Elul: The Reckoning of the Year

The twelfth month: the time of reckoning

It is indeed the twelfth month of the year counting from Tishri, from the creation, and it is the sixth month counting from the Exodus from Egypt. We will have to explain these two relationships later on, but let us keep in mind that, just as a balance sheet is drawn up in any business, so a person, in the twelfth month, must see where he truly stands.

Now, whether we like it or not, we always tend to make the teaching of the Torah “topical.” And when we make it topical, we measure it against the problems of the day. And this confrontation means that, one way or another, we violate the originality, the very distinctiveness of the divine word, because we want, as it were, to develop it, to make it topical, to present it in its best expression.

And at times, or very often, we alter its teaching, because the emphasis we have placed on form, on expression, on translation, on interpretation, has sometimes altered the very substance of the divine message. We have ended up consecrating the profane rather than the sacred text. And that is an act which makes the mitzvot and the word of the Torah secondary to the philosophical interpretation we wish to give them. We must be on our guard.

Elul: the harvest and the search

The fact is that we are now beginning the twelfth month of the year, the month of Elul. You know that at its root lies […], the katzir, the harvest. And the harvest is indeed the reward of the whole year. In Aramaic, the word means searching, it means inquiry.

We are indeed called upon to renew, or to restore, the relationship we have with the text, with the sacred, with the person, with the Adam who dwells within us, that noble Adam who is built up starting from Adam HaRishon, the first man. We are forty days before the giving of the second Tablets of the Law, and the giving of the second Tablets of the Law is on the day of Yom Kippur.

The second Tablets and the people’s participation

So on the first of Elul, Moshe is summoned to withdraw to Mount Sinai for the writing. And what is it? Tablets of the Law that are fashioned by man, while the writing is divine. Forgiveness is granted. The Holy One, blessed be He, has gone back on His decision: “Let Me be, and I will destroy them.” No: the people must take part in shaping the Tablets of the Law, in building the Torah.

And that is the reason why the first Tablets of the Law were unsuited. They were imposed entirely from above, and that did not correspond to what the people could really do, what they could take upon themselves. The second Tablets, however, are accompanied by this movement of return, by this forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? For the sin of the Calf.

And the sin of the Calf we identified, first of all, as a cyclical sin, one that recurs, like the sin of Adam HaRishon. The egel, the calf, is iggul, the circle. It is what happens when we settle into a routine, and when, well, even the precepts of the Torah become so commonplace that we perform them without kavanah (inner intention), without absorbing them into the depths of ourselves.

The circumcision of the heart and the virginity of the spirit

That is what it means to perform the circumcision of the heart, the milat ha-lev. […] “… and the heart of your descendants.” It is not a play on words; it is an idea that our Sages translated into this search, this quest for virginity, because the zodiac sign of the month of Elul is Betulah, the Virgin.

“Shuvi, betulat Yisrael”: return to your virginity, maiden of Israel. Well, we must recover that virginity of the spirit. We are indeed confronted with many trials throughout life, and it is impossible not to have dragged along, somewhere in what we have done, some dust, some sand, some mud. All of this must be scoured clean in the course of the month of Elul, which is called the month of Rachamim, the month of mercy.

The month of mercy, because the Holy One, blessed be He, forgave the people of Israel for that rejection of the Torah given by G-d, because they confused the holiness of Moshe with that of the Holy One, blessed be He, or rather because they projected onto Moshe the power of the Creator.

We are of course bound to respect and to fear our teachers, our Sages, but not to the point of deifying them, not to the point of making them absolute references.

Shoftim: the judges, the kohanim and the people’s point of reference

This is precisely Parashat Shoftim: you shall have judges, you shall have officers to carry out the law, in every age. And to this day we continue to pray: grant us to find our judges once more as in former times.

And when justice lets itself be led astray by every kind of political consideration, by every internal scheme, then, sadly, the people no longer has any point of reference. Yet the point of reference is the kohen; the point of reference is the teacher, the one who educates, and the judge: they are the educators of the people, those who stand as models for the people.

And that is why the kohen was not to have a plot of land to work, nor to invest himself in real estate, nor to have any occupation other than devoting himself to the cause of his people. In Israel, it is G-d who is, indeed, their possession, their inheritance. They must be at the disposal of the people.

Of course, the people has the duty to provide for their needs. But the kohanim were not to be people preoccupied with their possessions, with their wealth, with the desire to receive gifts, terumot, presents from others. On the contrary: justice and education had to be preserved from all subjective leanings, from every particular inclination.

Recovering the fear of Heaven

So this is the occasion for us, in the count of these forty days that separate us from Yom Kippur, to recover, at the sound of the shofar, this fear of Heaven, this yirat Shamayim, that we have lost, because we have lumped everything together.

In trying to embellish our Judaism, we fell into the trap of fine forms and neglected the content. We have also tried to sanctify the profane at the expense of what the Torah itself has sanctified.

Our Sages said that the world was created to teach man to fear. To fear is not to be afraid. Fright is an external threat. Awe lies quite simply in our realizing that not everything depends on us, that we are partners in an enterprise, in a purpose, but that above man there is a Creator who governs the world, and who governs it in portions of days.

A calendar in which only the months have names

You know, there is something particular about the Jewish calendar. I don’t know whether you have noticed: the days have no names. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six. Only Shabbat has a name. Nor do the years have names. Nor do the weeks.

The particular character of the month, however, is marked by a name specific to each month. These names are not of biblical origin. They were borrowed from Babylon, they were introduced, and they were given a meaning tied to the renewal of each month.

For if creation had taken place over a span of six days, […] the text would have had to say “within the space of six days.” For the six days form one entity of creation, and each day has its own creation. And the weeks that follow one another renew, as it were, this movement of creation on another level, because there is no such thing as time in the abstract.

A time with a beginning and a purpose

A day that passes is not renewed by another day. The next day is different from yesterday, it is different from last week. It is another contribution, it is another time. There is a time that has neither beginning nor end: it is the one that paces the history of all the nations.

The history of the Jewish people, by contrast, is regulated and structured by a time that has a beginning, that has an end point, that has a goal. Within the week, it is Shabbat, the seventh day. It is shemittah in the cycle of years. It is the yovel, the jubilee, in the cycle of fifty years, because every fifty years there is a fresh perspective on history. And all of this is directed toward the seventh millennium.

The history of this world is conceived, like the six days of creation, for six millennia. And consequently, as we advance in time, we are only drawing nearer to the appointed term. And therefore, […] the eve of the seventh millennium is like the eve of Shabbat.

It is important to know that we do not live in an abstract time, in this notion of space-time in which time itself would be empty and would have to be filled. Time has a content. Either one espouses one’s time and is heading in the right direction, or one lives on the margins of that time, and one is in idolatry.

For the first definition of idolatry is failing to see a whole in the unfolding of history, and regarding time and life as the pages of a calendar that one tears off, day after day.

Elul, the month of mercy

So the month of Elul has this particular quality: because it carries this attribute of mercy, it can turn everything around and lead us back to a vision of the whole, of the divine plan in which each person has his place. Each contributes his stone and fulfills his mission.

And in the same way, respect for parents is accompanied by fear. Respect for the teacher is likewise accompanied by fear of the teacher: it is a way of acknowledging his kavod, his honor. Respect for G-d is accompanied by fear of G-d.

What is this fear? It is the fear that holds us in suspense before a king whom we respect and whom we fear. How then could we not feel it before the Adon ha-adonim, the Master of masters? Yes, the Master of masters, just as He is Elokei ha-elohim, the G-d of gods, the G-d of divinities. Yes, the Torah acknowledges that there are divinities: as soon as one detaches an element from a whole, it becomes a divinity.

True service of G-d is the service that holds us in suspense before what we are doing, not out of fright, but because we want to succeed at all costs in what we undertake, and because we fear losing our means. We fear not seeing our trials through.

The shofar against overweening self-assurance

And that is where the shofar, which we sound from the second day of Elul, is a call to recover this fear that has been lost, because we have made everything commonplace, because, when we settle into routine, we then suffer from an overweening self-assurance.

We lose the sense of this respect and of this awe. We think that we are the masters of everything, and we sin through pride. Of course, one may be a man of law, observant beyond measure, and yet we sin all the same by being so comfortably settled in our relationship with Hashem that we confuse the ani, the “I,” and the Atah, the “You,” and forget the higher dimension of the One who eludes every grasp: the dimension of the transcendent and of the future. Then we lose the whole fruit of the year, the whole harvest of the year, the whole search.

Ki Tavo and the dread of settling in

I began by saying that the month of Elul is generally introduced by the concern to respect an authority within Israel, and that this authority should always remain the focal point of the people, the example to follow.

And then the second point is Ki Tavo: how much the Torah dreaded the settling of the Jewish people in this land. It desired it so much, yet as much as it desired it, it dreaded it. Why? Quite simply because taking root in the land and believing that it is thanks to me, thanks to my own strength, that we succeeded in building a country, that is the ruin of the people, its inner ruin.

And it is the parashah of the curses, which we read before Rosh Hashanah. We conclude it by asking that the year end together with its curses, with its threats, and that a new year of blessing begin.

And in this promise for the future, in this mercy, one must know that however much the Jewish people may wish to destroy itself by its own hand, it endures. That is the blessing of Rosh Hashanah. The blessing is that, whatever you may go through, you will remain bound to the eternity of this world.

And that without any distinction between […] and the woodcutter: no difference at all. He watches over the Jewish people. What is needed now is that we become aware of it. And in these forty days that precede the giving of the Torah, we are called upon to show this will to break out of routine, out of the humdrum of life.

Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi and the call of the selichot

Look at what Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi says, he who introduced into the selichot, these prayers of forgiveness… You know, there is a difference between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. Among the Ashkenazim, they begin only four or five days before Rosh Hashanah, that is, in the last week. But when that week has only Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they begin the week before, and then there are eight or ten days. Whereas among the Sephardim, we begin on Rosh Chodesh, and that makes forty days.

So, whatever the custom. What does he urge? “Sleeper, do not sink into your slumber; abandon your base ways; move away from the way of life of all other men. You are not like them; you have a particular standing. Just as you claim one for yourself, for your family, out of dignity, out of self-respect, you must know that within the family of nations you have a particular standing.”

For if you lift your gaze toward the heights to serve the Rock who presided over all things, who preceded all things, […] the gleam of your stars, of your own light, will these lights, these gleams, not vanish into the darkness? […] Consider creation once more, the beauty of this creation, and draw inspiration from it.

He fashioned you in His image, be-tzelem. That is to say, He gives you the time to create the Adam, this man whose dimension stretches from one end of the earth to the other. That is the Adam. It is this Adam, at once universal and at once be-tzelem Elokim, in the image of G-d. It is he who carries this dimension of the twelve months of the year.

The twelve months and the twelve driving faculties of man

You know, the Ari zal and Sefer Yetzirah conceived that, just as there are master faculties in man (sight, smell, speech, walking, the heart, the filter of the kelayot, the kidneys), so too it is in the months, in time. In Sefer Yetzirah the twelve months of the year correspond to the twelve driving faculties of man.

And Elul is the capacity to walk, with the left foot. It is truly the month in which a person’s engagement in the world is put to the test, just as the shofar calls us to take hold of ourselves.

If a shofar were to sound in the city, if the siren sounded, everyone would wonder: what is happening? We would run to take refuge in the shelters. The shofar, however, asks you to reflect within yourself: I remind you that you have lost the sense of language, that you have lost your direction in life. You must recover it, because the left foot is the one that […].

So one must learn to master, within oneself, this movement of return to G-d. It is surrounded, or rather conditioned, by these selichot that we recite every day. And that is the meaning of […]. We will have more to say about this.