I was getting ready for our family trip to South Africa earlier this summer, and while no one can claim that packing for a trip with eight children is relaxing, we are old hands at it by now.
But this time, I ran into a very specific problem: I couldn't find my Shabbat pants.
And I started having feelings of deja vu. I’d been here before.
A couple of years ago, I flew to Israel and somehow couldn't find my Shabbat pants. And it was a bigger problem than you might expect! You can’t just walk into a store in Israel on a Friday afternoon and ask, "Excuse me, do you happen to have a nice pair of Shabbat pants in exactly my size?" So you walk into an Israeli shul with a mismatched suit—weekday pants and a shabbat jacket— and they think, “these Americans sure are strange people!”
This time, I was determined not to make the same mistake.
I searched everywhere. Every drawer.
I asked my kids to help. I asked my wife.
At one point, I'm fairly sure the entire family was more invested in finding my pants than in packing their own clothes.
But nothing turned up. They seemed to have evaporated into thin air.
Eventually, I made peace with my fate: We would land in Cape Town on Thursday night, without much time to shop and limited options. Maybe I'll find a store, maybe I won't. And if I don't? I'll wear regular pants on Shabbat. What can you do?
So we stopped the search and sent everyone back to packing their own belongings.
We flew. We landed. We got to the Airbnb. And I started unpacking.
When I opened my suitcase, they were right there. My long-searched-for Shabbat pants, sitting right in my suitcase, exactly where they needed to be.
I just stared at them, incredulous, and then I started laughing as it hit me all at once: I’d been so determined to avoid a repeat of what happened in Israel, that I’d packed them in advance, only to forget and end up turning the entire house upside down.
We all had a good laugh and I enjoyed feeling properly dressed for Shabbat. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a great lesson here as we prepare for Rosh Hashanah.
So many of us are searching. For answers, meaning, happiness, fulfillment … whatever we feel is missing.
And we’ll go to great lengths to find the answers. “Who can help me?” we wonder. So we run to all kinds of professionals - rabbis, therapists, specialists, teachers. We call our friends. We ask our spouse. We even ask our kids.
But there is one place that is so easy to overlook - a place where no one else can go: Inside yourself.
We all have a neshama, a soul, a piece of Hashem, which knows exactly what we need to do. It knows who you really are and what you're capable of.
Instead of running around looking for answers, sometimes we need to turn inwards and ask ourselves: Who am I? What am I here for? What kind of person do I want to become? What is my neshama actually asking of me? What have I been avoiding?
So as we approach Rosh Hashanah, maybe we could all do a little less searching outside ourselves, and a little more searching within.
If you just trust yourself, you’ll discover that the strength you're looking for is already inside you.
May Hashem grant each and every one of us a year of health, happiness, nachas, success, and revealed blessings.
And may we all have the courage to look in the right place.
Shana tova!