Each year at this time, we Jews are called to contemplate our character and consider how we might, should, will improve it.

Regardless the pain and humiliation, we must recall to ourselves how we've let others down, willfully hurt someone out of pique or envy or spite; cheated in some way, or taken advantage of the weaknesses of others instead of helping them overcome them. We are meant to scour our souls for transgressions that require acknowledgment, apology and atonement.

By religious convention, and for the faithful Divine decree, we can't be judged worthy of another year of life unless we not only face up to our sins, but set about rectifying them.

In years past, we may have calibrated our character against admirable family members, committed civic leaders and exemplary public servants. But this year, albeit inadvertently we have devised an entirely different means to evaluate the state of our souls: Donald Trump.

Here's how it's happened: as advocates for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, we've devoted much of the time since the Party conventions to cataloguing the character traits that make Trump singularly unfit to lead this country.

We have judged him scarily, cruelly vituperative; reflexively spiteful and habitually mendacious. It's never enough for him to be grossly self-aggrandizing.

He has to demean, degrade and demoralize others to inflate his worth.

Any comprehensive inventory of Trump's shortcomings as a human being serves not only to mark the gaping moral distinction between the two nominees, but as a means of taking stock of our own. In other words, Donald Trump offers a handy metric for gauging the rightness and righteousness of our own behavior.

In reviewing your year, try this: ask yourself: "How do I rate against Trump?"

Challenge yourself on truth, magnanimity, tolerance, beneficence and grace. Anything we find loathsome in him we should find as intolerable in ourselves, and we must proceed at once to purge ourselves of any practices or attitudes that could cost us the trust of those around us, just as his character and temperament have alienated so many of those whose trust he needs in order to win next month.

The Trump test, like the soul-weighing scale depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphs, provides a definitive test of our own adherence to the values and ideals we find lacking--or not at all--in him. And when we tally our results, we have to face up and do whatever we must to act in accord with the ideals Trump has failed to display, or acknowledge that we're hypocrites, with one standard for those who seek pubic office, and another for ourselves.

If Trump can assist in our annual practice of self-scrutiny and self-improvement in this way, perhaps we won't have been subjected to his foul, degenerative campaign in vain. He will have made us better people and more conscientious citizens, with a new lease on life to carry on the good fights alongside Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.

L'Shana Tova.

###

October 11, 2016