Most of us were not raised to think of Elul at all or to think of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as “gifts.” Most of us go to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services because “we’re supposed to.” We’re not thinking that the word “service” or “services” means “work,” let alone “work” that is for us to do. In this case, the “work” is spiritual. We can let the service leader do the work and let it roll off us. We probably emerge pretty much the same after Yom Kippur as we were before Rosh Hashanah.
But if we actually do the “work” on and between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, if we actually dig deep into ourselves and try to bring ourselves more into line with whom we are supposed to be, we come out changed but exhausted – like when we begin a series of workouts when we are out of shape.
On the other hand, “Judaism” and “the Jewish religion” actually give us a workout regime to prepare us for the sprint from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. It is the month that precedes the two, the month of Elul. Instead of compressing everything into a frantic week-and-a-half of soul searching, Judaism offers us an opportunity to calmly and deeply reflect on the false notes in our lives, the relationships that need healing, the ways in which each of us, respectively, and all of us, communally, have failed to be the full, complete, authentic human beings we are here to be and – most importantly – what we need to do to free us from the captivity of our missteps.
The missteps can be communal – committed by all of us. It happens that one such communal misstep has been and is being spotlighted over the last year; it is our tendency as human beings to feel uneven or unequal compassion for the “other” in times of conflict. Some of us in Nahalat Shalom feel more compassion for Palestinians than for Jewish Israelis. Others of us feel the opposite. Before October 7, 2023, we papered this over. We created the illusion of “community” by pretending the differences did not exist, by not speaking of them.
This illusion was shattered on October 14, 2023, only one week after the Hamas attack and barely at the beginning of Israel’s counter-attack. On that Saturday evening, we came together to share our collective grief. It soon became clear, however, that although we were all feeling grief, our grief was not collective, did not unite us. Our grief divided us. Some of us expressed frustration and anger at what was felt to be insufficient grief for Israeli victims. Others of us expressed frustration and anger at what was felt to be insufficient grief for Palestinian victims. Alas, it is likely that both sides were correct; regrettably, it is also likely that neither side views its own unequal compassion as a misstep.
Opening ourselves, individually and communally, to compassion for an adversary is not easy. Journalist Julia Ioffe said, shortly after October 7, “If your heart does not break on its own – for both Israelis and Palestinians – then you have to break it yourself.” If our hearts do not break on their own for each other in this community, then we have to break them ourselves. If we do not, this misstep will deaden ourselves, deaden each other, and deaden our community.
How can each of us, individually and communally, identify our missteps? One way is to ask oneself, “If I knew that I were going to die in five minutes, what would I regret having left undone or unrectified? What burden do I wish I were not still carrying?” “What burden is my community carrying that keeps one and all of us angry, atomized, and spiritually deadened?”
There is a surprise hidden in these questions: If, in preparation for death we do the undone, rectify the unrectified, set down the hindering burden – including breaking our own hearts that will not break on their own – we will find that we are not just prepared to die; we will be prepared to live.
Elul is for preparing to live, for excavating within ourselves and within our community to find our missed marks so that when Rosh Hashanah comes, we can dig the inauthenticity out of ourselves and out of our communities. If we use Elul to prepare, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will gift us with the opportunity to use the spiritual muscles developed during the Elul workout to complete the work, to pull the burden from within, to bring it from darkness into light.
Over the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we hold up and then set down the things that have led us astray and held us back. Finally, dressed in our white Yom Kippur garments signifying a burial shroud, we let go of and inter the detritus of our old lives. At last free to be who we are, we sing the words of Shlomo Carlebach, “Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul; return to what you are; return to who you are; return to where you are; born and reborn again.”