The greatest blessing one human being can bestow upon another is that of grace (or in Hebrew, chein), by which I mean our willingness to give someone else permission to change. To get by in the social world we live in, we tend to rely very heavily on what we know — or think we know — about other people. We form an assessment of someone’s character based on their past actions, and use that picture to predict how that person is going to act in the future. This gives something apparently stable to rely on in the midst of life’s uncertainty and helps us make sense of our lives in connection with others.
 
All of which is perfectly reasonable and valuable, so far as it goes. The problem is that the life of an actual living human being is never as simple or predictable as the picture of them in the minds of their fellows would seem to suggest. And although we tend to uphold that picture others have of us as a sort of personal contribution to the orderliness of social life, there comes a time when a person needs to make a change, whether for their own wellbeing or from the need to be a better person. At such times the name a person has acquired for themselves — even a good name! — can be a tremendous impediment, because the people around them tend to react with surprise, disbelief, and discomfort to anything which seems to challenge the picture of them that had been built up from their understanding of that person’s past.
 
That’s where grace comes in. Grace is that capacity to overlook our discomfort at our fellow humans’ capacity to surprise us and accept that everyone, no matter how apparently stable and predictable, can find it necessary to make a change from time to time. This capacity is particularly necessary in times such as this — by which I mean both the month of Elul, a season in which we are traditionally called upon to take stock of our lives and make necessary changes, and the general times of upheaval and instability in which we are all living these days, which often seem to demand a tremendous amount of flexibility and adaptability from us just to get by. As frightening and as challenging as that need for change can be, it can be made so much easier by our friends’ graceful acceptance and willingness to acknowledge the changes we need to make in our lives. This grace does not always come naturally, but it can be cultivated if only we try.