The Promise of the New Year

Call it naïve, but I love new year’s resolutions. 

There’s something genuinely and perennially compelling about the chance to imagine ourselves acting differently in the year to come than we were in the year that’s ending. For those of us who love the soul-searching work of Elul and the high holidays, January 1 offers both an opportunity to check in on our spiritual growth over the past few months, as well as an opportunity to set some concrete goals for how we want to live in the new secular year stretching out before us. And so, each year as December comes to a quiet, snowy close, I find myself making the same familiar promises—eat more healthfully, go to the gym more, get better sleep—predictable but exciting nonetheless, an annual declaration of optimism about who I might yet become.

So there I was on the morning of January 1, jogging dutifully on a treadmill alongside a gym full of people who had all decided that this was the year we would finally, truly, once and for all live our best, healthiest, most fully actualized lives.

But of course, as I do most years, I now find myself toward the end of this first week of January already watching with frustration and a tinge of guilt as many of my lofty goals fade swiftly in the rearview mirror. Who really has the time, after all, for all that self-improvement?

It’s easy to tell this story in a lighthearted way, but beneath it is something very real: the familiar cycle of intention, effort, disappointment, and self-judgment. We want so badly to change, to be our best selves, and we’re often so hard on ourselves when change doesn’t happen all at once. As much as I relish the opportunity to start a year with a clean slate, setting resolutions can sometimes feel less like an invitation to growth and more like setting myself up for abject failure.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the great 18th-century Hasidic master, offers a gentler and far more realistic way of thinking about growth, particularly when it comes to our spiritual lives and our commitments to tikkun olam. Commenting on the Sephardic community’s haftarah for this Shabbat, he explained:

Everything we do—anything at all—in the service of the Blessed One, even if afterward we do what we do (i.e. sin), God forbid—even so, that [holy] deed is never lost forever. It has already been joined to the wondrous [spiritual] edifice and has effected a great repair in the structure of holiness…and if we strengthen ourselves each and every time, all the days of our lives, to begin anew each time [we falter]—even if whatever suffering may pass over us does pass over us—then in the end, all those repairs that we effected through every act of devotion and through every new beginning will ultimately gather together.…Then, we will recognize what we accomplished through every holy deed—that nothing [good] is ever lost.¹

Rebbe Nachman made this profound comment as part of his explanation of the famous verse from the haftarah: “I remembered you for the kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days, your following Me in the wilderness…” (Jeremiah 2:2). The prophet Jeremiah is assuring the people that even though they had strayed far from God’s instructions, such straying did not negate the fact that they had once followed God out of Egypt and into the wilderness, courageously stepping into the unknown. In other words, God remembers not perfection, but beginnings. Not perfect outcomes, but moments of youthful courage, animated by a sense of real possibility. Not whether we made it all the way, but that we stepped forward at all.

What so often holds us back from meaningful and lasting change isn’t a lack of desire, but fear: fear of doing something wrong, fear of not keeping it up, fear that if we can’t do something perfectly, it isn’t worth doing at all. Ours is a culture that teaches us that if improvement isn’t measurable and sustained, it doesn’t count, and that anything less than a total success is simply failure in disguise. And so we hesitate to begin —whether it’s a new habit, a new spiritual practice, a new commitment to doing our part in the healing of our world—because beginning makes us vulnerable to the possibility of failure.

But the second Shabbat of the new calendar year is as good a day as any to remember that we don’t live all-or-nothing lives. Very few of us are capable of all or nothing change. Rebbe Nachman reminds us that no sincere spiritual effort—no honest attempt, no real beginning—is ever wasted, and that each time we make a sincere effort to better ourselves or the world around us, it creates a permanent, positive change in the fabric of the universe. 

This way of thinking shifts the question from “Will I succeed?” to “Am I willing to begin?” It invites us to value movement over mastery, and courage over consistency. Taking on a new spiritual practice or integrating a new mitzvah into our lives, knowing we may not sustain it forever; offering our time to volunteer for something important, even if we cannot make it a regular part of our schedule. None of this disqualifies the meaning and importance of our efforts. 

As we enter Shabbat—a day that itself arrives every week no matter how the last one went—we’re invited to begin again. To rest without having finished everything. To be present without having perfected anything. May this Shabbat remind us that our small efforts matter, that growth is cumulative, and that nothing good—no sincere act, no hopeful beginning—is ever a waste of time.

Shabbat Shalom,

Joe Bumberg

 1. Translated and excerpted by Rabbi Sam Feinsmith from Likkutei Halakhot, Orach Chayyim, Hilkhot Tefillat Aravit 4:24. Likkutei Halakhot is a Hasidic commentary on Jewish law based on the teachings of Rebbe Nachman. It was composed by his principal student, Reb Noson Sternhartz of Nemirov. The verse Reb Noson is commenting on here appears in the haftarah Sephardic Jews chant on Shabbat Shemot.