It's Ellul, the spiritual month of reflection and growth leading up to the High Holidays.  Our rabbis consider this the spiritual tax season. Their recommendation: sit down and take close hard look at your life and do a literal accounting of your actions over the past year; essentially to figure out what the heck you were doing aside from relentlessly checking the Photos section of Facebook. 

This cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, is supposed to highlight the religious credits and debits of your life over the past year and basically sum up how much spiritual work you gotta do over the next 30 days to be back in the green. 

I recently did this. I sat down with my computer, put my IM on “AWAY FROM MY DESK…for 2 minutes” status, and took a look at a brief VH1 type of “BEST 5768 EVER” highlight reel in my brain – naturally making satirical off-color comments on my own highlights and overwhelming lowlights from the past year. It was at that point, as I was pondering whether or not reading the Ethicist can actually be considered a talmud torah write-off, that, in the very midst of practicing this ancient spiritual tradition of real hardball introspection, one critical thing came to mind. I had to take a leak.

So I got up from desk, apprehensively, as a highlight mitzvah memory of me giving 8 dollars for a 6.25 cab fair suddenly flashed to my head, and headed for the restroom.

The urinals were full, so I hit a stall, sat there, and I noticed my goto-all-too-familiar mark on the glossy tiled floor. I see this mark every I go to the bathroom. I always focus on it and instantly space out…hundreds and hundreds of times over the year.

Then suddenly I realized something terribly sad and frighteningly illuminating: these space out times, while worshiping the porcelain god, could possibly be the best times I've spent thinking about Hashem all year. I'm not making this up. The mark for me works kind of like tzitizit – which are supposed to be blue, to remind you of the sea, which is supposed to remind you of the sky, which in turns should remind you of G-d. This mark, when morphed with the 70's tessellation of the grayish and whitish bathroom tiles looks like a hatted long bearded chasidic rebbe. I know it sounds completely warped, but it does look like that, swear (cue the warshak test). The thing is, this shape always leads me to start thinking about rebbes and more religious Jews and what they are doing while I'm at my desk job scanning facebook status updates and running to pointless and endless conference calls. Which, in turn, like clockwork, always leads me to start thinking about things I need to do religiously, to better myself, my life, my world, my purpose.

Then suddenly a loud flush from the stall next to me sounded and I caught myself. Quickly recalling the halacha that spiritual things should not be dwelled upon while, well, in the can. But then I thought, why not?  Why shouldn't God be part of my thoughts when I am finally in a quiet place of solitude even if it is the third stall from the right?  What were our sages really intending by prohibiting us from thinking about spiritual matters in unsacred places like in a quiet stall or in a hot shower – there are no calls, no stress, no emails here, no relationship drama, no bills – to me it seemed like those places have always been the best (and really only) spots to think about what I, as a religious Jew, was doing with my life. It soon hit me that this cheshbon hanefesh isn't some one off thing that I'm just doing now a month before the big judgment day, but rather something I do almost every day, multiple times, generally after my 2nd cup of morning coffee.

So I decided, irreverently, I would conduct the rest of my official cheshbon hanefesh in the john (or, more appropriately spelled here, jon). (definitely mark this in my lowlights) 

So there in the 29th floor public restroom, I started recalling all the horrible things I said to people, and all those I really hurt this year. I recalled the few big acts of kindness I got to be part of, all the really cool shiurim I heard, I though about my heroes, my points of inspiration, who I wanted to be like. I remembered all the contributions I had made in time, money and even laughter. Then I stopped to think of all the moments when I really thought about Hashem via prayer. It was so weak I thought I heard a flush from shamayim, or more likely from stall 2. My morning davening this year had been reduced to a 5minute mumble, my mincha had been virtually non existent, and my maariv has somehow transformed into something between a stream of consciousness meshing shema shmoneh esray and the cable bill I forgot to pay…usually recited in my boxers, in the dark, rarely with any actual brain wave activity, and all too frequently while I've been completely drunk.

Suddenly it hit me why I had been so set on this idiotic bathroom bais medrash idea: I had abandoned the real one! 

This is really why our sages instituted a prohibition about spiritual thinking in unspiritual places, not only cause it smells like dung (note: the word dung is intrinsically yeshivish), but because its so darn convenient that your lazy, overworked, underpaid (anatevka) butt will inevitably end up giving up on the real places and moments of time-tested genuine spiritual launchpads in lieu of a loo!  Trust me, I'm so there.

And so, this is what I am set on working on this year. This probably doesn't mean I'll stop looking at my favorite mark on the bathroom floor and start thinking about the divine, heck everyone will always do that – I just hope now I'll be able to start nail that time for real introspection, real one-on-one time with God, real prayer, real soul searching earlier that morning, ideally before my 2nd cup of coffee.
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