by diane sussman
staff writer
It’s Feb. 1, and I’m already lagging on my New Year’s resolutions: lose weight, exercise more, get out of debt, save more money, paint my house, meditate, learn to play chess and spend more time with my husband and cat.
Of course, I have plenty of company. According to a study from the time management firm FranklinCovey, four out of five people who make New Year’s resolutions will eventually break them. Indeed, a third don’t even make it through January.
While most people said they were either too busy or lacked sufficient motivation to follow through, experts say our collective failure is due to a lack of specificity: Instead of setting general goals such as “save more,” we need to set goals that are specific and quantifiable.
I immediately reset my goals accordingly. They now are: lose a ton of weight, exercise way more, get totally out of debt, save a truckload of money, meditate at length, paint my house green, learn to play chess on a chess board and spend more time with my only husband and yellow cat.
Still, something makes me suspect that our collective success, or lack of it, has less to do with the wording and specifics of our resolutions than with the way we approach the New Year’s holiday itself. As Jon Stewart would say, it’s not “Jewy” enough.
For too many of us, New Year’s Eve involves drinking excessively, sloppily kissing other people’s spouses at midnight, slurring the words to the lovely “Auld Lang Syne” (if people indeed understand or know them), throwing garbage on the streets, killing each other on the freeway and, as was the tradition in the two Redwood City neighborhoods I used to live in, shooting guns — hardly a compelling or noble prelude to any sort of genuine or lasting morning-after self-examination.
Not that I have been able to escape the vortex. When I look back on the ghosts of New Year’s Eves past, I dredge up recollections of half-hearted parties alternating with long nights of forced wakefulness waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square, followed by scenes of random people at parties I wasn’t invited to shrieking into TV cameras.
What’s wrong with this picture? Pretty much everything that the Days of Awe have and the secular New Year’s doesn’t — which is to say, any context whatsoever for serious, sober personal reckoning.
Unfortunately, we disaffected Jews are on our own on New Year’s Eve — so far there are no alternative events like the ones on Christmas Day that offer movies and pizza at the local JCC or synagogue. No Kung Pao Kosher Comedy Night of the Soul or Matzah Ball — A Night of Dancing and Joy.
Then again, why would we have such an event? We already have what we need, just on a different timetable.
That’s why, this year I found myself at the Green Gulch Zen Center on New Year’s Day, participating in a Buddhist tea ritual. Over the course of two hours, we ceremoniously ate a tiny sweet made from azuki bean paste and drank a designated fraction of tea from a communally shared cup. Following the many ritualistic bowings and cup-turnings, we were allowed to talk. The conversation turned personal and kept returning to the same point: Everyone had come to wrest some kind of meaning from the New Year.
I came away from the tea with two new personal traditions, one Chinese, one Jewish. Henceforth, I vow to clean my house and give some things away on New Year’s. It may not be as cleansing, demanding or communal as our Rosh Hashanah rituals, but it beats a bad party followed by regret, a hangover and quixotic resolutions.
Those who embrace optimism and a hope for renewal by making New Year’s resolutions can learn much from the Chinese tradition of house-cleaning and the Jewish tradition of soul-cleaning. As Nietzsche said, “Without cruelty, there is no celebration.” Likewise, it could be said that with only celebration, there can be no weight loss and getting out of debt.
And for those who need a more complete reckoning of one’s self and place in the world, only 243 days until Rosh Hashanah.
Diane Sussman is a copy editor at j. She can be reached at dsussman@jweekly.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California