Isn’t it just about trying our best?

Responsibilities.

In the physical, everyday world, they’re more or less nonnegotiable. If you miss too much work, your pay will get docked. If you don’t feed your kids lunch, they’ll be hungry – and you’ll pay for your lapse with cranky children. If you don’t brush your teeth, you’ll end up with sky-high dentist bills.

In the spiritual world, though, it’s often hard to feel like our responsibilities are nonnegotiable.

What are spiritual responsibilities, really? Hashem doesn’t actually need us to fulfill those responsibilities, right? So we don’t really look at our spiritual responsibilities with an I-better-do-this-stuff-right-or-I’ll-have-to-pay attitude. Instead, we prefer to tell ourselves that we’re simply responsible to try our hardest. To give Torah and mitzvos our best shot. And the rest? Well, it’s really all up to Hashem.

Theoretically, we know we’ll be judged for every spiritual misstep. But somehow, that doesn’t feel practical.

Perhaps because we’re scared to let it feel practical. Because from our current perspective, real responsibility for our spirituality poses a heavy, even terrifying burden.

Unfortunately for us, however, Chazal don’t define achrayus, the Torah term for responsibility, as “the commitment to try your best.” They see it as “the commitment to pay up when things go wrong.” In a word, accountability. The same accountability that exists in our physical lives.

Again, that feels scary. Like punishment. We’re good people. We’d like to consider ourselves spiritually responsible. But how can we go through life consciously holding this millstone of accountability around our necks?

Oh – another word of lashon hara. I’d better do teshuvah or I’ll have to pay up big time.

Oy, it’s only 9 am and I’m already liable for so many misdeeds – snapping at my kids, davening like a robot, making a chillul Hashem by driving aggressively because I was late to work…

It’s too much. If we really faced our spiritual accountability like that, we’d be crushed.

Yet ignoring it, making it theoretical, distancing ourselves from it emotionally – that’s also harmful. When we do so, we blunt our middah of achrayus… and hurt ourselves spiritually.

Is there a better way?

Is there a way we can feel the full extent of our spiritual accountability, yet experience it as empowering instead of punishing or crushing?

And what does all this have to do with our last few discussions about sitting in the driver’s seat of our lives?

Join us next email as we start to discover answers – and move toward richer, stronger spiritual lives.