Rosh Hashanah: The Month of Elul and the Cry of the Shofar

We have entered the month of Elul, and you know that the forty days of Elul correspond to the last forty days that Moshe spent in order to bring down the second Tablets of the Law. He went up Mount Sinai on Rosh Chodesh Elul, and on the day of Yom Kippur we were granted the second Tablets. Now, you know very well that after the Exodus from Egypt we reached a certain summit, with the revelation of G-d at Mount Sinai. And sadly, forty days later, the people committed the sin of the Golden Calf — a sin that is ours as well, since we are summoned to grasp the Divine as it truly is. That is something quite different from the substitute we give it in exchange, the things by which we in fact replace this approach to the total revelation of G-d — and so we take Elokim.

We take Elokim, that is, a plurality of divine manifestations; we cling to one aspect of that plurality — and there we are, in the sin of the Calf. We live within frozen ideologies which, in the end, prevent us from reshaping our own person; we are as though cast in a mold, with a thought that has stopped moving and a conduct that has set. Unfortunately, such behavior, such conduct, confuses us with the laws of nature, or reduces us to the laws of nature — a nature which is condemned to die, to grow old, to perish […] — whereas the Creator (and Elokim is the Creator) is the One who renews His creation every day. Now, on Tisha B’Av — or rather, first of all, on the Seventeenth of Tammuz — the first Tablets of the Law were broken, and this led to the second sin, that of the spies sent to the Land, the Promised Land; and Tisha B’Av is precisely the ruin of that hope of the people of Israel to enter its land. Ever since, there is no sin that does not contain at least a trace of the sin of the Golden Calf and of the sin of the spies. Yet we have the Creator’s assurance that just as He renews the heavens and the earth, He will always sustain the people upon which His creation rests — or, rather, by which His own creation is justified: “So shall your seed and your name endure.” Indeed, it is our custom to close the year by reading the second set of curses, those that threaten the very existence of the Jewish people. One set of curses is read before Shavuot, in Parashat Bechukotai, at the end of the book of Vayikra; the second set is in Parashat Ki Tavo, which we read last Shabbat. The difference between the two is this: the first curses correspond to the destruction of the First Temple, and the second curses announce the destruction of the Second. For the first — for those first curses, which strike the observance of the Law — there is a consolation: we will come to recognize our errors and return to the practice of the Law. But the second curses, the second series, the one that announces the destruction of the Second Temple, offer no such recovery, no such rising up again, as the first do. After the first, we came back to the Land of Israel after seventy years. The second we are still living through today — and here there is no consolation. This very question was put to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the man who took refuge with his son in a cave under the Roman occupation. When he received the question, he himself did not know what to answer, and he began to weep. Then the prophet appeared to him and said: Take heed — the second curses contain within them, in seed form, all the blessings. And the reason is that where the verse says, “Also every sickness and every plague” that the Eternal will bring upon the Jewish people — ya’lem Hashem alecha — ya’lem does not mean that He will bring them down upon you, that He will spread them over you. No: ya’lem means that He will turn them aside, He will make them vanish. When one reaches a point of no return, a force comes into play: the promise made to the Jewish people that the Jewish people will not disappear, and that the future of humanity — the future of creation itself — is bound up with its existence. Consequently, when that promise is brought to the fore, the curses recede; it is as if, at that moment, the principle of the Jewish people’s renewal came about of its own accord, and all the curses are transformed into blessings. The curses become a source of blessing. Why do I say this? Because the lease we are granted in life is always for one year. It is the cycle of one stage of life — more than that, of a microcosm. If you wish to picture it this way: history stretches over six millennia, but within those six millennia each year is in itself a sample of what the end of times will be, since each year is, after all, a stage that ought to lead toward that end of times. And that is why the Land of Israel is not like other lands and is not subject to the same rules as other lands.

It is not like Egypt, which must be watered by irrigation “like a vegetable garden.” No — the Land of Israel is the land of the dew of heaven, the land that drinks the rain of the heavens. And this indeed flows from hashgachah pratit, from the individual providence of G-d, who ensures its rainwater for the Land of Israel. And of it the verse says: it is the land upon which the Holy One, blessed be He, sets His gaze, “from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.” Reshit hashanah — what is that? Reshit hashanah is Rosh Hashanah. And acharit shanah — what is that? It is the last month of the year, the month of [Elul]. And our Sages taught us that just as we began the reshit, so will we find ourselves in the acharit, at the end of the year — an end of the year that is not far off, and which is nothing other than a projection of the end of times. For that reason, we must regard this acharit as a final purpose […], as a source of experience — but what is it that prevents it, in the end, from coming to pass? We read the Torah portion of Tisha B’Av: “When you beget children and grandchildren” — the text stops at three generations: ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

The grandchild is yet another generation. When we must establish a genealogy, three generations suffice. Why? Because the notion of venoshantem ba’aretz must not be allowed to creep in. Venoshantem — “you will grow old.” Venoshantem ba’aretz — aging. What is aging? It is remaining within a way of life in which everything belongs to the daily round, in which everything is repetitive, in which everything is a matter of natural phenomena. Now the Rambam says that one must remain alert and alive. In two mitzvot he mentions the importance of keeping man in a state of constant wakefulness. The first concerns the shofar, in time; the other, the mezuzah, in space. The mezuzah, in space, calls on us to change our behavior, our bearing, as we pass from one space to another.

When we remain in one and the same space, we have no need of a mezuzah. But the moment we must separate between the different stages of our life, between the reshut ha-rabim and the reshut ha-yachid — between, let us say, the public domain and the private one — then we need a mezuzah. A mezuzah is required; we cannot do without it. And each time, says the Rambam, that we pass a doorway bearing a mezuzah, a change of attitude, of behavior, is called for. The same holds in time. But in time, how is this expressed? It is expressed by the shofar. Even though the blowing of the shofar, which G-d commanded, is a decree of Scripture — still, there is an allusion in it: “Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber.” Indeed, in the Hebrew language, yashan (old) and yashen (asleep) come from the same root.

To let oneself grow old, to enter a repetitive system in which there is nothing new, no prospect of a new life, no advancement in life — then we are indeed in the aging that leads to death, and renewal then demands a cry. That cry is the cry of the shofar. What is the cry of the shofar? It is the person who suddenly finds himself facing a situation he can no longer explain, that he no longer understands, and who is seized with dread. It is as if one were waking from a dream and asking where the reality of things lies. The shofar is the return to that first breath of man — the breath that henceforth allows him to produce and utter sounds, to form a language and communicate; but this is a different kind of communication.

“Shall the shofar be blown in the city and the people not tremble,” not be seized with dread? Yes — G-d is with those who are charedim el devaro, who tremble at His word. He is attentive to those who do not seek to rationalize everything, who do not shut themselves up in an approximate, strained, rationalizing kind of thought. Paradoxically, during the Shabbatot that precede Rosh Hashanah, we conclude the reading of the parashah with passages from the Prophets, with words of consolation. The prophet is the one who carries a different language — the language of nechamah, of consolation, which is a turning back; but for that to come about […]. As for the month of Elul, our Sages found a remez, an allusion to it, for they asked themselves where it appears in the text.

They found it in the expression of the circumcision of the heart — the removal of what seals the heart of man. Now, whenever we speak of milah, it always signifies a going beyond the natural order, or at the very least a stepping out of that natural order. We do not wish to subject ourselves to the laws of nature. We practice milah to declare that we wish to step out of that framework; and stepping out of that framework means something more: that we cease, a little, from constantly comparing what we are with what others are, our situation with the situation of others — as if, in the end, one could place the history of the Jewish people and the history of the other nations on the same scale. And each time we let ourselves be drawn into this approach — being like the other nations, comparing ourselves to the other nations — then we are indeed exposed to the same scourges as the other nations, and, just as the other nations are threatened with disappearance,

we would run the same risk. They also asked themselves where an allusion to the month of Elul might be found. They found it in “Lulei he’emanti lir’ot — Had I not believed that I would see the goodness of the Eternal in the land of the living,” then I would have found myself among violent men, immoral men, brigands. Lulei, if you will, is the month of Elul: these are the letters of Elul, but reversed. That is to say, the path of Elul obliges us to situate ourselves in relation to those words of the prophets, which assure us of another status, of another language. The prophet was told: “Like the shofar, raise your voice” — carry your voice as the shofar does. This means recasting one’s language every time, so that it does not sink into vulgarity. And indeed, such vulgarity does not exist in the language of the Jewish people: the intimate organs of the body have no name in the biblical lexicon — I mean that there is a certain discretion, a certain will to rise above this world and to leave to language its sacred character.

The month of Elul, the approach of Rosh Hashanah, is what commands us to be the rosh in the shinui — the head of change. I was saying earlier that we always hold a one-year lease on life: mereshit hashanah ve’ad acharit shanah. That lease — it is we who renew it, and we renew it the way we do when we move house and change our surroundings. What do we keep, then? We keep the things that can find their place in the new setting, in the new apartment, and we get rid of everything that does not fit. We take stock and sort through everything, and we throw away whatever does not correspond to the new circumstances of our life. And this holds in space as well.

I said it at the beginning: mereshit hashanah. It is the land of […] of G-d. So when we are within the middat ha-rachamim, the attribute of mercy — when we invoke the attribute of mercy […] — we must know that, in any case, a servant […]: a servant has no reason to expect a wage or a reward from his master. He is paid for this; he is paid to do the work. He was hired for that work and, on the contrary, he must do it well. We are bound to discharge our mission in this world — and ours carries far greater responsibilities.

On it depends the equilibrium of the world, the very health of the entire universe and of humanity. But what do we actually bring to bear for it? We have no merit of our own. You know that the twelve months of the year correspond to twelve permutations of the Tetragrammaton, and each permutation is drawn from a verse, either from its first letters or from its last letters. For Elul, it is “U-tzedakah tihyeh lanu — and it shall be righteousness for us.” The attribute that best befits this permutation, that befits the month of Elul, is this: everything we do is tzedakah granted to us. We fulfill our duty as it should be fulfilled, but the reward we are to expect is tzedakah — it is charity, a gesture of the Holy One, blessed be He, toward us. That is why the month of Elul began with rachamim (mercy), with the Selichot, with the invocation of divine mercy. It is mercy that enabled us to receive the second Tablets of the Law, and it is mercy that will indeed enable us to reach the messianic era.

Now, we know very well that concerning those messianic times, some of our Rabbis said: “Let the Messiah come, but let me not see him.” Why? Because it is bound up with ordeals; we do not want to go through them, we do not want to suffer, to be put on the same footing as the others. But when we place ourselves on the same plane as the others, we call forth the middat ha-din, the attribute of justice. And when we stand before the attribute of justice, it says: halalu ve-halalu — “these are like those”; these are My creatures and those are My creatures; these too, like those. We are on the same scale, so why should we be favored over others? Why, in fact, should we attain this life that we never cease to demand? […] It is because we truly aspire to give the world a firm foundation, and because we truly await the moment when Hashem is proclaimed King over the whole earth; but that proclamation […]. We demand nothing. We are here in the same way that we fulfill our duties toward our children and toward our faith: we do so toward the entire universe, with a sacred sense of responsibility and, above all, imploring divine help in all that we undertake. That, above all, is the message of the Selichot, which begin on the first day of Elul and culminate, or conclude, on the day of Yom Kippur. You know that our Sages said there were never festive days — days of rejoicing — like the Fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur. The Fifteenth of Av was indeed the day of meeting, of new shidduchim (matches): seven days after mourning the Temple, its destruction, we return to life, we think of new shidduchim, new encounters, we set about building homes again. And Yom Kippur is the same: it is not an austere day but a day of joy, because it heralds another opening for man — who, just as all slaves go free on that day, himself attains his own freedom in the full sense of the word. There — I will stop here to leave room for questions.