Your Rosh Hashanah service, conversation, teaching, community event was a success.

I don’t need to know anything about it to know this.

The seating in your congregation might have been not as full as you’d have liked or maybe too full. You might have had a chaotic kid oriented experience or perhaps perfectly smooth. Your people might have talked through your sermon or it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

Either way, it was a success.

How do I know?

Because there is only one real measure that matters.

Did you make one person’s life better?
More meaningful?
Did you impact them?

The answer is yes.

Unequivocally, I know that you did. Because that is what we do. It is what we live and breathe.

Being a rabbi or a leader is about changing lives for the better.

We believe the idea that because we have hundreds or thousands of people in front of us that we have to change all of their lives. This is especially true in synagogue life, but I’m sure there are other organizational analogs.

This, of course, is ridiculous.

We want it to be true. By God we do. We want to think that because we have so many people at our disposal that we can change the destiny of all of them. We want so badly to have all of our people walk away, scratching their heads, wondering how they can be different. We want all of them to be changed.

But actually, this is the wrong way to think. This is a trap. You can never do this.

Rather, our goal must be to impact a singular person. You might not know their name or where they are seated. You do know who they are in other ways.

I don’t give many sermons these days, but I have always found that I only can really write one particular way. I can only write sermons to myself. Whatever struggles I’ve had, those are the sermons I can give. A personal example is that I gave a gun violence prevention sermon on an interview weekend. (A story to be told in full another day.) It was the Torah that I needed to hear and as a result was the Torah I had to share.

This is true for your Rosh Hashanah experience.

Whatever Torah you had to share, it served at least one person. And it will have impacted them. They will have gone home to think. They will be sitting today, evaluating their choices. They will be better than they were yesterday.

And this is how we need to be measuring ourselves.

It is so easy to be caught up in all the other details. Did all of the people with honors show up on time? Was it raining during Tashlich? Was all of the signage accurate?

That stuff matters and we can always improve on those.

But actually impacting one person is really the thing we can take away. Don’t get caught up in nonsense. Focus on the big things and on the tiny things. The one person and the bigger theme.

As a part of my role at Congregation Beth Shalom, I run all of the children’s programming for the holidays. On Rosh Hashanah day one, we had a rough start but all turned out just fine. It rained, people were late, we were slightly short staffed. I was a little frazzled to say the least.

When doing my pre-program check in, my frazzled-ness showed. As a result, while everything was fine, I could see that everyone was nervous and feeling overwhelmed. I mean, programming for nearly a hundred kids is always overwhelming.

However, the following day, I was able to collect myself better. I spoke with more confidence and was feeling less frazzled. As a result, my team was much more relaxed and was much more impactful.

This year, I realized how little it takes to make an impact. The slight changes in how I spoke and how I expressed my feelings literally made the difference in my team.

I know that you did this too for your sermon, program, hike, or service.

You did something you didn’t even notice and you will have changed someone.

I know this. You know this.

Now go have some ice cream or something, you’ve earned it.