up for the cycle of over-ambitious goals followed by discouragement, because it makes us feel like virtue is unnatural, exhausting, and basically impossible.
I want to share with you an alternative model for human nature, which I think gives rise to a healthier conception of teshuvah. We can talk about the model in terms of homeostasis (which I learned about a nutrition blog that I follow). Homeostasis is the idea that our bodies are self-regulating – for example, our bodies maintain a certain ideal temperature by counteracting cold with certain mechanisms and counteracting heat with other mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms are involuntary, like sweating or shivering, but some of them are behavioral, like putting on a coat or going swimming when we're hot. The behavioral aspect of homeostasis regulates itself through intrinsic motivation – in other words, we naturally want to do things that will make us feel warmer when we're cold or cooler when we're hot. In this model, human desire is not dangerous – rather, it's an essential signal that helps lead us toward healthy behavior.
According to this model, healthy behavior – or teshuvah – is not something we have to attain through effort and discipline. Rather, teshuvah is a matter of listening closely to our bodies and intuitions, and allowing ourselves to respond in ways that are gratifying and satisfying.
I appreciate this model of teshuvah because I think it still leverages the power of having a specific time of year to focus on self-improvement – we can still spend the High Holidays reflecting intensively on what it is that is pulling us out of being grounded and in touch with our own needs – but it doesn't prompt us to make New Year's resolutions of the kind that are likely to crash and burn.
So I want to invite you to try this on for size – what if teshuvah were an opportunity, not to figure out how to try harder in life, but instead, to figure out what we truly want and need? What if it were an opportunity to identify new behaviors, experiments, and solutions that could feel exciting, relieving, satisfying, relaxing and effective? And now that we're in Cheshvan, instead of crashing and burning on New Year's resolutions that are already starting to seem a little unrealistic, what would it look like for this month to be a laboratory to experiment with new behaviors that feel easy, good, and right?
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