Blog

Welcome to Elul! Monday evening we began the final month of our spiritual year. While there are many ways in which we tend to mark our seasons, either by the school year or a company’s fiscal year, or by the sports we follow or the plants and yards we tend to, at a Jewish institution we really feel the gravitational pull of the Holy Days as a signifier of seasonal change.

But there is more to preparing for the Holy Days than what we do on OUR end. The pre-work of the Holy Days is really for all of us. If I were to pick one word that encapsulates what Judaism asks of us, it would be tikkun, or, repair. We know our relationships could be better, so our job is to repair them. We know that we often don’t live up to our greatest potential, so our job is to repair ourselves. We know that the world is broken in so many ways, so our job is to repair it.

We don’t have to wait for the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to engage in tikkun. In fact, the time is precisely now to begin the spiritual auditing, the serious introspection and the goal setting. It is now when we must summon the courage to face what is uncomfortable or unfathomable and make what is repairable a priority.

When we use Elul in this way, celebrating the New Year on Rosh HaShanah takes on greater depth, for we are not just rejoicing in the turning of a day on a calendar (that may or may not be marked with a signature brisket or some other favorite food), but rather we are celebrating a commitment to be the greatest version of ourselves we can muster up.

Elul is the time to vision. It should inspire us to be honest with our loved ones and ourselves about when we’ve missed the mark. Let us be bold enough to make first moves, and humble enough to offer and accept apologies.

We asked some of our members how they might be preparing for the New Year in this special preparatory month and captured their thoughts in our Seeking Sinai podcast. I would encourage you to give it a listen, draw inspiration from their words, and maybe even have a different, more meaningful Elul and New Year than you’ve experienced in the past.

Click here to check out the podcast or tune in wherever you listen to podcasts.

Shabbat shalom,

Beth