The World is in the Balance: ONE Mitzvah Tips the Scale!

I want you to imagine a scale.

Not the kind of scale that I got on this morning, that we keep under my wife's bed, that told me that I'm a little overweight from Rosh Hashanah.

Okay, not that kind of scale, but the old-fashioned scale, a balance.

Imagine a balance.

It's absolutely equally weighed between your personal merits and your transgressions and that same scale also has another level to it and it is measuring the state of the whole world all of creation and it's absolutely equally balanced between merits and transgressions and God is judging us and judging the world and your next Word or deed can tip the scale in one direction or another.

That's even scarier than what I saw this morning when I got on my wife's scale.

But it shouldn't be scary, as we'll see in a second.

Your next word or deed can bring life and salvation to you and the entire world, or God forbid, the opposite.

This fantasy is a teaching of the Talmud, and Maimonides quotes it in his amazing work, Hilchos Teshuvah, The Laws of Return, which definitely is a work you could read, find it online, Hilchos Teshuvah, it's part of his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, his codification of Jewish law, Maimonides quotes it from the Talmud.

All year long, the Talmud teaches us we should look at ourselves as if we're equally balanced between merits and transgressions, sins, if you will, and mitzvot.

And the next deed we do will tip the scale one way or the other.

And we should see the whole world as balanced all year long between, sorry, my phone is going.

I don't think that sounds like a transgression, but maybe a faux pas.

I'm not going to answer it now.

But in any case, the whole world is equally balanced.

And the next word or action we do, if it's a mitzvah, it tips the scale for the good and life and salvation.

If it's the opposite, bad, destruction.

Wow, what an incredible vision, what an incredible responsibility each one of us has.

Now, we shouldn't be scared by that.

And maybe we can't live like that all year long.

I know I can't.

But in the 10 days of Teshuvah, now we can.

The next action you do, the next word you speak, a word of kindness, of positivity, helping someone else, calling someone you haven't called, that will tip your scale and the scale of the whole world to a favorable judgment or, God forbid, the opposite.

Every deed you do now in these Zamboni days, as I call them, the 10 days of return, are even more supercharged with an ability to tip that scale.

It doesn't have to be something big, massive.