Teshuva: What to Work on First!!?

mimivan

Mon, Sep 15 2008, 5:15 am

I guess this may be more appropriate in the "Working on our middos" forum, but I forgot to ask for access, and anyway, since many of us are working on our middos in Chodesh Elul, it may be more appropriate to post on the public forum..

Shalhevet gave a very good answer to someone asking about how to get in the habit of davening more regularly..

Quote:

Take it one day at a time. Decide on one thing only (eg not to do anything except looking after your children before you daven or not to do anything else while you bench) and decide to do it until YK. It is overwhelming to take too many things on at once, and a tool of the yeitzer horo so that we end up doing nothing at all in the end. After YK make a new decision, for a month, or till Chanuka or whatever.

My question is, I have been doing a chesbon hanefesh and have found so many things I need to work on. But it seems so overwhelming. For instance, one MAJOR character trait I want to fix, to become more machmir in several areas of YIddishkeit, to learn halachos more regularly, start new projects to spread YIddishkeit, improve the environment in my home (I am deliberately being vague...there are man specifics involved in all of these things) that I am afraid I am going to be overwhelmed and set myself up for failure (Yet again!)

Any suggestions? I like Shalhevet's suggestion above so much, because it is not making Y.K the deadline by which I have to have this all sorted out......maybe write down everything I want/need to improve onto a copy of a calendar and work on one thing per week (but it should be ongoing)...Divide into categories of middos, learning, observance, family etc...and color code on index cards... LOL

well I'm not that organized, but...I really want this to work this year.

any other ideas?

shalhevet

Mon, Sep 15 2008, 7:24 am

It is not my idea, it is the idea of many gedolei mussar and shiurim I have heard. If a person is a different person on YK than he was before, that is teshuva. The object is to get to next Elul having progressed, even with something small, rather than with the same long list of things we need to fix.

Say a person wants to fix a midda (eg anger), you take on something small for a short period of time:
eg not to get angry between 8-10 am
* not to get angry at person X
* to always count to 10 before shouting

If they master this by YK, they can add the next stage. EG now not to get angry between 8-11/ add another person/ for the next month/ until Chanuka.

Same thing for halachos - decide to learn one or two halachos every day and put them into practice.

The most you can do is one positive (like learning, davenning etc) and one negative (like not getting angry, not speaking LH) at a time - someone who manages two small kabbalas like this from now till YK is doing really well!