text: Some have found this future orientation strange: Would it not make more sense to first figure out all the ways in which we have failed in the preceding year? The answer is that we must first develop a set of goals for our lives. Without such standards, it is impossible to judge even past actions. On Yom Kippur, we wash our dirty clothes. But before we can throw our clothes into the washing machine, we have to first take them off. That requires recognition that our clothes do not befit us and need cleaning.
  ``Happy is the nation that knows the secret of the shofar blasts." The shofar heralds the Divine judgment. Indeed by blowing the shofar, we invite our own judgment, and thereby acknowledge that the judgment of the day is more for our benefit than it is for G-d’s. He can judge us each and every moment. It is we who need one day a year when our attention is riveted on the quest for our essential selves, for a clear self-definition. By summoning G-d, as it were, to sit in judgment, we show Him that we recognize the need for change, for re-creation of ourselves.
  Israel could certainly benefit from a greater future orientation. As individuals and as a society, we have been forced to spend so much energy just surviving the next 24 hours, that we often appear to have given up on the future altogether. Our columnists rehash each event with the same minute attention the ancients once gave to reading entrails. Missing is any longer view or attempt to put the details of our lives in a larger context.
  Our governments meanwhile lurch from crisis to crisis. The most pressing problems are put off for years, and then after a decade or more of benign neglect, we suddenly find ourselves forced into hasty decisions that frequently do more harm than good. The water crisis has been brewing for years. Yet even now, when the Kinneret and our principal aquifers are all way below the danger line, we still have no comprehensive plan for addressing the issue.
  For years, our per capita spending on education has been near the top of the industrial world and our return near the bottom. And still no one seems to know why or to have figured out that spending more money is not a cure-all for every problem. It has long been a cliché that road accidents have claimed more lives than all our wars. But we still have not made the relatively small investment in automated speed monitors that would not only save many lives but also return economic dividends far greater than the cost of the monitors.
  THE good news for us, individually and collectively, is that change, even very dramatic change, is possible. That is the message of Yom Kippur.
  The power of repentance, say our Sages, was created prior to the world, for without it the world could not have existed. Teshuva cannot be understood within the normal framework of time and space, for through teshuva the past can literally be rewritten: When one returns out of a desire to draw close to G-d, his former sins are counted as mitzvot. The true ba’al teshuvah becomes not just a better person, but a new person.