"If I gave you $86,400, what would you do with it?"

If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400, but which carried over no balance from day to day, allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening, canceled whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day, what would you do? Draw out every cent, of course!

We all have such a bank. Its name is “Time.” Each and every morning, we are, every human being is credited with 86,400 seconds. Every night, the bank rules off, as lost, whatever of this account we have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balances – it allows no overdrafts. In other words, the clock is ticking, even as I speak here this evening.

What are we doing with our lives? With what are we filling up the pages of our Books of Life? 86,400 seconds are hard for us to conceptualize – perhaps if we rationalize it in terms of a year – there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. For some of us, that’s an easier number to handle. To quote the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson, “a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money!” A few thousand seconds lost here in frivolity or a few thousand seconds lost there in idleness begins to take on real meaning if these “inactivity’s” become a way of life. No matter how we calculate it, it still comes down to the pages of our Books of Life being filled by our own deeds. What an empowering and thrilling thought that is! We can control our own destiny!

We have 86,400 seconds given to us each day by Gd, which, more often than not, many of us fill without the slightest thought of Gd. We often feel that Gd owes something to us but few of us take even a moment to think about Gd on a daily basis. Only at certain times in our lives, particularly at times of crisis do we call upon Gd to assist us in some way. And at the end of each day, the seconds given to us are gone. Unlike the TV commercial, we don’t get any “roll over minutes” to bank against possible problems ahead.

Some Rabbis will equate the seconds of our days with the pages in the Book of Life in which we write our deeds, accomplishments, and/or simply the day-to-day mechanics of our lives. And here I suggest we have golden opportunities each day to fill our Life pages with blessing and beauty if only we believe. Each of us can achieve great things daily if only we take the time each morning to recognize Gd’s supremacy in all things and then live our lives according to Gd’s laws. Which laws you ask? All of them – but if we must make a daily choice, think along the lines of being kind to your spouse, your employees, your friends and your customers. We can operate our daily lives with honesty and integrity and respect for the other person. We can make the seconds given to us count for something, however, once in a while is only a minimal effort. We have to get used to using this process on a daily basis otherwise little is truly accomplished. We can fill the pages of our Books of Life with Gdly deeds and actions if only we try a little harder. And if we do these things, the seconds may be gone daily but the residual effect of daily mitzvot will linger – they will become a normal way of life for us – in a way, they will cause our Book of Life savings accounts to swell.

Rosh Hashana is an ideal time to make a personal resolution to adjust our activities so as to add mitzvot to our daily lives. It’s a process – don’t try to do everything at once but add a few mitzvot on a regular basis and soon your account will be very healthy.

As the prayer says: “Righteousness and loving kindness are the foundations of His throne.” The time Gd gives us on this earth is very precious. Let us resolve to use it as wisely as we can this coming year for by doing so, we can positively affect our lives.

L’Shona Tovah Tikatevu