The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack Update: 66 Changes I'm Considering for January 2025

After last year's cabin retreat, I made three writing-related anti-resolutions for 2024. In this post, I examine this year went, and what I envision for 2025.

Jan 01, 2025

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-9:12

The Torah content through the end of Chanukah is sponsored by Feiga W., with the following dedication: "With deep gratitude to my parents, who taught me to seek out opportunities for growth—and to Rabbi Schneeweiss, whose shiurim are exactly that."

Click here for a printer-friendly version of this article.

This year’s cabin was The Roxbury Yurt, which I highly recommend!

The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack Update: 66 Changes I'm Considering for January 2025

Preface

As my annual solo cabin retreat came to a close last week—and as I packed up my books, my food, and more books—I listened to the recording of the update I posted on 1/1/24, entitled The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack Update: Three Changes for January 2024. I’m glad I wrote it when I did, but I’m especially glad that I recorded an audio version because it enabled me to hear my state of mind at that point in the year.

My cabin retreat in December 2023 had rejuvenated me, but I was still burnt out from four challenging months of adjusting to my new teaching job. Returning to the high school classroom was fulfilling, but I was frustrated by how my relationship to writing had devolved. I had hoped for a prolific year of writing alongside my three part-time teaching jobs, but four months had gone by, and I was struggling to complete even one article on the parashah each week.

This frustration led to an epiphany, further crystallized by my cabin reading (see the full post for details). In the section entitled "The Bottom Line," I outlined my intention to implement three changes for 2024. I’d like to review how my writing in 2024 unfolded in light of those changes, and then share my plans for 2025.

Reflection on My Writing and Anti-Resolutions of 2024

Last year, I made three “anti-resolutions”:

Anti-Resolution #1: NOT to be bound by the self-imposed tyranny of the weekly parashah: My major epiphany was, “I must free myself from the tyranny of the weekly dvar Torah.” I declared that I would still write an article every Friday, but I would no longer prioritize the dvar Torah genre over the many other types of articles I wanted to write.
Anti-Resolution #2: NOT to be bound by the self-imposed tyranny of page-length restrictions: Rather than spending too much time editing my articles to fit exactly 1-2 PDF pages, I would aim for that length without worrying about exceeding it.
Anti-Resolution #3: NOT to choose what to write about based on what I imagine other people want or expect. This anti-resolution stemmed from my ongoing struggle to write for myself, trusting that if I focus on what interests me, my audience will benefit and enjoy my work.

I am pleased to report that Anti-Resolutions #2 and #3 were a success! Although I continued to write 1-2 page articles, I stopped worrying about adhering strictly to that limit. My articles occasionally ran to 3 or even 4 pages, and guess what? The world didn’t end! I didn’t receive a single angry letter in Greta Thunberg’s voice, accusing, “How DARE you make me use more than a single sheet of paper to print out your weekly article!”

As for Anti-Resolution #3, I’m not surprised I was able to pull it off. After all, this wasn’t my first “stop caring about what other people think” rodeo. I just needed to give myself a kick in the seat of my pants and remind myself why I write. Unsurprisingly, people responded favorably to whatever I wrote about, even when I chose topics that were more obscure, personal, or radical than a typical dvar Torah.

Anti-Resolution #1 proved to be a far greater challenge than I anticipated. In 2024, I wrote a total of 57 new full-length Substack articles, of which only 18 were not on the parashah. Most of these non-parashah articles were written early in 2024, when these anti-resolutions were still fresh in my mind, and during the summer, when my writing tends to be freer and more prolific in general. Once the school year started in the fall, however, I lapsed back into writing mostly articles on the weekly parashah. Judging by these numbers, I’d say I somewhat fulfilled Anti-Resolution #1. Roughly a third of my articles were not on the weekly parashah—better than nothing, but not exactly a smashing success.

At least, that was my initial thought. But they were, all of them, deceived, for another resolution was made …

The Unexpected Triumph: What I’m Thinking About This Morning

Little did I know at the time I wrote last year’s update that the biggest change in my writing routine would start a mere two days later when, on a whim, I wrote my very first “What I’m Thinking About This Morning” Instagram post.

Before I talk about how this series came to be and what role it played in 2024, I have to ask two questions of my Substack readers:

When I say that I started WITATM “on a whim,” I really mean it! This wasn’t a planned experiment. I didn’t have any goals or objectives in mind. I didn’t commit to doing it for any particular amount of time. I didn’t even mention it in my gratitude journal that day or that week because I didn’t deem it noteworthy. I just did it. And because I liked it, I did it again the next day, and the next, and the next. At some point, I decided to commit to writing these every weekday morning until the end of January, then reevaluate the practice. The end of January came, I realized I enjoyed writing these posts, so I continued. FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR!

I didn’t launch WITATM with the specific intent of writing more articles on more topics, but that’s exactly what happened. Over the course of this past year, I wrote 249 of these “mini-articles.” That’s 93,000 words!

What did I write about? Everything under the sun. I wrote about all genres of Torah (Tanach, Torah she’baal Peh, metaphysics, halacha, midrash, theology), philosophy, education, self-improvement, cultural commentary, history, community, psychology, movies, book reviews, creativity, and more.

Looking at Anti-Resolution #1 again, did I succeed in freeing myself from the tyranny of the weekly parashah? Well, when these WITATM posts are taken into consideration as part of my literary output of 2024 (as they should be), it turns out that I’ve written 306 articles (57 full-length Substack articles + 249 WITATM posts). Of that total, only 41 were on the parashah (the 39 full-length articles plus 2 WITATM posts), and 265 were on non-parashah topics. In other words, a whopping 87% of my articles were not on the weekly parashah, which means that Anti-Resolution #1 was a smashing success! (If you’re interested in more thoughts on WITATM, check out the this morning’s WITATM post.)

Although I’m thrilled by how this turned out, there was one significant cost that I didn’t even notice until a few weeks ago: The Stoic Jew Podcast. The 2023-2024 school year already posed challenges to TSJ, as my high school classes (especially homework grading) consumed the time I would have spent recording TSJ episodes. The TSJ shiur I launched over the summer was a success, and I fully intended to return to making TSJ episodes once 2024-2025 got underway, but that didn’t happen. Why not? Because the time I had previously devoted to planning and recording TSJ episodes was instead used for writing my WITATM posts. There’s only so much time in the day.

Will I continue WITATM in 2025? You betcha! However, I’m considering changing my practice from writing these daily (well, “weekdaily”) to writing them daily-ish — that is, aiming to write them every weekday, but allowing myself to skip a day here and there. I would do this for three reasons: (1) to allow time for TSJ; (2) to eliminate those days when I put pressure on myself to write them; (3) to give myself a guilt-free break when I need it.

Or maybe I’ll make an effort to do what I did early on in 2024: on days when I’m pressed for time, I’ll share an excerpt from something I’m reading, without commentary, as its own WITATM post. Or maybe I’ll dabble in posing questions on the parashah without answers. Or sharing Q&A questions from my high school students. We’ll see what I end up doing. Now that I’ve maintained the practice on a daily basis for an entire year, the rigid discipline isn’t as necessary as it initially was.

This brings me to the topic you might have been wondering about since you read the title.

The 66 Changes (I’m Considering)

During this year’s cabin trip, I read two books on creativity, productivity, and work habits: Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport, and The Multi-Hyphen Life, by Emma Gannon. As I read both books, any time an idea came to mind for a change I might want to make in my routines for 2025, I jotted it down in my journal under a list titled “Changes I’m Considering Making.” By the end of the retreat, I had listed 66 potential changes. Some were related to life habits (meditation, exercise, sleep), others involved new tools (e.g., “buy a large 30-minute hourglass”), and many pertained to projects related to my writing and other Torah content.

I’m not going to list these here or even discuss them in detail. I wanted to mention them because, unlike the end of 2023—when I faced a major problem and a significant epiphany that led to three concrete anti-resolutions—the end of 2024 feels different. There are things I want to change, but I sense it will be better to experiment with these changes privately and organically, without any grand public declarations.

If there’s one thing WITATM taught me, it’s that you never know when an unplanned change will emerge that solves your biggest problem. The key is to remain aware of what needs to change and to stay open to experimentation and opportunities as they arise. That feels like the right mindset for entering 2025.

Thank you for reading, and for all your support!

If you have any feedback or thoughts on this post, or on my substack in general, or on anything related to my Torah content, this is the best time to let me know!

The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack

The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack Update: 66 Changes I'm Considering for January 2025

After last year's cabin retreat, I made three writing-related anti-resolutions for 2024. In this post, I examine this year went, and what I envision for 2025.

The Rabbi Schneeweiss Substack Update: 66 Changes I'm Considering for January 2025

Preface

Reflection on My Writing and Anti-Resolutions of 2024

The Unexpected Triumph: What I’m Thinking About This Morning

The 66 Changes (I’m Considering)

Discussion about this post