This past Shabbat we were treated to the celebration of Josie Chrismer becoming Bat Mitzvah. Josie’s Bat Mitzvah parashah portion was Ki Tavo, one of the final portions of the entire Torah. Ki Tavo means “when you enter” or “when you arrive,” the context of which is Moses advising the Israelites what rituals that she undertake when they enter the Promised Land—how to solemnize the sacred transition and truly integrate the values and practices that have been revealed to them in the course of their wilderness wanderings.
In particular, the words Josie chanted related to a ritual they would carry out by splitting the tribes up among two different mountains upon entering, one mountain representing the curses they understood that they would experience if they departed from the ways God had laid out before them, and one representing the blessings they would experience if pursued those pathways.
While this can be the sort of passage that turns off modern readers—is that truly our experience of the world or our relation to God? That if we follow rules good things happen to us, and if we don’t bad things happen to us?—Jose offered an interpretation layered with complexity and nuance. What if our ancestors never meant to suggest that the blessings and curses play out on a literal physical level? What if the suggestion is not about religious-rule-following leading to prosperity and religious-rule-breaking leading doom?
What if instead, the suggestion is that we experience these “blessings” and curses” on the internal level? That when we do good, our hearts feel full, or when we do bad, our souls feel empty?
Josie offered some beautiful personal examples including helping a new kid at school feel welcome when no one is watching. The “blessing” one experiences in that moment can’t be quantified: the richness we feel in our soul, a divine hum reverberating through it is blessing enough.
With that modeling in mind, I wish you Shabbat Shalom, and a Shanah Tovah U’Metukah—a good and sweet New Year.
What follows are the remarks I delivered this past Friday.
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So we are in the month of Elul, the final month in the Jewish calendar before Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Elul (אֱלוּל), it has been noted, is an acronym for the phrase from the biblical book Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs: Ani L’dodi v’Dodi Li . I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me. Elul — אֱלוּל — Alef, Lamed, Vav, Lamed, Ani L’dodi v’Dodi Li — אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי. This is a love phrase, spoken between between those totally devoted to one another, sometimes as part of a betrothal. Committed, until death do us part.
It’s a phrase the rabbis understood to apply to Israel and to the divine, or universalized, to god and humanity. There is a divine-human bond, tradition teaches, that God and humanity work together, committed. Humanity, working on the material plane to fix the brokenness in the world; God the source from which we flow, as Rabbi Art Green has put it, “the source of inspiration and the ever-renewing center of strength [in] this ongoing struggle.” We need each other: God needs us to fix what’s broken in the world; we need God as the singular source of inspiration, comfort and love. Love, I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me. Ani l’dodi, v’doi li. Elul.
It’s a good thing that that bond of love is established and unimpeachable and unseverable, according to this teaching, because we are about to hit some rocky seas as a couple: Elul is, of course, preparation for the Ya’mim Nora’m, the Days of Awe.
The Days of Awe are, under one understanding, without mincing words, the days of judgment. The metaphor shifts from one of divine love, to one of divine sovereignty, to one of divine judgment. The Days of Awe are when as the liturgy states “k’vakarat ro’eh edro:” as a shepherd examines their flock, Making each sheep pass under the staff, so You, adonai, will review, number, and count, judging each living being, determining the fate of creation, inscribing their destiny.
These are the ominous notes of the day of judgment, the day when our fate for the year is sealed.
We don’t, according to this understanding, want to go before the judge unprepared. Not having examined our case, not having looked inward, not in touch with all the different parts of ourselves, the parts of ourselves that work their way through our psyches, our souls, manifesting themselves in ways that might be contrary to our underlying intentions. Were we as kind, as patient, as gentle as we wanted to be. We want to check in with ourselves, lovingly and gently, but thoroughly, inquiring where we’ve gone astray; where we need to make teshuvah before we encounter the judge—teshuvah, of course, commonly translated as repentance, but literally meaning return. A return to what? To God, to holiness, to the core sacredness of ourselves, of which we know we are capable. We want to begin to make this teshuvah, return, before we arrive before the king, the judge.
All of this self examination, self reflection, the sages prescribe for us in the month of Elul. Elul is the month of preparation, they say. “All the month of elul before eating and sleeping,” the 14th century talmudist Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin teaches, “let every person sit and look into their soul and search their deeds.”
If this sounds like a daunting prospect, the medieval rabbis have a surprisingly action-oriented approach to accomplishing this. In fact, The 15th century rabbi Elijah ben Moses Ashkenazi Loans offers a three-step process: “Let every person do teshuvah during all the month,” he writes. “Let them scrutinize their actions with a view to mending them,” as follows: (1) “Let them seclude themselves one hour every day. Whether they have committed one transgression or many transgressions, let them confess them and (2) put them down in their own book for remembrance. Finally (3) consult a sage to show them their way in teshuvah.”
Three steps: (1) seclude ourselves every day (2) write our reflections down in our own book for remembrance; (3) consult a sage.
If these sound remarkably similar to modern prescriptions like (1) mediate, (2) journal, and (3), therapy, you’re not wrong. These insights about what it takes to heal ourselves so that we can be better vessels for goodness in the world are time-worn and have roots in Jewish tradition, especially in the month of Elul.
Let’s quickly take them in turn.
“Seclude ourselves for one hour every day.” No doubt that’s a tough one. To pat myself on the back, I was getting close, when counting all the davenning I do, right up until our second daughter Nina was born a few months ago. Now I’m all the way back at square one. (How’s that for passing the buck). And I’m a rabbi, whose job is in some ways to cultivate this kind of time, so I can imagine how hard this prescription is for everyone.
Still, I can’t help but think these medieval sages were onto something. With our phones and our emails and our notifications, where and when do we do the thing known as cheshbon ha’nefesh, an accounting of the soul, a deep level of self examination, that helps identify where we need to do teshuvah, where we need to return to our truest selves. I sometimes find that my best, truest, clearest thinking, reflecting comes where else but the shower because that’s the space I have no access to distractions. I can’t open up a new tab on my desktop, can’t check espn.com or the New York Times, I have to — or I get to, as the case may be — just be. Elul is when we’re called upon to search out more moments like that. Walks. Sits. Prayer. Just being. Alone with our thoughts. Whether it’s for ten, twenty, thirty minutes a day we are invited to turn our gaze inward, searching all the parts of ourselves, for where unthinking habits and instincts have taken hold that are not true to our core selves, not true to our partnership with the divine and the world around us. Unearthing them in order to uproot them.
And then what are we supposed to do? “Put them down in our own book of remembrance,” Elijah ben Moses says. We’re supposed to journal. We’re supposed to write. One of the biggest gifts I have is that my work affords me the opportunity to write. Each year before the High Holidays, I get to go deep into my soul and pour it all out on a piece of paper, or a google doc as the case may be, for this congregation. I cherish this time. Some rabbis dread the High Holidays, and I’ve never understood that. It’s my favorite time of the year professionally, because it’s the opportunity I have to unspool some of the threads that have gotten balled up, tangled up over the course of the year. On paper I can slowly but surely untangle them. Stretch them out end to end and examine them.While not all of us have the captive audience rabbis do on the high holidays, the work of pouring our thoughts down on paper, I can promise you, is one of the more meaningful experiences I have encountered in this work of teshuvah, of returning to core self.
Whatever your method, I invite you these remaining weeks of Elul, to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, and begin unspooling.
Which brings us to the final piece of advice from these old-time rabbis, “consult a sage to help you find your way in teshuvah.”
Or as I like to call it, therapy. I have been in therapy for years now. And when it wasn’t therapy, rabbinical school helped pair us with what are called “spiritual directors,” “guides whose purpose is to listen deeply to clients and help them explore their spirituality.”
Think that egocentrism and a focus on the self is a twentieth/twenty-first century phenomenon? Think again. Here the age-old rabbis are imploring us to meditate, journal, and get therapy, especially during the month of Elul. They know that to be vessels of holiness in the world, we have to work on ourselves. Sometimes we have to talk and talk and talk to someone else who listens without interruption, without the expression of judgment, without trying to solve everything for us, who simply holds space for our experience so that we can find our own way to what ails us and to healing. Not because they have the answers but because they have the patience and the time and the humanity to make space for us to find ourselves. Once again, the medieval rabbis had the instinct that this was necessary; “consult a sage to help you find your way in teshuvah.”
As we prepare ourselves for the chagim, for the yamim noraim, the Days of Awe, we scrutinize our self, our soul, our practices, our habits, so that we can experience that true sense of expiation on Yom Kippur, kippur from kaparah, atonement, expiation, the true release that comes when we have unearthed our ills and corrected for them. The magic doesn’t happen on its own; we help facilitate it, through our work in Elul.
Fortunately, all this self-scrutiny, self-examination, and as we might be inclined, self-judgment, comes at the time of Elul, ani l’dodi, v’dodi, li. It’s as though we are performing this self-examination alongside the most caring, loving divine companion we can imagine—one with whom the bonds are un-severable, one with whom we are eternally committee, one for whom no discovery will be rejected as long as we engage in the process with sincerity and openness.
Ani L’dodi V’dodi li. While we’ve got our work cut out for us for the remainder of this month, it’s work that will be received with love. Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah.
