What Is Missing Cannot Be Counted

“What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be counted.” Opening King Solomon wrote: “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be counted.” It is a simple verse, and its truth hurts. Some moments are gone. Some chances were missed: a talk that never happened, a study session that was put off, a moment of closeness with a son, a wife or a friend that got swallowed up in the rush of the day. It will not come back. A mother once came and said: “My daughter missed her school trip. So I took her on a trip of our own. We went out, we had a great time, we laughed. But she still felt empty.” Why? Because the new trip was something else. However good and lovely it was, it was not that trip. The hole left by what was missing stayed open, because nothing else can fill it. It is the same when we serve Hashem. When a person does wrong, or misses a chance, his first urge is to try to “balance it out,” to “make up for it,” to “fix it.” He studies one more hour to cover the hour he lost. He gives charity to make up for the wrong he did. But the simple truth is that this is not the same place, and it is not the same hour. What was crooked is still crooked. What was missing is still missing. Going Deeper: A Hard Question But right away a question comes up. Isn’t this exactly the power of returning to Hashem? The Talmud says that when a person returns to Hashem out of love, “his deliberate sins become merits.” The Zohar, the classic book of Jewish mysticism, also teaches that returning to Hashem reaches all the way up to Hashem’s Throne of Glory. The whole past is turned around! If so, why is there still this empty feeling? Why does what is missing still gnaw at us? There is more. A thoughtful person will say to himself: “Yes, I am returning to Hashem. But that hour of Torah study, that good deed I lost, that moment: who will give them back to me?” This very pain holds a great danger. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains it in the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought. Pain that is not pointed in the right direction turns into heavy sadness, and heavy sadness is a force that paralyzes a person completely. Returning to Hashem Is Not a Time Machine But there is a fine and basic distinction here. “His deliberate sins become merits” does not mean that the wrong is erased and a good deed now stands in its place. It means something deeper. The energy that went into the fall, into what was missing, into the pain, is itself turned around. It becomes fuel for a greater rise. It is not a replacement for the past. It is a lever for the future. The wrong is not erased. It is transformed. Hasidic teaching speaks of this as turning the dark itself into light. Now we can understand King Solomon’s words: “What is missing cannot be counted.” Do not try to count what is missing back into the old account. It has no place there. It cannot be fixed inside the old series. But it opens a completely new count, with numbers and levels that were never in the old account at all. Look at what King David did after his son died, as told in the Book of Samuel. While the child was alive, David fasted and cried. But when the child died, he got up, washed and ate. He said: “Now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back?” This is not indifference. It is facing the fact that the loss is final. And from exactly there, the next verse says: “And David comforted Bathsheba his wife.” Accepting what cannot be changed is what opened the door for him to build again. A Lesson for Serving Hashem: Freedom, Not Despair So “what is missing cannot be counted” is not a cry of despair. It is a cry of freedom. It frees you, my fellow Jew, from the impossible job of “fixing” what was. You do not need to make up for it, balance it out or erase it. That cannot be done, and trying to do it leaves you empty, like the mother who took her daughter on a replacement trip. What you can do, and can do right now, is return to Hashem. Not to “fix the past,” but to build the future. This is a foundation of the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement: the main inner work happens in the present. Being obsessed with the failures of the past is a trick of the evil inclination, the inner voice that pulls us toward wrong. It wants to rob a person of the present and of the joy of his life. The feeling of what is missing, the pain and the bitterness, will itself become the launching point for new inner work. As the Tanya explains, true bitterness is not heavy sadness. It is a positive force that wakes a person up to return to Hashem.