The annual daylight savings time clock changing confusion has subsided and the clocks have been reset, and now it hits us: Passover is right around the corner!

This means it is also time for a clock reset that is more existential – an inner shift in the soul that takes its cue from the outer shift in time.

The sudden time shift, occurring as it does near the beginning of the month of Nisan, is fortuitous. The spring season, or Chodesh Aviv in Hebrew, that is ushered in energetically by the month of Nisan, is an appropriate backdrop against which this parallel inward shift toward the possibility of a newly felt soulfulness can begin to happen.

This season of rebirth encourages new life to emerge from within. Creeping tentatively, out of hibernation, then gathering momentum it begins to burst upwards, piercing through the dark blackness of the newly moistened, suddenly fertile soil of our souls, spilling out with a newfound vivaciousness, into the daylight of our awareness.

What kind of clocks will we reset?

Will it be like the clock of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous character Benjamin Button, the clock of the grieving blind watchmaker, who tries futilely to erase the memory of his life’s accumulated sadness and pain by telling time backwards?

Or, will it be more like the famous clock of the Rebbe of Lublin, the one that had literally absorbed his contagious hope and optimism, and upon hearing its joyful chime it would penetrate one’s very soul with its uplifting message; the accumulated moments and hours of our life’s experiences, encompassing the good, bad and the ugly, that have already passed us by. They are not taking us further away from ultimate happiness; to the contrary, they lead us ever closer to the holiest and happiest moments of our lives that are yet to come!

Only time will tell!

Much Love. Chag Sameach! Θ

Rabbi Yossi Lispker leads Chabad Lubavitch of the North Shore.