We are now near the middle of the month of Elul, this time we have every year of getting into the gear of atonement and repair. This month of reciting penitential selichot prayers, or maybe improvising selichot prayers if you’re not a by-the-book person.
This month is an eyt ratzon – a time of God’s special good will, special softness towards us and our needs and requests and our teshuvah – our atonement.
The Alter Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of what became Chabad Chasidism, offered a beautiful allegory to describe this time of eyt ratzon. He said, in the month of Elul, the king is in the field.
What did he mean by this? Well, he is likening our relationship with God to the relationship of subjects to kings. That’s not a big stretch. A rather traditional image. But he extends the king metaphor in a surprising way.
The idea is this: when the king is in the palace, it is very hard to gain access. You most go through all the protocols. Request an appointment. Get the appointment approved. Come at the designated time. Wear the right clothes. Enter with the proper number of bows. Wait until spoken to. And that’s if you can get an audience with the king at all, which in the earthly world is completely unlikely.
But there are times that the king comes out to visit the fields and see how they are doing. And when he is there, the workers in the field are able to converse casually with him – talking about the year’s crops and the work involved and perhaps asking for some favors or leniencies that they otherwise would never have the opportunity or courage to ask for.
I love this teaching, but I don’t use it so much because of the whole king thing, the whole patriarchy thing. But it occurs to me maybe it will translate better if I gay it up a little bit and tell it this way:
In Roman Holiday, Gregory Peck, the newspaper man, was only able to have this meaningful and ultimately romantic time with Audrey Hepburn, in her first major role as the princess of an unnamed middle-European country –– he was only able to meet her and come to know her because he found her asleep on a park bench. At the end of the film, once she was back in her place among the royals, holding a press conference in an ornate Renaissance palazzo, there was a distance between them – an official separation, marked off by stanchions and ropes. And because of the conventions of royalty, they could speak to each other only in limited and formulaic ways.
On Rosh Hashanah, our most majesty-filled holiday, we are in that palace, standing behind the stanchions. But during the month of Elul the Divine is Audrey Hepburn on a bench, far away from the palace. Hopefully not asleep because that would be wrong, but maybe joining us in a dream-state where we can talk real talk, where we can speak our truth to each other; say what we regret, what we hope, what we need, without all the formalities that fill our prayerbooks.
We have the rest of the month for this delicious intimacy. This is a time to ask ourselves, “What would I say if it weren’t so hard to pray?” And maybe to say it.
And then on Rosh Hashanah we will come together at the palace gates. We will say the prescribed words and sing the prescribed songs. Glorious words, glorious songs, that are also difficult to say, and that might be in a language in which we are not adept, using metaphors that make us tense up. If those things are sometimes impediments, then now is the time. Now, in this eyt ratzon. In this dreamy time, this is the time to do the work while the Divine is here in the field. Close. Casual. Listening. We can be here, cuddled up with the Divine looking like Audrey Hepburn. And if we are cuddled up with the Divine looking. like Audrey Hepburn, what will we ask for? What favor will we ask for? And then, at last, when we enter Rosh Hashanah, we will be clean and ready, starched and gorgeous as Gregory Peck.