26 Aug SHOFTIM: COMPLACENCY KILLS

I was once in a post office,
and started chatting with the
fellow working there behind
the counter. Over the course
of our conversation, he
mentioned that he had served in
the Marines.

“The Marines?” I said. “Wow, that’s
amazing.”
He said that he spent some time in
Afghanistan. I asked how much time he spent
there, and he said that he was there for seven
months. He had been a Marine for many
years, but he spent only seven months serving
in Afghanistan.
“Why only seven months?” I then asked.
His answer caught me off-guard.
“Because complacency is no good.”
He explained that war is very dangerous, and
very complex. In order to succeed, you need
to be on high-alert at all times. At every
moment, you need to be fully prepared, and
completely focused. You need to make sure
that all your equipment and all your
ammunition is in tip-top shape and ready for
action. And maintaining this level of alertness
and preparedness requires the highest levels
of motivation. The moment a troop falls even

slightly, for a moment, into complacency,
letting his guard down, he puts himself at
great risk.
In fact, this ex-Marine post-office worker
said, there was a sign hung in his base in
Afghanistan that read: Complacency Kills.
This man, I believe, helps us understand what
the month of Elul is all about. It is about
taking us out of our complacency, it is about
ensuring that we don’t become the kind of
people who sit back in our chair, pick up our
feet, and take it easy. The month of Elul is
meant to wake us up from our feeling of
“whatever,” of “I’m fine the way I am.” It is
about reminding us that we’ve been brought
to this world to excel and to achieve, not to
just sit back and relax.
Every so often the yetzer ha’ra puts a dream in
my head – a dream where I just sit somewhere
doing absolutely nothing, without my phone,
without anyone around me, without any
obligations or responsibilities.
This is my yetzer ha’ra’s dream. And I hope I
never have a single day like that in my entire
life. I don’t want to ever spend a day doing
nothing, a day when I am not making the most
of the precious time I’ve been given here in
this world.
The Midrash tells what appears to be a very

peculiar story of a man who sat down along
the side of the road to eat, and suddenly saw
two birds fighting, with one eventually killing
the other. The living bird then left and later
returned with a leaf from a certain plant,
which it placed on top of the dead
bird. Miraculously, the bird came back to
life. The two birds then flew away together.
The man set out to find the miracle plant. He
found it, and took some leaves. He then went
around seeing how he could use them. He
chanced upon the carcass of a lion, and he
placed the plant on it. The lion came back to
life – and immediately proceeded to devour
the man.
Rav Shmuel Pinhasi explains the meaning of
this story told by the Midrash. The man was
granted remarkable power – the power to
restore life. He could have utilized this power
to bring back Moshe Rabbenu, Dovid
Ha’melech, or Avraham, Yitzhak and
Yaakov. He could have brought back his
parents. This miracle plant presented him
with so many precious opportunities. But
instead, he used it to bring back to life a
dangerous, violent animal, and he lost his life
because of it.
This is the mistake that so many of us make
– we misuse, or fail to use, our capabilities. The
very fact that we are alive proves that we have

the potential to achieve, to do great things. If
Hashem keeps us here in His world, it is
because we are powerful, because we have so
much to give. Elul is the time to ask ourselves,
honestly, whether we are using these abilities
to their fullest, whether we are achieving to
our full potential, or if we have become
complacent, preferring to “take it easy,” to sit
back and relax, rather than put in the work to
maximize our potential.
If we use our talents and capabilities for a
“lion,” for the wrong purposes, then we, like
the man in the story, are hurting ourselves. In
order to shine, in order to live life the right
way, we need to avoid complacency, and
make the decision to invest effort to be the
best that we can be. And Elul is the time to
make that decision, to stop being complacent,
to stop accepting the way things are, to get up
from our chair, and to resolve to go ahead and
turn our lives into what they are meant to be.