It’s that time of year. That terrifying chasm-in-time between day camp and school. My three youngest wake up with a chorus of “I’m bored” – even though they had an action-packed day yesterday and it’s only 7am.
We’re their parents, and we need to provide for their needs. At the same time, we shouldn’t give them everything they want. We give lovingly, but within reason.
Yesterday afternoon, they went swimming. A half hour after their return, they were bored again. I didn’t NEED to provide more entertainment. At the same time, I felt for their distress. I had pity.
So I took them for Slurpees. I just felt that the situation called for me to go beyond my normal protocol.
Why am I telling you this? Because I want to demostrate the difference between kindness and mercy. Kindness is a feeling or act that comes from friendly connectedness of spirit. Mercy is about showing kindness when it isn’t deserved.
Imagine a parent’s mercy on a child, helping him through a difficult patch of his own making. Or a judge using legal discretion to grant a lighter sentence to a convicted violator. It’s not about the person deserving kindness; it’s about the sense of mercy being triggered within the grantor. And that mercy wells from such a deep psychological place that it transcends the normative ‘kindness protocol’.
We’re entering the High Holiday season. The Rosh Hashana/ Yom Kippur liturgy has plenty of references to G-d’s “attributes of Mercy”. What does that mean in Divine terms? It means that is transcending His normative ‘kindness protocol’ to grant us what we need.
Rosh Hashana isn’t about what we deserve, it’s about recognizing that G-d is a loving Parent, and loving Parents find mercy to help their children even beyond what’s ordinarily deserved.
Before Rosh Hashana, we have a month of preparation, the month of Elul. In Elul, the Mercy is slightly different in that G-d nudges us to have mercy on ourselves, to recognize our own disconnect from Holiness and reach beyond life’s distractions to plug [back] in to a meaningful relationship with G-d. Elul means finding a deeper place within our own psyches, transcending our ‘normative system’ of wants and desires, to find a place of closeness with the Divine.
Elul is also a special time to be merciful to other people. When we find the ‘mercy muscle’ within ourselves, we find a deeper part of our souls, and we trigger Mercy within G-d and the cosmos.
What better preparation for Rosh Hashana?