Meditations and Reflection on Elul: Preparing for the High Holidays
Join the Adas Israel clergy and community members in a new project as we reflect in writing and video on the meaning of this holy season and offer meditations several times a week to inspire, challenge and help us explore our own spiritual work as we approach these sacred days of Awe.
“𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝘀?” - 𝗥𝗮𝗯𝗯𝗶 Elianna Yolkut
The most sacred line in our high holiday season comes from an unlikely source.
In the book of Jonah, which we read on Yom Kippur afternoon, the gentile King of Ninveh asks his people “מִֽי־יוֹדֵ֣עַ- who knows…” - and he is right who really knows anything.
This is a radical spiritual posture, the gentile King is offering us readers of the Tanach (Hebrew Bible) - “who knows…” - what if? Maybe? Maybe I am wrong? What if things turn out different in that conversation or relationship then I expected? What if this relationship isn’t beyond repair?
A tiny window of possibility that things could be or look different.
Do not be deceived, this spiritual posture doesn't take away our suffering, our sadness, our despair - that sense that we are a bit wobbly - it is more powerful than that. It offers us not certainty but acceptance of the uncertainty with a side of hope. It simply offers us an orientation toward a different kind of moment. Maybe it is a hug from a loved one, or an amazing cup of coffee on a gorgeous day, maybe it is a chance to do work uninterrupted or make challah. Whatever it is for you, the sliver, the מִֽי־יוֹדֵ֣עַ, the - אולי the who knows, the maybe is a glimpse into some possible healing, maybe not a perfect tool or a full tightening but just a sense that you will find your bearings, you will be able to grow roots again and gain strength along the journey. And you will have moments where the impossible joy, sense of purpose is once again in your reach - you won’t know what is coming next but you will know moments of possibility again.
"Shofar Interrupted" - 𝗥𝗮𝗯𝗯𝗶 Aaron Alexander
I want to start by acknowledging that at times (and by at times, I mean lots of times), questions of intricate Jewish Law can totally miss the forest by focusing--really hyper-focusing--on any of the trees. But also, even amidst the give & take of insider Jewish learning, truths present themselves.
Here’s one: If the person charged with sounding the shofar at a morning, weekday Elul service comes to shul a bit late, and the time for shofar comes (i.e., the end of the service for everyone else) while she is still praying… can she interrupt her prayers to sound shofar for the community?
Yes!
And, no!
So Jewish.
The answer depends on what prayer she is saying at that moment.
If it is just the preliminary service, Pesukei D’Zimra, interrupt. Go get that shofar. Even if she is somewhere in the blessings surrounding the Shema, interrupt. After all, the one sounding the shofar is helping the congregation to observe a long-standing custom, and this sacred act honors (mipnei haKavod) the community.
However, if she is praying the Shema itself (or the Torah paragraphs attached to it), or if she is in the middle of her Amidah, then we, the congregation, must wait for her to finish those prayers.
So here’s where we can either start gazing at the leaves, or maybe take a step back and enjoy the entire view. What might we be actually discussing here?
The shofar is a critical tool for preparing us for the Holy Days to come. To help wake us up. To stir our hearts towards return. It seems pretty important for the community to assert its priority, even over an individual’s required prayer obligations. But also, certain prayers addressed to & about God--like the Shema (Unity of God) and Amidah (Petitionary prayers of individual, in the collective)--are so core to Jewish prayer that interrupting the flow of either may subvert something too central to the “everyday” of the Jewish year. The shofar can wait.
So too, our journeys. In what ways do pieces of our lives need to be interrupted in order to hear the shofar’s beckoning? Where must we stop, interrupt, and take stock so as to greet Rosh Hashanah more ready for its message or renewal?
And, also, where must we press forth without looking back? Uninterrupted. What might we be involved with, for which the flow of it, the import of it, asks us to stay focused and ignore the calls around us for change or transformation?
I think that’s the big picture. It's too easy to think nothing has to change or everything has to change. This legal question, small as it may seem, points us away from all or nothing, and asks for considered thoughtfulness for the journey ahead.
"𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴" - 𝗥𝗮𝗯𝗯𝗶 𝗟𝗮𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗻 𝗛𝗼𝗹𝘁𝘇𝗯𝗹𝗮𝘁𝘁
I love to travel. I love to imagine myself in other landscapes, in different seasons than the place that I am living and the feeling I experience when I am adventuring in a new place. There is an opening of the heart, a release of the mind and a calming of the self that happens in the land of travel. This probably happens because our defenses are down, we need the help of others, less sure of ourselves and our surroundings when we are traveling. There is a letting go and a softening that happens inside the self as well as the exhilaration of conquering a mountain, swimming in a new sea, experiencing the food, music, culture of a new place.
The month of Elul is also a journey, but instead of going to another place, we are asked to travel inside. To open the places we have closed because of pain, or shame, or grief and to allow teshuvah to help us find our path to healing. Many times in our lives, we end up on roads that are not meant for us to travel. We look at the lives of others and think that we would be much happier if our lives looked like “theirs”, we chase ambitions that in the end don’t fill us up because they were not ours to begin with. We lose our sense of self and who we are meant to be in the world because the world is filled with so much noise, it’s hard to reflect. Elul asks us to come home to ourselves.
The first question in the Torah is asked by God to Adam and Eve after they eat the fruit in the garden. They hear God in the garden and they hide. God says, “Ayeka” “Where are you?” Seemingly God knows where they are and is asking them something other than their spatial coordinates. God is asking something more profound- “Where did you lose your way? How did you end up here? Where is your soul?”
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of the land of Israel writes in the third volume of Orot HaKodeshthat Adam and Eve were enticed by the desire of the snake and not their own desire. In essence, they were chasing the dream of the snake and they lost their way. He writes:
“The sin of the first human being, which estranged him from his true self, was that he turned to the advice of the snake, losing himself.
He did not know how to clearly answer the question “Ayeka?” because he did not know himself. He lost touch with his true “I-ness”, his truest self. We must seek our inner selves. When we seek, we will find.”
This month is about spending time traveling inside. Reconnecting with ourselves, the lives we are living, the relationships we are in and asking ourselves, Ayeka? Am I traveling the road I was meant to travel?
“𝗦𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴” - 𝗠𝗶𝗸a𝗲𝗹𝗮 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗺𝗮𝗻
“And with a great shofar it is sounded, and a thin, silent voice shall be heard.” Unetaneh Tokef
Sometimes it is described as a still, small voice. The Unetaneh Tokef is not messing around. Sometimes it isn’t in a frequency we are attuned to hear, but that voice shall be heard. That takes learning.
Last spring, I left a leadership role that I accepted in the earliest days of pandemic lockdown. I had lasted over two years. Then, some quiet part of me knew enduring wasn’t the goal, never was. I attempted to persuade, cajole, sideline and just full on yell at that voice to stop bothering me with its demands for attention. I was busy enough already. That voice was inconvenient - totally unrealistic too.
My eventual departure was withering. There was a stadium of voices inside then with a whole lot to say about how it all went down. I didn’t find the still, small one again until months later and I had to search.
I had to learn (again) to make space to hear all the voices – but not listen to them as if they spoke truth. I had to go into my body to find the frequency of stillness and the sound of my own breath. I needed to forgive myself, to seek forgiveness, and do the work that it took to forgive others.
The source of the word Teshuvah (repentance) is lashuv, to return to one’s potential and a just path of living. Hearing is a prerequisite. Listening is the daily act of courage that changes everything. These are the tools we are given during the high holy days. Our work is to use them.
"𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗕𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀"
With Cantor Arianne Brown
“Waking Up” - Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt
11 Elul 5783 - August 28th 2023
I told a story in services once about an experience I had at the self-checkout at Giant— everyone laughed. Here’s the story- I was doing my weekly supermarket shop and had an extra-large amount of items in the shopping cart. I decided to do the self-checkout, scanned, paid, and bagged everything up. When I got to the parking lot and was loading the grocery bags into my car, I realized that I had forgotten to pay for 1 bottle of seltzer. It was hidden between the bags in the cart and I had just missed it. I stood there for a moment and felt terrible. “I should go back up and pay for this” I thought. But I needed to get home and I rationalized that this had happened many times in the era of self-checkout and Giant wasn’t losing money on me! I left.
But then there was this voice in my mind all week that wouldn’t let it go. “I took something, unwittingly yes…but when I figured it out, I should have gone back!” I let a couple of weeks go by before I marched myself back into Giant and told the person at the information counter what had happened and I paid the store for the bottle of seltzer I had taken.
Why in the world did I spend so much time worrying, contemplating, angst-ing about this? Well for one, I do it well. But more importantly the whole incident reminded me of a teaching about teshuvah from the Talmud, tractate Kiddushin 40a “when a person sins, and repeats the sin, her actions (seem to her) to be permissible.” My internal response to not fix the issue immediately was what we so often do with many things in our lives. We rationalize to ourselves why what we did was ok. We make lots of excuses and many times repeat these actions because we come to see our mistakes as permissible. The correction was necessary, even if the sin was “light” and “understandable”. By correcting even our most trivial mistakes we train our spiritual selves to be more exacting of how we behave and to own the imprint we have in our everyday dealings both big and small. Elul asks us to wake up….being awake is not always easy.
“Hope and Courage”- Betsy Strauss
8 Elul 5783 - August 25th 2023
Twice each day, for 50 days – from August 17 through October 6 – our tradition asks us to read, recite, or sing (here and here) Psalm 27.
I’ve come to think of this practice of reading Psalm 27 as a “religious reminder.” In particular, the last verse reminds me to hope and to wait:
קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְ֫הֹוָ֥ה חֲ֭זַק וְיַאֲמֵ֣ץ לִבֶּ֑ךָ וְ֝קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְהֹוָֽה
Hope in God with strength and courage. Wait for God.
I need to be reminded to hope. “Hope,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. “
Hope requires imagination. To go beyond the possible to the impossible, we need to imagine it. Imagination “lightens up the heavy circumscribed world we think we live in,” writes Norman Fischer. “It plays in the deep end, where heart and love hold sway. Spiritual practice is one of the key sites of imagination.”
I need to be reminded to wait. Waiting requires patience. Patience is the capacity to practice inclusiveness when difficulty comes, with a spirit of strength, endurance, forbearance, and dignity rather than fear, anxiety, avoidance and anger. Waiting is asking me to be with what’s true.
The psalmist knows this isn’t easy: It takes strength and courage.
“Renewal - To Begin Again” Rabbi Elianna Yolkut
6 Elul - August 23rd
A couple of years ago I went peach picking with my family on a farm an hour from our home in Washington DC. The peach and nectarine trees were so mangled and old looking that at first glance I thought, these can’t possibly produce edible fruit. I got up close to the trees’ crooked and twisted limbs and noticed the best fruits were at the tops of these bumpy branches. Turns out those peach trees I saw aren’t all that old - I asked the farmer about them. “They grow like that”, he remarked - twisting and turning to get what they need to grow the fruit - towards the sun, away from it, toward the ground away from it and so it goes, continuing to produce fruit reaching and turning. He said to me “you know they look old because they are like the aging person who understands how to create the conditions for growth, beauty and renewal each season.”
The phrase הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ, יְהוָה אֵלֶיךָ וְנָשׁוּבָה חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם Hashivenu, ha-Shem, elecha v’nashuvah; chadesh yameinu k’kedem, which finds its origins in the Book of Lamentations, will be heard throughout synagogues during the High Holiday Season. It might be literally translated as “Take us back, Adonai to You, and let us come return/turn; renew our days as of old.” The literal translation is as confusing as any attempt at poetic rendering. What could Jeremiah, the suspected author of Lamentations, mean by “Renew our days as of old”? How can something be new and old at the same time? Commentators and scholars have long sought to clarify the apparent conflict in the phrase.
Perhaps days of old means literally like an older person, like those peach trees - wrinkly, twisted and crooked having lived through so much, experienced drought and downpour, tragedy and triumph, misstep and success and still growing and changing, resilient bearing fruit - just like most of us humans during this season of repair, return and repentance. Even after we have erred, having disappointed ourselves and those we love the calendar beckons us toward growth and change. The verse implores us towards the light, twists and turns, find the winding path toward Teshuvah. Days of old…days with the wisdom of the lived life, the one with all the twists, turns, even faltering. We can use this season to remind us that even craggly old trees, limbs and branches having seen the hardest things can, in fact might just be the thing that leads us to continued and eternal growth.
“Small Changes”-Nechama Liss-Levinson
4 Elul -August 21st
Here I am again, the summer rushing by, moving inexorably from the destruction of Tisha B’Av to the creation of the world, to Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year. We will soon be arriving at the synagogue, dressed in our finery, greeting our friends, lifting our Mahzorim, ready to pray.
But are we any different this year than we were last year? What is the point of saying the same prayers? Reciting the same words, the same litany of errors of judgment, errors of impatience, errors of inflated ego, errors of commission and omission. As I imagine this, I feel defeated. I feel overwhelmed. I put down the Mahzor in my mind.
But the moon of Elul keeps getting fuller and the Shofar is sounding every morning. I listen to the cries of the Shofar and I feel a call to grasp this opportunity for second chances, and third and fourth ones too. New chances appear every day when I arise, and new chances are blossoming with the coming New Year. And although I am in the same seat, sitting with the same people, the earth has moved and has made another circuit around the sun. Perhaps I can move too. I begin to envision some small changes I could make. Perhaps I can try for a moment to imagine what the other person is feeling. Perhaps I can slow down and take a breath before I respond. Perhaps I can stretch myself to offer one more moment of kindness. To make one more phone call. To create one more connection.
The New Year is approaching. And my opportunity for change has arrived with the sounds of the Shofar.
Mediations and Reflection on Elul
𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 - 𝗥𝗮𝗯𝗯𝗶 𝗦𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗵 𝗞𝗿𝗶n𝘀𝗸𝘆
Teshuva is hard. Can we say that? It’s hard! And it’s hard for so many reasons. It’s hard, first and foremost, because when are you supposed to do it? Aren’t we busy enough with life’s hustle and bustle? The time, the attention, the emotional investment - teshuva is demanding. Fierce and persistent.
But teshuva is also hard because it forces us to confront some of the darkest parts of ourselves and our loved ones - the parts that we hide, or pretend we don’t see, or let fall by the wayside. Elul is the month where there is no wayside - or, better said, we let ourselves fall into that gulf as well.
And what we find might scare us. When we peel back the layers of our own soul and truly confront what we find underneath - both the beauty and also the muck - the power and intensity of the bare truth can be overwhelming. And the instinct can be to wrap it all back up, tuck it away, and disengage.
The tradition does not let us do that. But it does give us a tool for such work - a boost in those moments of challenge. It invites us into a practice of radical acceptance. Of coming face to face with our unadulterated selves and loved ones, and of loving through that vulnerability.
Martin Buber tells the story of Rabbi Moshe Lieb of Sasov, an 18th century Hasidic rabbi. As the story goes:
One midnight when Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov was absorbed in the mystic teachings, he heard a knock at his window. A drunken peasant stood outside and asked to be let in and given a bed for the night. For a moment the tzaddik’s heart was full of anger, and he said to himself, “How can a drunk have the insolence to ask to be let in, and what business has he in this house!” But then he said silently in his heart, “And what business has he in God’s world? But if God gets along with him, can I reject him?” He opened the door at once, and prepared a bed.
We are all flawed. We all err. But we are not undeserving, and we are not unloved. To be in God’s world means to always have a home, and to be made in God’s image means to always create that home. We start with ourselves, nurturing and accepting our weary souls through this difficult work. And then turning outward and, in the same breath, holding our loved one’s accountable for their own improvement and also fundamentally accepting them for all that they are.
This is the work. May we be empowered to do it together.
Mediations and Reflection on Elul
Wobbles A Little But Could be Secured - Rabbi Elianna Yolkut
I am part of a Buy Nothing neighborhood group. I am not sure it is working to diminish my purchasing capacity because I still seem to buy a lot of things.
Recently the following posting went up: “Round side table: 27” wide x 28.5” tall. Two small drawers. Wobbles a little, but could be secured.”
Wobbles a little but could be secured.
It felt like the best possible description about how most people I know feel these days and it is certainly the way the High Holiday season can sometimes make us feel.
We are, all of us, a little bit wobbly, looking for a little security and certainty. The world is challenging, relationships are tricky and don’t even get started on thinking about and engaging in a relationship with God. During this sacred time leading up to the High Holidays we are to be in the sacred sphere of repairing relationships, doing self reflection and thinking deeply about the areas of our lives that need work. But this is hard work and we so much want to find the perfect fitting tool to fix the problem. A wrench of just the right size, or the screwdriver that slides right in for a tightening.
Yet, life simply isn’t like that. What am I supposed to be thinking about or doing during this sacred time? I do feel wobbly what tools does the tradition offer me to steady myself?
We might in fact find at some moments like this - that our sadness, anxiety, worry, loss, grief, anger are the cause for so much uncertainty and unsteadiness that we need to give in, to surrender to it. We need to allow ourselves the time and space to surrender to the work of the season even if just for a few moments each week leading up to Rosh Hashanah.
So join us here as we offer you small tidbits of reflection by your clergy team and community members to help us prepare for the sacred work of growth, hope and change. Beginning August 18th and running through Rosh Hashanah.
