My son, who is 4, likes to cook. He especially likes making eggs and pancakes (and thankfully is happy with the gluten free mix that’s replaced the standard kind in our kitchen). He not only wants to crack open and beat the eggs, or mix up batter, he is determined to hold the spatula and make sure everything is cooked to perfection in the pan. And he’s rather good at it…and cautious, too (more than his sister at this age, to be honest), or I wouldn’t let him do it.

The other morning he poured eggs into a pan, and after a few seconds, asked when they would bubble.  It took me a moment to realize that he was trying to apply our lessons on pancake flipping to scrambled eggs. Eggs don’t work that way, I explained. Eggs are different. You can just keep stirring them until they’re ready. But you’ve got to keep pushing them around, or else they’ll get stuck or unevenly cooked. You want scrambled eggs to be cooked all over, but you don’t turn them the way you do pancakes. You just keep them on low heat and in pretty constant motion.

With pancakes, you’ve got to let it sit, and you’ve got to choose the perfect moment.  Once you’ve spooned in the batter, you’ve got to let the heat work its magic for a while without trying to force the issue. When the batter starts to bubble, you still have to be patient–until the moment when it’s bubbling all over. You can test the edge with the spatula to see if it’s ready, really ready. And then you flip. If you’ve done it right, the batter will have become a pancake, the bottom will be golden brown, and the turning will be easy. If you let the batter sit in the heat too long without turning, bubble and bubble until it bubbles no more, it will burn, and get stuck to the pan, and never turn over. Then it can even be hard to remove from the pan.

We were reviewing these principles, my son and I, in the week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, and a time of introspection and change.  There is a month before the holiday, in which we’re called to self-reflection, and ten days after–the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur–in which we have one last chance: to make amends;  to apologize to those we’ve wronged; to make peace with ourselves and our Source; to find a way to Teshuvah, or turning, truly changing our ways.

In years past, I have tried to make a serious practice of apologizing to people for wrongs I may have committed. I’ll admit that in recent years, in raising small children, and in the midst of sub-par-health, while I apologize for things throughout the year, I have let that annual practice slide a bit. I’ve let it slide too much. It takes time to think about your actions over the year, to strip away the permission and self-forgiveness we often grant ourselves year-round, and time to be with the people from whom we are asking forgiveness.

And really, apologizing is one thing. Really changing is another. That truly takes dedicated time. And attention. Vigilance, even. Because there can be long stretches when we’re not ready to change, even once we’ve identified a problem. And then there are usually moments when we are primed and ready to turn. Miss those, and the process becomes harder.

All of us have strengths and weaknesses. Some of our strengths get cooked like eggs (you knew I’d be coming back to this, right?). We’ve been trained, or trained ourselves, under consistent friction, gentle prodding, and a constant low-level heat, for a long enough time, that the trait is reliably cooked to our liking. But the parts of ourselves that are hardest to deal with, hardest to change, really require a higher “heat,” some bubbling, and absolute vigilance. You’ll forgive me (I reach for the metaphors at hand, and my son handed me this one) but our imperfect character traits and behavior are a bit like pancake batter.

Sometimes it’s intentional, this turning up the heat for our batter, sometimes we do it to ourselves, but most often it’s life that creates the big hot pan of change.  We are forced by circumstances to take a good hard look at what we’ve done. If we’ve got time and ability to focus on it, we can grasp the moment of bubbling, when we become fully aware of the import of our actions, and can choose that perfect moment to flip, into a golden pancake. Too often, we are distracted: in denial, refusing to see things or ourselves clearly, not wanting to think about it, or just consumed by other concerns. We miss the bubbles, and the moment, and the batter gets stuck. Instead of the heat of life’s frying pan providing opportunity for us, we let it firm up our misdeeds into something much harder to change.  With water, soap, a brillo pad, it will still be hard to remove all that burnt batter. If we’d just been paying attention and able to seize the moment, that right moment, it would have been so much easier.

The challenge right now–for me, and others celebrating the New Year–is to turn on the heat in this season, and watch for the bubbles. It won’t be a perfect process; it rarely is. But if there’s a burnt-up pan (or two or more) from earlier in the year, remnants of a process failed when life gave us heat and we didn’t pay attention, we can pull out a new pan and start over. We can pour in the same kind of batter, and this time turn up the heat ourselves, let the bubbling begin, and see if we can’t flip more successfully this time around.

We really aren’t expected to have only perfect eggs and perfect pancakes by the end of every Yom Kippur.

But I think we are expected, or should expect of ourselves, to have done some cooking…