The Hitchhiker’s Guide – One Degree

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate.  Genesis 3:6  N ASB

Desirable – We studied the woman’s choice.  We arrived at a conclusion: “When we choose, we become different persons.  We construct our own identity, one choice at a time.  Watchfulness is choosing to change direction, to go in the direction of God’s animating breath, one step at a time.”

But now we notice something else.  Changing direction is an almost invisible process at the beginning.  Today you decide not to follow the pattern you’ve become so used to.  You make a conscious effort to take a different path.  But when you look around, it seems as if nothing much has changed.  In fact, if you don’t tell yourself that you’ve done things differently, the change is more or less unnoticeable.  Sometime later, perhaps much later, someone might say to you, “You know, you seem different.  You’ve changed.”  But those words of encouragement and recognition don’t come at the beginning.  In fact, they might not come for a very long time.  Each individual choice is swallowed up in the routine of life.  Each day you look in the mirror, you see the same face.  You don’t notice the incremental differences.  But look at a photo of yourself that is ten or twenty years old and you see you’ve changed.  That’s the Luzzatto program—subtle, invisible to the present eye, long-term.  Slow.

And because it’s so subtle and so extended over time, it seems discouraging right now.  It seems that making that one tiny change didn’t matter.  We are incapable of noticing gradual redirection.

Imagine that you’re following a map (Luzzatto’s musar is a kind of map).  As you move along the routine path, you make a 1 degree shift.  Just a 1 degree difference.  The distance between your present position and the usual journey is so slight you barely notice.  But keep going in that 1 degree direction and after a few miles (or years), the 1 degree difference results in enormous distance from the original direction.  That’s what we’re doing.  Just making a 1 degree correction and following it to its conclusion.

In order to remind ourselves that we’ve made a 1 degree change, it might be useful to keep a little note, say, for example, a marker on the calendar for each day you’ve followed the 1 degree difference.  Something tangible that you can use to remind yourself that change really is happening.  Something that denies the yetzer ha’ra its effort to convince you that you’re just like you have always been.  The yetzer ha’ra wants you to believe that nothing has happened.  It will try to convince you that you’ve failed because you haven’t had a “conversion” experience.  You haven’t been struck down by a light from Heaven.  You didn’t hear a divine voice.  It will use every means possible to get you back on the original track. So, look at your little marker as often as you can.  You’re 1 degree off center and in the end you’ll be a very different person.  Hallelujah for 1 degree.

Topical Index: 1 degree, musar, direction, watchfulness, Genesis 3:6