The Moment of Perfection

Before everything that exists, there is a moment of perfection

The lecture opens with a spiritual law. Before the butterfly's wing leaves the cocoon, before a baby takes its first breath, before a flower opens, there is a moment of perfection that comes first. Monica Berg asks us to picture the house of our dreams: it is different for each of us and, once the building starts, delays and surprises appear. But in your mind that house is perfect, and that moment comes before everything.

Rav Ashlag says it is the same when we think of our soul. Right now, every one of us is in the middle of a process, and we forget that. The soul's moment of perfection comes before everything life has built on top of it.

The 1 percent reality

We take this life very seriously. We take our experiences and our body very seriously, and we treat everything the five senses show as reality. Even studying in Kabbalah that this is illusion, the daily life of our mind is the 1 percent: this is how I feel, this is what hurt me, this is how that person treated me.

What Monica Berg asks for is a change of lens. In truth, we are only in the middle of a process, and we need to keep that present, especially in these weeks before Rosh Hashanah.

The month that precedes the moment that is coming

She mentions the so-called August sadness: summer is over, and we go back to reality. And she calls that one more illusion, because whoever treats these weeks as a simple return to routine loses the opportunity of the new year and everything it has to offer.

That is what makes the month of Virgo, our Elul, so powerful: it is the moment that precedes the moment of perfection that is coming, Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the year. There are six steps in the process of teshuvah, and the lecture walks through all of them, one by one, so we can check where we stand.

First step: revisit, and let it hurt a little

The first step is to revisit, and it should hurt a little. It is like drifting off to sleep and suddenly startling awake: I cannot believe I said that. The heart tightens. That is how it should be, Monica Berg says. Revisiting is going back for real and feeling the pain we caused.

But the part almost no one revisits is the other one. How did we drift away from ourselves this year? In how many places could we have been present, shared, experienced the Light and offered it? When we revisit, we almost always look outward, at what we did or failed to do. The real work includes looking at what was left unrevealed, the same place the cry of the soul goes to gather.

Some forget the answer in that hour, because they did not live the life they came to live and drifted too far from their own essence. It is not a threat, it is an alarm clock. That is what this period is about.

Second and third steps: seek out those you hurt, and listen

The next two steps walk together: going back with compassion and empathy, seeking out the people we hurt, and listening, really listening.

And there is an instruction for this month that runs against everything the ego asks. It is written that if someone comes to say something negative about you, or even mistreats you, what matters is to say nothing. Stay quiet and listen, because this is a cleansing process. "So I beg you," Monica Berg says, "do the second and the third step."

Fourth step: teshuvah is not changing. It is returning

The fourth step is connecting to your perfect self. Our souls are all perfect, only covered by veils, because of our Desire to Receive in this life.

When we think of change, we think in small pieces: change that one little thing, do a little less of that. That is not what Rosh Hashanah is about. Teshuvah means to return. To return to you, to your essence, to your soul, and to live that reality. That changes everything.

Raising veils, she says, is our specialty. At that we are masters. Bringing them down, the rest of the year, is very hard. But in this week, in this portion, on this Shabbat, we can.

Fifth step: the 604,800 seconds of forgiveness

The fifth step is forgiveness, and Monica Berg delivers it with arithmetic. If you had 604,800 dollars in the bank and someone stole 20, would you spend everything that is left trying to recover those 20? No one would. It would be ridiculous.

604,800 is the number of seconds in a week. Someone says something horrible for 20 seconds, at a dinner or on Instagram, sometimes a person we do not even know, and we hand over the remaining six hundred thousand seconds of the week chewing on it. That is how we waste a life.

Sixth step: letting go, by becoming someone else

The sixth and final step is letting go. And we only let go for good by becoming someone else: when you are no longer the one who gets upset over the 20 seconds, nor the one who drifts from themselves, nor the one who runs from what they came to this world to do. Then what you did does not come back, because the one who did it is no longer here.

Monica Berg tells of the whispers she heard after her son was born, years after crossing an eating disorder, when anxiety left her visibly underweight: she is sick again. And of the honest question she asked herself: wait, am I? No. Because the person who fell ill was no longer there. She no longer thought the same way, no longer criticized herself the same way, had learned to love herself and accept herself, for real.

That is the process that can happen between now and Rosh Hashanah. And the final invitation is to take hold of the power of this Shabbat: every word, every sentence, every sound, to bring down the walls and the veils that cover the essence.