Getting ready for Elul: Season of Love - For ourselves, for our community

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes - how do you measure,

measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In

inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife. In 525,600 minutes - how do you

measure a year in the life?

How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love. Seasons of

love.

Dodi Li, Va’ani Lo ha’roeh bashoshanim…

As we discussed last week, T’u B’Av, the holiday 6 days after Tisha B’Av is about love.  And now, as we get ready to turn the corner into Elul, we find Elul is also about love.  The Rabbis observe that the word Elul, spelled Aleph, Lamed, Vav, Lamed can be read as shorthand for the words Ani Ledodi Ve’dodi Li, the verse from the Song of Songs meaning, I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, a phrase we often hear in song and in speaking at weddings.  Elul, the new Hebrew month that begins next Friday is a time of love and caring, a time of reaching inward for self-reflection and reaching outward as we strive to show appreciation for those we care about and to begin to rebuild relationships that are broken.

Elul comes around as our world stands in the throes of hate speech, anti-Semitism, a prevented attack on an Ohio Jewish center, trade wars, Brexit and the future of Europe in debate, mass protests in Hong Kong, rising tension in the South China Sea and in the Persian Gulf.  Let’s have faith though that our personal and community journeys through Elul, the month of teshuvah, the month of turning, can ripple out into the world and have a meaningful impact.

            

 Rabbi Alan Lew explains teshuvah time comes around now, at this time every year, since Tisha B’Av was the moment, like in the kids song, all falls down.  Now’s the time we have a look around as the dust settles and figure out our next steps. The challenge is that like Tisha B’Av, we tend to find ourselves often in the same patterns.  Rabbi Lew teaches us, “The unresolved elements of our lives – the unconscious patterns, the conflict and problems that seem to arise no matter where we go or with whom we find ourselves – continue to pull us into the same moral and spiritual circumstances over and over again until we figure out how to resolve them.”(Lew, 2003, p. 42)

And so now it would seem to be the time to focus on ourselves, cheshbon ha’nefesh, a thorough accounting of ourselves, our souls, figuring out who we are, who we hope to be in the New Year, what are our priorities, our goals, our dreams, our plans.  

Then, we read this week’s Torah portion, especially the part toward the end of the reading that we may recognize as the second paragraph of the Shema, a passage written about the nation, about all of us, about our collective responsibility.  

            

It’s hard enough to summon up the courage to examine our faults, our flaws and growing edges.  How can we possibly check in with and be responsible for everyone else, literally the entire People of Israel?  

            

As Tevye says, “It isn’t easy.”

            

Just as hearing the Shofar during Elul is a first step toward the full cavalcade of Shofar blasts on Rosh Hashanah, in the spirit of celebrating 50 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, let’s take one small step.  Over the next weeks prior to the New Year, let’s commit to introducing ourselves to one or two people we see at synagogue whom we don’t know.  And if we’re blessed to know most or everyone we see, let’s commit to going one step beyond surface conversations and ask each other some open ended questions that can help us chart our own personal, and communal, pathways into the New Year.