Super late/early, last night well before dawn, the time went from 1:59 to 1:00. There’s something spooky about that to my way of thinking. In about six months, we’re going to lose an hour, which brings up other thoughts. So many times in recent years I’ve reminded people that life isn’t a computer game. We can’t press the “undo” button and erase our bad move, or dumb/dangerous thing said or done.
Most of us are sound asleep at 1:59. We certainly don’t set alarms to wake up and put the clock back to 1:00 at that exact time. We set the clock before going to sleep. Last night many of us were happy that the night would be an hour longer. And this morning, most of us woke up to bright sunshine, even if that same time for the past few weeks had been as dark as midnight.
What if we really could reverse time and use the technique of turning back the clock to fix our mistakes? What if life had a simple “undo” button, like we find on all sorts of computer programs, games, photo-editing etc?
Would that make life better or worse?
Judaism has a technique for “undo,” which can be used for certain, sins or mistakes but not all. It’s called Teshuva, Repentance, but it’s not a simple “Ctrl/z” or button to press. It’s a lot of work, and it only affects sins between man and Gd, not between manwoman and woman/man.
In reality, we can’t undo and redo easily, though we can try to make amends. We can try to do better each day, each hour, each minute or second. We can try to apologize, improve how we live and behave as long as we have the ability. And Gd willing we will succeed in making amends and doing much better.
