It’s a Monday morning in early September. We’re at our weekly staff meeting. We are sitting around the large, conference table in the Temple library. It’s only six days until Rosh Hashanah, and this is our first, full staff meeting of the year. With religious school about to open, most of the congregation coming through the doors in less than a week, the program year beginning in earnest and a wonderful but brand new Temple Administrator to bring up to speed, we have a great deal of business to discuss.
There’s an eager sense of anticipation in the room; there’s enthusiasm and energy for the work we’ll do together. But as you might imagine, there’s also a considerable amount of stress. Our agenda is packed, and it’s unlikely we will get through everything in the time we’ve allotted for this meeting. Still, back in June, we’d decided that in the coming year, we would protect a block of time at our staff meetings to do some learning together each week. And this is the first week, the first staff meeting since June at which we actually have the opportunity to put our new resolution into action.
In the second chapter of Pirkei Avot (the famous and beloved collection of rabbinic aphorisms), our teacher, Hillel tells us: “Say not: ‘When I have time I will study’ because you may never have the time (Avot 2:5).” Apparently, Hillel also attended his share of stressed-out staff meetings or had a to-do list long enough to be catalogued at the Library of Congress or felt pressed (and sometimes overwhelmed) by the many, competing demands of his work, his loved ones, his community and his own life. Regardless, it clearly sounds like Hillel was familiar with the voice in each of our heads that says, “Yes, that’s a really important commitment to me, but I just don’t have the time right now.”
The problem, Hillel reminds us, is that “not right now” can end up lasting for months, years, decades or even, God forbid, an entire lifetime. And the important commitments that we put off can include not just lifelong learning but spending time with loved ones, helping to make the world a better place, volunteering for causes about which we care deeply, taking care of our bodies, seeking spiritual nourishment and on and on and on. As so many of us do during the High Holy Days, in moments of quiet reflection, we sincerely resolve to make more time for the activities we value. But then we’re back at a jam-packed staff meeting or we’re home, exhausted, after a long, difficult day at work or our boss asks us to take on three, extra tasks or our friend needs a favor and there’s just so much to do and all that responsibility and it can feel like it would require an almost heroic exercise of will to keep those well-intentioned promises to ourselves.
Hillel’s simple but wise and powerful message is this: Don’t wait! If you do, you may never have the time. If a commitment is truly that important to you, find a way to protect some time in your life for it. By the way, at that meeting back in September, the staff compromised by sharing a slightly shorter study time than we’d originally planned. But we did learn together, hopefully, in more ways than one.
-Rabbi Jonathan Kraus
