IT DOESN’T HAPPEN IN A DAY

On September 3, 1967, Sweden did something that sounds almost impossibly complicated: it changed the side of the road on which the entire country drove.

Until then, Swedes drove on the left, even though most cars sold in Sweden already had the steering wheel on the left as well, which made overtaking particularly entertaining and, one assumes, occasionally fatal.

Neighboring Norway and Finland drove on the right, continental Europe drove on the right, and eventually the Swedish government decided that enough was enough. The country would switch.

The operation was called Dagen H — “H Day,” the H standing for högertrafik, right-hand traffic — and it took years to prepare. Road markings had to be repainted, signs replaced or covered until the appointed moment, intersections redesigned, traffic lights repositioned, and buses altered because their doors were now opening onto what would suddenly become the middle of the road.

An enormous public education campaign was launched to make sure that nobody woke up on Sunday morning, drove out of their driveway on instinct, and discovered the new rules by meeting a Volvo coming the other way.

Then, in the early hours of September 3, traffic across the country was brought to a halt.

Drivers were instructed to stop and carefully move their cars from the left side of the road to the right. A few minutes later, Sweden began driving on the opposite side.

But here’s the amazing thing: accidents initially went down. You might have expected chaos, but the exact opposite happened, at least at first, because everyone was paying attention. Nobody could rely on muscle memory. Every turn, every intersection, every lane change required conscious thought.

And I think there is a very important lesson here, as we come to the end of Elul and prepare for Rosh Hashana.

Parshat Nitzavim contains one of the Torah’s most famous declarations about change. Moshe tells the Jewish people: כי המצוה הזאת אשר אנכי מצוך היום לא נפלאת היא ממך ולא רחקה היא – “This commandment that I command you today is not beyond you, and it is not distant.”

A few verses later: כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו – “The matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.”

The Ramban famously understandsהמצוה הזאת  here as referring to the mitzva of teshuva. Moshe is telling us that teshuva is not some elusive spiritual achievement available only to saints, mystics, or people who have forty days to disappear into a cave.

Teshuva is close. It is accessible. It can be done. You can do it. Anyone can do it.

And yet, if we are being truthful, teshuva rarely feels easy. We arrive at this time of year full of good intentions, and every year we are surprised to discover that we are more or less the same people we were twelve months ago.

We know what we should change. We have known for years. The difficulty is not usually identifying the problem; the difficulty is actually doing something differently.

Part of the reason is that we imagine change as a dramatic internal event. We are waiting to become inspired enough, moved enough, frightened enough by the approaching Yamim Nora’im, and then, presumably, our personality will rearrange itself.

But Sweden did not change sides of the road by announcing on television that everybody should please feel differently about driving. They changed the roads. They moved the signs. They altered the buses. They repainted the intersections.

In other words, they changed the environment in which the old habit operated.

And that may be one of the most practical lessons of teshuva. If you genuinely want to change something, do not rely on the person you hope to become. Make life slightly more difficult for the person you already are.

If the phone is ruining dinner, don’t deliver a stirring speech to yourself every evening about being more present with your family. Put the phone in another room.

If you want to learn more Torah, don’t resolve vaguely to become a person who learns more Torah. Choose a shiur, put it in the calendar, and arrange your week around it.

If you regularly come late to shul, telling yourself on Rosh Hashana that punctuality is important is unlikely to change much. Work out what makes you late and change the system: go to sleep earlier, prepare what you need the night before, leave the house ten minutes sooner.

If there is someone to whom you consistently speak impatiently, don’t simply decide that next year you will be more patient. Identify the moment when it usually goes wrong and prepare for that moment before it arrives.

We sometimes make teshuva so grandiose that we render it useless. We decide that from now on we will be calmer, kinder, more spiritual, more disciplined and more grateful. These are admirable goals, but they are not instructions. “Become a better person” is not an action item.

Sweden did not say: from Sunday, be a better driver. They said: let’s get it together before, so that we’ll be fully ready when the time comes to change sides of the road.

That is whatבפיך ובלבבך לעשותו  means. Ultimately, it has to reachלעשותו  — doing something.

Not admiring the idea of change, not regretting the past, not producing an eloquent list of resolutions. Moving one thing from one side of the road to the other.

And there is another aspect of Dagen H which is worth thinking about. For the first few weeks, Swedish drivers were safer precisely because they could no longer function on autopilot. They were intensely conscious of what they were doing.

That may be the most important spiritual danger most of us face. Not rebellion, not wickedness, but autopilot.

We say the same brachot, daven the same tefillot, sit at the same Shabbat table, deal with the same people, and repeat the same patterns until we stop noticing what we are doing. Familiarity is wonderful when it creates stability, but spiritually it can become anesthesia.

Rosh Hashana interrupts the traffic. For a few days, everything stops. We look at the road again. We notice where we are standing and ask whether this is actually the lane we want to be in.

And perhaps that is enough. We do not need to redesign the entire spiritual map before Tuesday. We need to identify one intersection where we keep taking the wrong turn and change it.

One habit. One relationship. One piece of davening. One fixed time for Torah. One thing we need to stop doing. One thing we need to begin.

Teshuva is not deciding that the old road was terrible. Most of the time, it wasn’t terrible. It was simply taking us somewhere we no longer want to go.

Teshuva means getting onto the other side of the road, so that we are on the right side, not the wrong side. And everything follows on from there.