I went out to the backyard this morning with two small things on my list. Check that the pool cover was sitting where it belonged, and turn the filter back on. We have a small pool that my parents gifted us a few years ago. We put it together and fill it every summer, and it provides hours of fun for the kids. I had forgotten about the filter for a couple of days, and forgetting it had seemed like nothing worth thinking about.
But when I pulled back the cover, I noticed that the bottom of the pool was green. Not cloudy, not faintly tinted. Green. When I looked over at the hoses running to the filter, the green had worked its way inside those too.
I stood there for a while feeling caught, the way you feel when something small you let slide turns out to have been quietly doing damage the whole time you weren’t looking.
Because I had not done anything to that pool. I had not left it uncovered, had not thrown anything into it, had not let half the neighborhood swim in it with muddy feet. The only thing I did was stop the water from moving. And that stillness was enough to turn clean water into a swamp.
Solomon is not describing a situation in which someone intentionally ruined their field. Nobody planted the thorns. Nobody came in the night and pushed over the wall. There is no vandal in this story and no enemy. The owner of that field did not do a single destructive thing. He rested. And the verses that follow name exactly how much rest it took: “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to lie down” (Proverbs 24:33). A little. That is the whole indictment.
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto brings these verses in his book of ethics known as Mesillat Yesharim. He points out that the verse is true in its plain sense, because this is simply what happens to a lazy man’s field. Then he brings the Sages in the Midrash, who read the field as a person’s inner life. Overgrown with thorns, they say, describes someone who searches for the meaning of a passage of Torah and cannot find it (Yalkut Shimoni on Proverbs). The thorns are not out in the yard. They are the thickening of a mind that used to be able to get through a tough passage.
What has stayed with me all morning is the middle of Solomon’s little story, the part that is easy to read past. “I observed and took it to heart; I saw it and learned a lesson.” (Proverbs 24:32). He is standing at somebody’s fence, looking at a ruined vineyard, and takes a lesson from it.
What was the lesson that Solomon learned? He set his heart, Rabbi David Altschuler says, to understand what laziness and inaction actually do. And he saw that when you stop putting in the effort, the result is not that things stay where you left them. Thorns come up. The wall comes down. Doing nothing is not stagnation, it is a form of destruction.
And I realized that this is a very fitting message for the Hebrew month we are in. Elul is when we are told to take an accounting, and I think most of us come into it assuming the past year was a neutral stretch, that nothing much happened to us one way or the other, and that the work of the next few weeks is to catch up on whatever we meant to get to last year at this time.
But there is no neutral stretch. That is what the pool was telling me and what the field was telling Solomon. The friend I keep meaning to call is quietly becoming someone I used to know. Prayer said on automatic does not wait patiently in place until I am ready to mean it again. It hardens.
Here is the mercy in it, and the reason we are given a whole month. I did not have to drain the pool and start over. It needed to be shocked, and then it needed the pump running again, the same water going back through the same hoses that had turned green. A field grown over with thorns is still a field. That is all teshuvah (repentance) is, really. Getting things moving again. It starts smaller than we expect: the phone call I have owed a friend since Passover, one prayer said slowly, in a language I understand, that I actually mean.
The Sages heard the name of this month in a verse from Song of Songs: ani l’dodi v’dodi li, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song of Songs 6:3). Both halves are in motion. I turn toward Him, and He turns toward me. Our relationship with God was never a thing we could set up once and leave running unattended.
