There’s a moment every year, a few days after Rosh Hashanah, when the dishes are put away, the relatives have gone home, and the house goes quiet. The new year has technically started. But nothing about our lives has actually changed yet.

That gap is not an accident. Jewish tradition doesn’t let the new year arrive and simply be declared good. It builds in ten days, the Aseret Yemei Teshuva, between the Rosh Hashanah shofar and Yom Kippur, and asks us to do something harder than celebrating: to look honestly at the year behind us and decide, specifically, what we’re going to do differently. I’ve come to think this is one of the most useful ideas in the entire Jewish calendar.

Reflection is what you do with it

In business, nobody improves their quarterly results by feeling bad about them. Improvements are made by looking at what actually happened, being honest about what didn’t work, and changing something specific before the next one starts. Teams that skip that step repeat the same issues year again with different dates on it.

For a lot of families right now, that........

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