From an Elul shiur by Rabbi Mendel Schapiro, Mashpia in Yeshivas Ohr Elchanan Chabad Los Angeles

You tell yourself that tomorrow will be different.

You’ll be more patient with the kids. You’ll stop checking your phone every few minutes. You’ll finally stick to that learning schedule. You’ll daven with a little more focus. You’ll stop losing your temper so quickly.

Of course you mean it.

Then tomorrow comes, and somehow you find yourself right back where you started.

After this happens enough times, an uncomfortable question begins to creep in:

If I really wanted to change, wouldn’t I have changed already?

Maybe I don’t actually want it badly enough.

Maybe all those good intentions aren’t as sincere as I thought.

Maybe this is just who I am.

In the maamar Ani L’Dodi 5726, the Rebbe addresses precisely this kind of person and offers a very different way of understanding him.

The Alter Rebbe famously describes the month of Elul with the mashal of a king who leaves his palace and comes out into the field. In the palace, access to the king is limited. But when the king is in the field, everyone has permission and the ability to approach him.

The Alter Rebbe adds an important detail: the king receives everyone graciously, with a pleasant countenance.

The Rebbe asks: Why is this detail necessary? If the point of the mashal is simply that during Elul everyone has access to Hashem, it should be enough to say that everyone is allowed to approach the King.

Why emphasize that He receives everyone pleasantly?

The Rebbe explains that “everyone” includes a person in a much more complicated situation.

He wants to approach the King.

He wants to do teshuvah, he wants to change, and something inside him has genuinely been awakened.

But he doesn’t do it.

The Rebbe describes him with these words:

“They want to greet the King, but they are captive in the hands of their yetzer.”

Even when the desire to change awakens within them, the Rebbe explains, “it does not come into actuality.”

They want to, but they just can’t seem to get there.

That is an experience most of us know in one form or another.

We know what we should be doing and, more importantly, we may even know what we want to be doing.

And yet there can be an enormous distance between the two.

A habit can be powerful, an impulse can be powerful, anger can be powerful, a phone can be powerful, and years of doing something the same way can be powerful.

And sometimes, despite genuinely wanting something different, we remain stuck.

Usually, we make the situation worse by drawing a conclusion from it:

If I keep doing this, this must be what I really want.

But the Rebbe is telling us that this is not necessarily true.

A person can sincerely want to change and still be, in the Rebbe’s words, “captive.”

His failure to act does not prove that the desire was fake.

And then comes perhaps the most beautiful part of the maamar.

How does the King respond to this Jew?

He does not say, “Come back when you’ve actually changed.”

He does not say, “You’ve promised this before.”

He does not say, “If you really wanted to come, you would be here already.”

The King receives him too with a pleasant countenance.

Hashem sees the desire that has not yet become an action, and He responds to it.

Not because wanting is enough.

The maamar does not end with the person remaining exactly where he was and being told that good intentions are all that matter.

Something happens as a result of the King’s response.

The Rebbe explains that being received warmly awakens within the person “a strong and powerful desire” to approach the King. And through that strengthened desire, he eventually finds the ability to overcome the obstacles that were holding him back.

There is a very deep lesson here about how change sometimes works.

We often imagine our relationship with Hashem in this order:

First, I get my act together, then I become someone Hashem can be pleased with.

But here the order is different.

The person wants to change but hasn’t succeeded, so Hashem receives that desire warmly, and that itself strengthens the person until he can finally do what he wanted to do all along.

Hashem’s warm response is not merely the reward after the change. It helps make the change possible.

Perhaps this can also change the way we look at ourselves.

There is the original struggle: the anger, the distraction, the inconsistency, the habit we can’t seem to break.

But then we often add a second struggle by turning our failures into a definition of who we are.

“I guess I’m not serious.”

“I guess I don’t really care.”

“I guess this is just me.”

Now we are no longer only fighting a behavior. We are fighting an identity we have created from that behavior.

The maamar asks us to look deeper.

If, after failing again and again, there is still something inside you saying, “I don’t want to live like this,” perhaps that voice deserves more respect.

Why does it still bother you?

Why do you keep wanting something better?

Why, after the fifth failed attempt, do you make a sixth?

Perhaps your frustration itself is telling you something.

The behavior is real. The struggle is real.

But the desire is real too.

And perhaps that desire says something deeper about who you are than the thing you are struggling with.

This is one of the gifts of Elul.

The King comes into the field not only for the person who has already made it across the field to greet Him.

He comes for the person who wants to approach but still feels stuck, and He looks at that Jew with a pleasant face.

Not to tell him that he doesn’t need to change, but to give him the strength to finally become the person he already wants to be.

Based on the Rebbe’s maamar Ani L’Dodi 5726, oisios 4–5