Those who know me know that the Jewish calendar is one of my favorite things to geek out on. It is a lunar calendar that always places the new moon at the beginning of the month and the full moon at the center, in the month’s ripeness. So when you see a full moon outside, you might not know what day of August it is, but you will know, without even checking, what day of the Hebrew month it is.
The lunar year is shorter than the solar year, so it loses ground against the seasons until at last we have to add an entire month to make up for the discrepancy. We do this completely predictably 7 times every 19 years.
Our Jewish calendar is replete with special seasons, full of associations and lore. There are weeks of mourning and weeks of gladness. There are weeks when we count the day every day. There are times when we welcome the light. There are times we celebrate the trees or the fields or the animals. There are times we get haircuts and times we don’t.
So welcome now to the Hebrew month of Elul. This is our first shabbat of Elul. So what is the special flavor of this month? These are the last weeks before Rosh Hashanah, before we put up our 5786 calendars, which I’m sure you’ve all already ordered. Our last full month for making good before we get inscribed again, God willing, in the Book of Life, according to the High Holy Day imagery we grew up with.
As the on-ramp to the High Holy Days, this is the time when our ancestors, and maybe we too, would dig into the work of teshuvah – of reflection and reckoning and repair. In some communities people offer penitential prayers every morning before dawn, asking for forgiveness for our missteps and our shortsightedness, for our sins of commission and our sins of omission. “Wake up, human, why do you sleep? Offer your penitence,” they sing in beautiful medieval rhymes, beforeblowing the shofar with the first light of day.
One beautiful Chasidic teaching by the Dinover Rebbe, who is also called the B’nai Yissaschar, identifies this month of Elul plus the ten days of the High Holy Days, as a mikveh in time. A great pool for personal transformation. We have already entered it; we are wading in right now, up to our knees. By immersing ourselves in this pool of time, we dissolve into the infinite. The aleph-nun-yud “ani” – the ego – gets rearranged into the aleph-yud-nun “ayin” of nothingness, of the infinite no-thingness. We are atomized like our grandmothers’ perfume. And then as we get close to Yom Kippur we are reassembled. We emerge from the mikveh solid and fleshy and renewed, or at least renewed enough to continue the hard journey of this life.
So one more tidbit for you. The name of the month, Elul, is spelled aleph lamed vav lamed. The rabbis like to point out that you can read that as an acronym for the famous phrase from Song of Songs: ani l’dodi v’dodi li. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
This is an interesting turn. In a period of time that is marked by working through our failings, working through our grief at what we’ve done or what we’ve allowed to happen, there is this sudden influx of the idea of love. And I love this. It takes this month of repair and sweetens it somehow. Maybe by reminding us that teshuvah, that repair, is a necessary component and consequence of love. We offer our teshuvah not out of obligation but because we love. It is because I love you that I want to be clean with you. It is because I love this world and the people in it that I want to make good on all the ways I have failed it and them. Love makes me accountable. And the repair I offer is an act of love.
So for those of you who don’t have a custom of teshuvah, a period of time for making good, you might ask yourselves, “What do I love?” And then ask, “How have I done in the enterprise of loving well?” When the answer comes to you, you will see for yourself what needs to happen next – what words, actions, apologies, commitments, or kindnesses your love demands of you.
We are accountable to love. May we not fall short.