Complacency Kills

Insight of the Week

I was once in a post office, and started chatting with the fellow working there behind the counter. Over the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he had served in the Marines. "The Marines?" I said. "Wow, that's amazing." He said that he spent some time in Afghanistan. I asked how much time he spent there, and he said that he was there for seven months. He had been a Marine for many years, but he spent only seven months serving in Afghanistan. "Why only seven months?" I then asked. His answer caught me off-guard. "Because complacency is no good." He explained that war is very dangerous, and very complex. In order to succeed, you need to be on high-alert at all times. At every moment, you need to be fully prepared, and completely focused. You need to make sure that all your equipment and all your ammunition is in tip-top shape and ready for action. And maintaining this level of alertness and preparedness requires the highest levels of motivation. The moment a troop falls even slightly, for a moment, into complacency, letting his guard down, he puts himself at great risk. In fact, this ex-Marine post-office worker said, there was a sign hung in his base in Afghanistan that read: Complacency Kills . This man, I believe, helps us understand what the month of Elul is all about. It is about taking us out of our complacency, it is about ensuring that we don't become the kind of people who sit back in our chair, pick up our feet, and take it easy. The month of Elul is meant to wake us up from our feeling of "whatever," of "I'm fine the way I am." It is about reminding us that we've been brought to this world to excel and to achieve, not to just sit back and relax. Every so often the yetzer ha'ra (evil inclination) puts a dream in my head – a dream where I just sit somewhere doing absolutely nothing, without my phone, without anyone around me, without any obligations or responsibilities. This is my yetzer ha'ra 's dream. And I hope I never have a single day like that in my entire life. I don't want to ever spend a day doing nothing, a day when I am not making the most of the precious time I've been given here in this world. The Midrash tells what appears to be a very peculiar story of a man who sat down along the side of the road to eat, and suddenly saw two birds fighting, with one eventually killing the other. The living bird then left and later returned with a leaf from a certain plant, which it placed on top of the dead bird. Miraculously, the bird came back to life. The two birds then flew away together. The man set out to find the miracle plant. He found it, and took some leaves. He then went around seeing how he could use them. He chanced upon the carcass of a lion, and he placed the plant on it. The lion came back to life – and immediately proceeded to devour the man. Rav Shmuel Pinhasi explains the meaning of this story told by the Midrash. The man was granted remarkable power – the power to restore life. He could have utilized this power to bring back Moshe Rabbenu, David Ha'melech, or Avraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov. He could have brought back his parents. This miracle plant presented him with so many precious opportunities. But instead, he used it to bring back to life a dangerous, violent animal, and he lost his life because of it. This is the mistake that so many of us make – we misuse, or fail to use, our capabilities. The very fact that we are alive proves that we have the potential to achieve, to do great things. If Hashem keeps us here in His world, it is because we are powerful, because we have so much to give. Elul is the time to ask ourselves, honestly, whether we are using these abilities to their fullest, whether we are achieving to our full potential, or if we have become complacent, preferring to "take it easy," to sit back and relax, rather than put in the work to maximize our potential. If we use our talents and capabilities for a "lion," for the wrong purposes, then we, like the man in the story, are hurting ourselves. In order to shine, in order to live life the right way, we need to avoid complacency, and make the decision to invest effort to be the best that we can be. And Elul is the time to make that decision, to stop being complacent, to stop accepting the way things are, to get up from our chair, and to resolve to go ahead and turn our lives into what they are meant to be.