Elul: The Uniqueness of Each Person

Can everyone hear me well? Yes. Dear friends, good evening; I am happy to be with you again under the sign of the month of Elul. You know, the sign of the month of Elul is “Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li” — I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. You are my beloved ones — my beloved, each one individually. For it is important that each person stand out from the other through his personality, his role, his responsibilities, in the same way that in a Sefer Torah every letter has its function within the word and can bend its meaning one way or the other. Know, then, that the Jewish people numbers as many as the letters of the Torah; consequently, each letter of the Torah represents one individual among us. And if that individual is in some way harmed — just as in a Sefer Torah the slightest break, so to speak, in a single letter renders it unfit, pasul — so it is with us as the people of Israel.

That is why what matters first in this month of Elul is to affirm one’s personality with respect to one’s role and one’s responsibilities within the people of Israel, within the whole of the Sefer Torah that we are constantly writing. We are in the process of writing the Sefer Torah. Do you know how we write the Torah? Every week we give it another connotation, another version, another spirit; we dust it off, we renew it, we breathe a new spirit into it. Just as He renews each day the work of His creation, so we renew that work of creation through the spirit we breathe into the text of the Torah. And that is why there is a difference — you know that the Jewish people has two anniversaries.

The anniversary that belongs to the Jewish people alone, that is proper to it and affirms its birthright, is the Exodus from Egypt, in Nissan. We prepare for the celebration of Nissan thirty days in advance, by driving the chametz out of the house. And then there is the month that stands thirty days before the anniversary of the creation — and that is what immerses us in the collectivity of the world. During the month of Nissan we are under the sway of “Dodi li va-ani lo”: my beloved is mine, He is for me, it is He who fills me with everything, and I answer His call. That is Pesach. The month of Elul — no, the month of Elul is rather a movement of the self toward HaKadosh Baruch Hu, toward the Creator of the world: “Ani le-dodi,” I give myself to Him, and in proportion to this giving of myself I will be able to receive something in return.

That, then, is the whole difference between the conception of man and his reality. Where is the conception, and where is the reality? It lies in rachamim. I have already told you that rachamim, which is translated as “mercy,” comes from the word rechem, the womb. That is where love is deposited to give birth to a new being — a being called at first tinok, the baby. That is how we name this embryo destined to develop, never to return to the rechem, and which is itself the fruit of an entire, integral world. Well, that is what the month of Elul is: in reality, we are conceived within the whole world, with a different status, whether we like it or not.

Bereshit, Genesis, is bound up with Israel, which is called reshit — the first fruits. “Beni bechori Yisrael,” “My son, My firstborn, is Israel.” How many firstborns can there be in a family? Only one. Well, we are the firstborn of humanity, and the firstborn of humanity has rights, but above all he has duties. This awakening of awareness for which we are preparing is no accident. Through this name of the month of Elul — a foreign name, imported from Babylon, which nonetheless found its place within the sacred literature — we see that, just as a person converts to Judaism, one converts this culture from the profane to the sacred.

There are aspects that we can indeed convert, and that have been converted. That is why the Aramaic translation of the Torah, Onkelos, is the first true commentary that gives us another dimension of what the Torah says — but in a foreign language — and we must preserve it, respect it, and regard it as such. Well, tell yourselves that what happens outside happens within us. My dear friends, let us not go looking for G-d anywhere but within ourselves, He who dwells in us. If in the end we are led to see Him and grasp Him outside ourselves, it means that we are somewhere bordering on idolatry.

For the true G-d is first of all within us. And when I finally manage to tear myself away from the narrow framework of reason and to think — these days there is an advertisement about driving “outside the bodywork,” isn’t there? What a pleasure! But first one must know how to think outside one’s own bodywork, outside one’s own structure, to try to go a little beyond things. For as long as we breathe things in from the inside and think of them solely from our own point of view, we remain in a kind of confinement, within an enclosure of reason proportionate to our intelligence. And you know, it is not for nothing that our Sages said that the numerical value of Elul is that of Binah, understanding — hitbonenut, reflection, meditation: the kind that leads a person to disconnect from himself, to go beyond what he is and to fulfill that for which he was created. For that is how Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin defined the birth of each person: every anniversary of a person’s birth is bound directly to the creation of the entire universe, as if G-d were saying to him, “I could not create My world without conceiving you yourself within it, and without your being able to pass through this time of the infinite within this world.”

For that too is how we must see things. We have a time called shanah, which is repetition — shanah, shenayim, shanu: repeated. We have the tekufah, the period, a time that is makif, that conditions us, encloses us — again a repetitive period. There is the chag, a circle: the chag is a cycle that returns each year, and we find ourselves within this cycle, obliged to pass through it. But in reality, where are we? If in the end we undergo this time as something enveloping us from the outside, if we undergo it in its repetition and its cycle, then where am I? I am in a permanent present. That is the idea of a life in which time, as Ibn Ezra puts it, is thus: “he-avar ayin,” the past no longer exists, it is no more; and “he-atid adayin,” the future is “not yet.”

It is “not yet,” it is still to come — it is tomorrow; I do not know what it will bring. “Ve-hahoveh ke-heref ayin” — and the present is like the blink of an eye. It escapes me; yet precisely because it escapes me and I cannot grasp it, I can in reality make the past converge with the future, illuminate the future by the past, and reflect upon the past in such a way that it can illuminate the future. Let us hope we have somewhat absorbed these preliminaries to the thought proper to this month of Elul. For, as you know, Rosh Chodesh Elul is the day on which Moshe goes back up to bring down the second Tablets of the Law. He was to remain forty days. He had remained forty days the first time, and came down on the seventeenth of Tammuz — and there, with the sin of the golden calf, he broke the Tablets of the Law — and was congratulated for it. The first “yasher koach” was for having broken the Tablets of the Law. It is paradoxical, but it is wonderful. Wonderful — why? Because the Law does not have to be given in its entirety and imposed from the outside. The Law requires a participation of the self to forge it. So, the second Tablets: after Moshe had been able to intercede to obtain a reprieve for the Jewish people, he sets out again on Rosh Chodesh Elul. That is why Rosh Chodesh Elul is placed under the sign of rachamim, of mercy, of the recasting of the Jewish people; and this recasting of the Jewish people goes hand in hand with a recasting of the Torah. But this time the Tablets are not given entirely by G-d, as when “the writing was the writing of G-d,” laws that were, as it were, transparent. No — “pesol lecha”: this time you, Moshe, will hew the stone, you will write this Law yourself and bring it within the people’s reach, so that it may win their assent. And that, in sum, is the process of the month of Elul, for we start from the principle that “Kudsha Berich Hu, Oraita ve-Yisrael chad hu.”

So the Holy One, blessed be He, the Torah and the people of Israel constitute a unity. What does it mean that they constitute a unity? The Torah — you will discover it by yourself. “Kotvem al luach libecha”: on the tablet of your heart you will write it. There is no point in taking it and reducing it to pure logical knowledge. No — you must live it from within, feel it, rewrite it. And how will you be able to? Because, in sum, the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells within you; He dwells in you, He is with you, He is in you. That is where one senses the secret of this discovery of the self within the month of Elul, which we begin, indeed, with the selichot.

With the selichot — selichot, selichot… Today, for anything at all, people ask forgiveness […]. No. There is a commentary that establishes a connection between salach and shalach, since the sibilant letters may interchange in the Hebrew alphabet; there is thus a possibility of relating salach, forgiven, to shaluach, sent. What, then, would be the connection between “sent” and “forgiven”? It is a matter of divesting ourselves of this tendency to have everything forgiven, to make ourselves our own accomplices in everything we do. And in the end we do not take in the true scope of things, because we have not cleansed our kli, our vessel. Our vessel is the human body, and this human body needs preparing so that the neshamah may shine forth within the person in all its intensity. We must therefore rid ourselves of all the dross that encumbers our being, of all this pollution that surrounds us. […] It is we who search our hearts. We address ourselves to HaKadosh Baruch Hu — that is good, He is there to hear what we want — but it is not He who is examining our hearts; it is we who are analyzing them and seeing whether we are truly sincere with ourselves.

And if we move toward these discoveries of the self — because this discovery of the self is very important for recognizing the Creator as King of the universe: Melech. That is a notion we will develop in another shiur (lesson): on Rosh Hashanah we place HaKadosh Baruch Hu in the orbit of “Melech al kol ha-aretz,” King over all the earth — something that Avraham alone accomplished. I was saying yesterday that for the moment we are the children of Israel, the house of Yaakov, but we have not yet come to live Avraham; we are not yet the people of Avraham’s generosity, of Avraham’s giving of himself. For it is a fact that HaKadosh Baruch Hu could have rid us of all our enemies, of Yishmael and of Esav. On the contrary: not only did He not place them outside the enclosure of Israel, but He willed that they be born within the womb of Israel — within Avraham, within Yitzchak. He willed that they occupy their place there, and that if there is indeed a distancing or an exclusion, it can only be temporary. The day will come when Yishmael himself will join in unison in this unity of G-d proclaimed by the people of Israel, and Esav after him. But once again, the Yishmael and the Esav who dwell within us must […] — for however much we drive them out of our home, they remain anchored in us; they cling to us, they demand their rights, they claim their birthright.

Yishmael claims his birthright; Esav claims his birthright. These worshippers of etz va-even, of wood and stone — well, they are members of the great family, the great family of Israel, but they are within the small family of Israel, whether we like it or not. And what makes them hard to digest is that they are still sour grapes, an unripe fruit: one’s teeth are set on edge in eating it, and it is not pleasant. That is indeed the situation in which we find ourselves. And that is why the Sages found many acronyms that recall the month of Elul and its content — mnemonic devices. Beyond “Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li,” there is also “U-mal Hashem Elokecha et levavcha ve-et levav zar’echa” — “Hashem your G-d will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants.” Your heart, and the heart of your descendants: a circumcision is required.

That is where the month of Elul lies: we must perform the circumcision of our heart and that of our descendants. You know very well that this circumcision has a very broad field of resonance, for the orlah, the foreskin, exists at different levels — […] our emotional life, our speech, our language. We shall see this too, for that is where we are heading, through the effort of prayer. For two paths always lie open to us in the discovery of the self, in the discovery of the Infinite that dwells within us, in the discovery of the destiny that we must carry through to its end. These two paths are that of reason and that of what lies beyond reason. The path of reason — I spoke of it a moment ago: it is ourselves, the emotional life as we are within it; it remains subjective. Beyond that, beyond reason […]. Study, to which we give a great deal of thought, fills the gap left by this emotional life, and that is why we are called back to our duty to deepen our understanding of the Law, to comprehend it, to try each day to confront the areas of shadow that remain here and there. But prayer has another function: it is what goes beyond study, what establishes direct contact with the Infinite, with G-d, with holiness. In the Torah we remain, as it were, in a mirror effect: looking at the text, analyzing it, answering, asking questions, trying to understand — and sometimes we remain at “yes, it can be interpreted this way, it can be interpreted that way,” and so on.

In prayer, there are not a thousand and one ways of praying. And here, the means of reaching a higher sphere of thought is prayer. That is why the month of Elul initiates us further by means of these selichot, which invite us to reconsider the structure of our being — for the structure of our being is as G-d conceived it in His projection into the world. It passes through thirteen garments, thirteen attributes, which we recite each time while trying, I would say, to become imbued with them. Perhaps we will have the opportunity one day to study them in depth. Tomer Devorah, the book of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, indeed insisted on the significance of these thirteen attributes and invited each of us to reproduce them within his own structure. For we cannot truly cleave to the reality of the Holy One, blessed be He, who is far from us.

Whom we can only imagine as very far away. But “Dirshu Hashem” means: seek the Eternal where He is found, at the moment He is found. Seek the Eternal — and call upon Him! “Call upon Him while He is near”: the Eternal is near to the Jewish people, He is within reach of the Jewish people during the month of Elul. During the month of Elul we say “ha-melech ba-sadeh”: the King goes out into the fields, and He seeks — He seeks His children. He seeks, because the notion of av, the notion of a father, can exist only if there are children. If there are no children, one does not taste the joy of being a father; one does not know the attribute of fatherhood.

So Av ha-Rachamim, the Father of mercy, the Father of love — we are discovering Him through the recitation of the Thirteen Attributes, which are on the scale of man, of the structure of man, of the structure of the Patriarchs. For, in sum, I believe I have already said that Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef and David are the structures of the middot of man — kindness, gevurah (rigor), justice. And, in parentheses — in parentheses — in the prayer of Rosh Hashanah we very often find the name of Avraham, the name of Yaakov, the name of Yosef; we do not find the name of Yitzchak, who is only suggested through the shofar.

Why? Because rigor — remaining all the time in the realm of rigor and pure logic — is death; it is deadly. We cannot bring this rigor into play on the day of Rosh Hashanah. We do not want it, we do not want it. We want […] Avraham. We want that generosity of Avraham; we want that chesed (loving-kindness) of Avraham. That is why the third facet of the month of Elul — the third facet of the month of Elul — is “Ish le-re’ehu u-matanot la-evyonim” (“[portions] one to another, and gifts to the poor”): ish — alef; le-re’ehu — lamed; u-matanot la-evyonim — lamed. That is to say, there is another way of approaching the month of Elul: to consider the other and to see him through the prism of this responsibility that binds us to him — the responsibility that led Hillel to say that if one wishes to learn the Torah in the time one can stand balanced on one foot, it is “ve-ahavta le-re’acha kamocha,” you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Now, who is this neighbor? Here again there are several commentaries, several explanations. But you know, the neighbor — “re’acha ve-re’a avicha,” your companion and your father’s companion — this companion is HaKadosh Baruch Hu. He is our companion, man’s first companion. We walk with Him, but we are unaware of Him; we do not know. […] We walk with Him. Re’a, re’acha — it is He. “Ish le-re’ehu u-matanot la-evyonim.” “Kol dodi dofek, pitchi li, achoti ra’yati”: the voice of my beloved knocks — “open to me, my sister, my beloved.” That is Knesset Yisrael, the community of Israel — but it is not only Knesset Yisrael: it is each one of us. And it is this deep voice of the awareness of being, of what lies beyond what we are and what we accomplish. For we need this confidence; we must not belittle ourselves, we must not shrink ourselves. That is not it. On the contrary, one must realize one’s dimension and try to give it a greater amplitude. For as you realize it, your companion — your companion, too — realizes Himself as much as we do, and gives us the love that we await from Him. For everything is a matter of a love that sometimes we did not know how to gather in time, or did not know how to measure at its true worth — and we let it slip away.

And it is hard to catch up, because at the moment he was knocking at the door and saying “open to me,” I was not ready. I was not… I was not thinking of that […]. “I have already taken off my garment — how shall I put it on again?” And, what is more, I must get out of bed to go and open, while he is knocking at the door. But when at last I made up my mind to do it — “ve-dodi chamak avar” — my beloved had gone, he had slipped away. What a pity […]; he was looking for me. Well, that is us; he is not outside us. We have had many moments in our lives that we could have taken; we could have seized them and given our life a direction other than the one it has today. But all is not lost, since this journey through time that is imposed on us means that we are in a permanent hoveh, a permanent present.

How is the present tense rendered in Hebrew? Benoni po’el. Benoni po’el means a continuous action: it is always in the process of being done. That is our preparation for discovering this eshet yefat to’ar, this beautiful woman whom we found among our captives. It is the Torah portion of the week — the portion of the week is Ki Tetze: “ki tetze la-milchamah al oyvecha.” You know, the Torah portions of this month of Elul are dense, and they convey a very powerful idea that draws near to — that plunges us into — the atmosphere of Rosh Hashanah. For it says: “Ki tetze la-milchamah al oyvecha u-netano Hashem Elokecha be-yadecha ve-shavita shivyo” — “When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Eternal your G-d delivers him into your hands, ve-shavita shivyo, and you take him captive” — rather than “ve-shavita oto.”

In Hebrew one would say “ve-shavita oto,” but it says “ve-shavita shivyo” — that is, you have taken captive what was the captive. What does this mean? The Or HaChaim HaKadosh sheds light on it in his own way, saying: take note — the people who waged this war with drums beating were people who had no regret for the vineyard they had planted or the house they had built, and who had no fear that sins on their hands would make them pay the price of their faults during this war. They were people of integrity, righteous people. They were there to wage the war of the whole community of Israel. And this war of the community of Israel is to rediscover — to rediscover — the soul held hostage within each one of us.

A woman of beautiful appearance — where did we find her? You know, we have left the month of Av. It was the month of Aryeh, the roaring lion, which took our sanctuary as its prey — the place that was indeed the place of our inspiration. And we were told: take care — your place of inspiration must not remain stone and wood. No, no, we do not want that: He poured out and poured forth His anger upon the wood and the stones, because you risked making of them, too, a small idolatry like the others — etz va-even, those who worship statuettes of wood and stone. No — “My sanctuary,” He tells you, “I grant it to you. Find this sanctuary within you.”

Rediscover it within yourselves; be a sanctuary on the move yourselves — that is what I ask of you. And that is “ve-asu li mikdash ve-shachanti be-tocham” — “let them make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell within them.” Now, what is the sign of the month of Elul? Betulah, virginity: we are to recover this virginity of being. And that is why, you know, there are three key words in the word nituk — disconnecting. I spoke to you of disconnecting from all the stereotypes we have accumulated in our thinking, in life. Of course, routine sets in, and little by little we settle into it, we settle into our slippers. You must pull yourself together, you must wake up: “Mah lecha nirdam? Kum, kera el Elokecha” — “Why are you sleeping? Arise, call upon your G-d.” […] It is the newcomer, the tinok, the baby, the new birth: it is a matter of this regeneration of the self. And this regeneration of the self is the tikkun — that is the true restoration. Your quest is to restore; they are the same letters: tikkun is restoration, the restoration of the self. Well, that is what we are undertaking this month of Elul. I think I will stop here to leave room for questions, and we will continue next week.

So if you have questions, with pleasure — don’t hesitate. Dare, dare, dare! You know, in Hebrew the word le-ha’ez, “to dare,” derives from the word oz: to have courage, to have strength. — “You spoke of something I find hard to understand: you spoke of bending the past. How can one bend the past? How can one? Bending the past. You spoke of the past, of the future, and of bending the past. I don’t understand that connection. The past is the past.” — Yes, my dear friend, yes, my dear friend. We are all subject in our lives to tragedies we did not want, that we did not choose. There are people — may it be far from us — who have lost children at a young age, who have seen their families torn apart, who have been victims of an accident.

There are many events that come, one might say, to pass the scissors through our lives. And in Baruch She-amar we say: “Baruch she-amar ve-hayah ha-olam,” Blessed is He who spoke and the world came into being, […] “Baruch gozer u-mekayem.” Baruch gozer: blessed is He who cuts, who severs — u-mekayem, al menat le-kayem, in order to sustain something. And we cannot understand it. Go and say that to anyone at the moment he is living through his tragedy — he will throw you out into the street. And yet, sometimes, with time, we come to integrate it, because the soul never dies. The soul accompanies us — the particle, the particle of infinity that we carry within us from our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our children.

Well, that is not lost. The instrument is lost, but the spirit knows no death. And that spirit we will indeed take up again, set it in another mounting, and give it a luster it did not have until now — for until now we had simply regarded it as something given for free. And I believe each of us does this, to some degree, each at his own level, each according to his measure — but it is done, it is done, it is done. Our parents, we carry them with us; family events, traumas, events we have lived through — like the Shoah, for example — we carry them with us. It is one with our history. We cannot speak of the Shoah in the past tense. Yes?

[…] — “Yes. Good evening. I wanted to ask you a question. Why do we speak of the soul taken hostage, and not the soul that has disappeared or the soul that is lost? Who took it hostage? What lies behind the principle of hostage-taking?” — Hostage-taking means that we did not take it into consideration. We locked it away. It wanted — every time it sent us signals, and we reduced it to silence. We did not allow it — we did not allow it — to weep for its father and its mother, to pare its nails. We did not — we did not want this soul to return to its source, its origin; and we made use of it like a worn-out garment. That is the problem. Consciousness, the consciousness of being, exists at every level, in everyone. But unfortunately, this beautiful woman — this Betulat Yisrael, this Virgin of Israel — we do not manage to free her. But that is the true war. You know that when they returned from a victorious war, the Rabbi said: very good, you have mastered the external enemy — but your internal enemy, have you vanquished your internal enemy?

That is the true war. Another question? — “Yes, Rav Benizri. How shall I put it? When one attends synagogue regularly, one finds oneself with all our traditions, with, I would say, the usual sequence of a service, and — how shall I put it? Personally, I am often struck by what goes on, by the attitude of some and the attitude of others. I would like to ask you, with regard to our own ritual: from what point am I in avodah zarah? From what point am I in idolatry?” — Yes, you are in idolatry when, in the end, you yield to folklore. And this folklore exists. I do not disparage it, but one must be aware of the place it occupies. For, well, we need cantors, we need to embellish the prayer with songs and melodies — all that is fine.

But in any case, it is like a piano — a great piano, with different notes. But in prayer there is always our personal symphony, which we play, which we interpret — and that we do in the Shemoneh Esreh, when everyone has fallen silent. Then it is the best moment, the best moment, when one truly stands face to face with oneself. But all of this — all the rest has been only a preparation for that level. Indeed, the very structure of the prayer follows three levels — not to speak of the fourth, which is that of Atzilut, emanation — Beri’ah, creation; Yetzirah, formation; Asiyah, action.

So we begin in reverse order. Asiyah first: what I am, what I am today. Then Yetzirah: what I conceive, what I wish to be, isn’t it? Beri’ah is my self-creation — my self-creation, in which I take part in what I am. That is the personal note. But it is in silence. As it is said, “lo va-ra’ash Hashem”: it is not in the storm, it is not in the thunder that the Eternal is found. “Kol demamah dakah” — it is the voice of a fine silence, a muted, a hushed silence. […] It is that one — the Shemoneh Esreh. There we are. Well, I will leave you now. I was happy to be with you again. Until next week — until next time.

— “I’ll subscribe you to the channel. Thank you very much. May I add that it was particularly impressive today?” — “Yes, exactly.” — “Thank you very much. Thank you very much for these words, which put love of the other and love of G-d […]” […] “You were really inspired.” — There we are. There we are, thank you. Have a good evening. — “Thank you very much. Good evening. Goodbye.” — Thank you very much. Goodbye. Thank you, Manu. — “Bye.” — Goodbye. Right, we stop here. So we’ll leave. Thank you, Manu. — “Yes, thank you, Manu.” — Hello, Julie. Hi, Nenel, how are you? — “Yes.” — All well? — “Yes, yes. Very well.” — Is your family well? — “Great. I married off my daughter last Sunday — it couldn’t be better than that.” — Oh, mazal tov, oh, mazal tov, that’s wonderful!

He married off his daughter. Mazal tov, mazal tov. Great. — “Very moving, it was very, very moving.” — Yes, it’s true. I can imagine, I can imagine. That’s great. It’s wonderful. — “Come, I’ll show you mine. Come over here. Here is my daughter.” — Hello. […] Bye, Manu. See you next week. — “See you next week.”