It’s not just Isla standing at the beginning of a journey today. We all stand at the edge of an important transitional moment this Shabbat. The Torah has us between two mountains, between blessings and curses, but is preparing us for when we cross over the river Jordan. Crossing over, balancing life’s blessings and curses, making choices about our behaviour going forward. In many ways this is the perfect metaphor for today. We are marking Rosh Chodesh Elul today, with the choir singing a beautiful half hallel, and with additional torah readings and prayers. The beginning of the month of Elul is not like the beginning of any other month. Crossing over into it marks the beginning of a month of serious reflection and preparation to get us ready for the High Holidays.
Our High Holiday committee have been meeting since just after Pesach, hoping to ensure a meaningful and safe holiday season for all of us. And today we are beginning the month of preparation for the rest of us! There are lots of rituals associated with this time of year, from visiting our lost loved ones, perhaps as an encouragement to honour their memory in our actions in the coming year, to the harder work of making amends between one another. We can’t expect to turn up on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and be able to take all we can from the experience – we are crossing over into a time between – when we reflect on the blessings and the curses, and try to commit ourselves to being a source of blessing in the year that is about to begin.
Ellul is said to be an Acrostic that spells out one of the most famous phrases from The Song of Songs – Ani Le Dodi, Ve Dodi Li. I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine. In other words at the core of the month of Elul sits our relationships, in all their blessings and curses. Although Yom Kippur often feels like a serious day, it is in fact a joyous one, it is a day of second chances. If we have done the hard work in Ellul of examining ourselves and our behaviour, and endeavouring to make the changes necessary to do better, Yom Kippur is meant to be a fresh start for us. An opportunity to make teshuvah, repentance. In some instances, we might not be ready to do the hard, transformational work necessary to approach those we have hurt. In others we may not be ready to forgive. In 2018 Rabbi Jill Zimmerman wrote a prayer For those not ready to forgive[1]. It is a powerful reminder of how hard forgiveness can be, and of how powerful it is when it follows true teshuvah.
She acknowledges the blessings and the curses, and in the second half of the prayer she writes:
It’s ok.
Take your time.
Sometimes the timetable of these holy days
doesn’t match the rhythm of your heart and soul.
Sometimes our devoted prayers get intermingled with inner voices not quite resolved:
[…]
This year,
love yourself enough
to trust
your own timing.
Be patient enough to
stay in the place of
“not yet.”
Trust that you will find your way,
that you will come to a time
where holding on
hurts more than letting go.
Forgive yourself for not being ready – yet.
Give yourself the time and space
to go at your own pace,
to love yourself right where you are and as you are.
From that place of acceptance,
May you have faith that the path forward will open up.
The High Holidays may feel like an old, well worn hat we can just slide into, feeling the comfort of the familiar music, or enjoying the honey cake with loved ones once again. But they are a very special moment in Jewish time – enhanced deeply by the beautiful music and delicious food, but unique as a process of exploring real change in our lives.
Change is hard. There is blessing and curse in it. But the world turns and another year arrives, let’s use the opportunity of this new month to explore what we might do to turn ourselves closer to the mountain of blessing, and to reduce the curses we bring into the world around us. The mountains will remain, just as they did last year, but the path we navigate between them will be different every year.
Isla these will be your first High Holidays as a Jewish adult. But the person that experiences them this year won’t be exactly the same person that experiences them next year or in any year to come. We are all different every time Ellul rolls around again. A year of blessings and curses having re-formed us once again. The coming month is a gift in time. It is a gift that requires hard work if we are to really benefit from it. Revisiting painful experiences when we’d perhaps prefer to just bury them under the rug.
Every few years a meme does the rounds on social media showing a picture of the Japanese art of Kintsugi – repairing broken ceramics with gold, emphasising the break and the repair, and often making the item even more beautiful in the process. The brokenness is not hidden or disguised. It is now a part of the objects story. We cannot, sadly, undo what we have already done, or what we have failed to do. But we can do all we can to seek teshuva, repair, and to change. As Leonard Cohen wrote: There is a crack in everything , that’s how the light gets in.
May Ellul come as a blessing to us all, enabling fresh starts and beautiful beginnings, and may we have the strength to do the hard work that is necessary. Shabbat Shalom.
