ELUL OVERVIEW
Elul, the month traditionally associated with repentance starts Thursday night, August 17. The next blog posts will focus on this theme, leading into the High Holidays and Sukkot. I want to highlight a few themes in this overview.
Elul is seen as a kind of thin place, a time when the divine is thought to be closer to the human world and repentance is more effective than other times of the year. The letters of Elul are an acrostic for Ani L’dodi V Dodi Li—I am my beloved and my beloved is mine, a quote from the Song of Songs, the eroticism of the poetry transformed into a love song between the divine and the divine’s people. That closeness lets us open our hearts and lets the divine hear us. It can be hard to open our hearts, and it sure seems like the divine can be deaf to our pleas.
We’ve been taught that this repentance culminates in the 10 days of awe from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, a time when our personal fate hangs in the balance. Will we be written in the book of life by the guy with the long white beard in heaven, or we will not make it to the next year. Unataneh Tokef, we pray.
It is true that you alone are the One who judges, proves, knows and bears witness; Who writes and seals, Who counts and Who calculates. You will remember all that was forgotten. You will open the book of Remembrances—it will read itself—and each person’s signature is there. And the great shofar will be sounded and a still thin voice will be heard.”
As Leonard’s Cohen’s fabulous midrash says “Who by fire and who by water, who in the nighttime and who in the sunshine.”
But I believe that our ancestors had a different orientation towards the purpose for repentance. Following the teaching of R. Zelig Golden, the end isn’t being written and sealed in the book of life. Rather it is to get right with the divine so that he (and YHVH is a he) will send the promised rains in season. Our ancestors believed that things over which they had precious little influence, such as rain in season, depended upon their moral status.
Water is life. Israel is a two season, wet and dry, climate whose agriculture completely depends on the rains from should start at the end of Sukkot after Hoshana Rabbah, the great pleading for them at the end of Sukkot. These rains stop at Pesach when the grain harvest begins. The grain harvest gave our ancestors more than 50% of their calories. No rain, no grain, not enough food. Water is life.
This is a collective repentance, not an individual one. It does me no good if I am holy if my neighbors and the world as a whole is not. It’s like the torrential rains, the hurricanes, the great droughts or cold or heat—it doesn’t matter how righteous I personally am if the climate keeps changing because of our collective human actions. Ironically, unlike our ancestors, we collectively actually have agency about whether we will get the rains we need, and only what we need.
So absolutely take advantage of the month to be clean in your human relationships. And maybe turn an eye to what we are doing to the earth as a whole. And repent of our sins.
