Found Like a Lost Object: The Ten Days Hashem Is Near

What's your favorite way to earn money?

The Torah describes three different ways a person comes to have something.

Wages. You worked for it. You put in the effort, and what you received is yours by right — you deserve it.

A gift. You didn't earn it. But you found favor in the eyes of the one giving, and because of that, it was given to you.

A lost object. Here you did nothing at all. You were walking along, and there it was, and now you get to keep it. Nothing about you made it yours. It was simply there.

These ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the days of which it is said:

״דִּרְשׁוּ ה׳ בְּהִמָּצְאוֹ קְרָאֻהוּ בִּהְיוֹתוֹ קָרוֹב״ Seek Hashem when He is to be found; call to Him when He is near. — Yeshayahu 55:6

To be found. That is the third category. Not wages, and not even a gift — a find. Right now Hashem is available to everybody, on any level, including people who by any honest accounting did nothing to deserve it.

But a lost object still asks one thing of you. You have to bend down and pick it up.

He is there. He is waiting. He is available for every single person, no matter what level you are on. All that is asked is the first effort — to reach out, to try, to call out.

Recorded as a voice note during the Ten Days of Teshuvah, 2026.