Elul: When the Curse Is a Blessing

The New Year — the New Year, which we always greet with this wish: “Tikhleh shanah ve-kilelotehah” — “let the year end with its curses” — “tachel shanah u-virkhotehah” — “let the year begin with its blessings.” So which curse is meant? You know that Ezra instituted that before Shavuot — that is, before we celebrate the giving of the Torah — we read a parashah (Torah portion) of kelalot, of curses: threats of death hanging over the people should it ever fail to honor the purpose of the Exodus from Egypt. And he also instituted that before Rosh Hashanah we read another parashah of curses, namely Parashat Ki Tavo, which we read this coming week. Yet this parashah does not end with words of consolation, as does the first one, the parashah that precedes Shavuot. And we ask ourselves: why? For what reason — for what reason?

What unsettles us is that the verses close with “ve-heshivkha Hashem Mitzrayim ba-oniyot” — “Hashem will bring you back to Egypt in ships” (Devarim 28:68) — with the threat of a return to Egypt, of suffering such as we have never known. And we wonder where this will lead us, and how we can say “let the year end with its curses,” when these curses are right here: we read them every single year, and we are not about to erase them. These threats weigh upon us — so how can we begin the year with its blessings? This question was put to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and he could not answer it. He was hiding in his cave with his son, afraid of being seized by the Romans and subjected to physical violence because he persisted in keeping up the study of Torah. His disciples managed to bring him this question, and because he did not know what to reply, he himself began to weep and sank into a deep sleep — until the prophet woke him, saying: in the second blessings — in the second curses — there is a secret: there is no real consolation. Why? Because the curse is in itself a blessing. That a curse should be a blessing is somewhat surprising. But to understand it, we must return to another text in Devarim: “Ki tolid banim u-venei vanim ve-noshantem ba-aretz” — “When you beget children and grandchildren, and have grown old in the land” (Devarim 4:25). You know that Tisha be-Av commemorates the destruction of both the First and the Second Temple; and we know full well that the first curses are directed more toward the destruction of the First Temple. There, a consolation did come, since seventy years later the Second Temple was built. But the second curses point rather to the destruction of the Second Temple, which is likewise commemorated on the Ninth of Av.

So on the day of Tisha be-Av, the Torah reading is built around “ki tolid banim u-venei vanim” — “when you beget children and grandchildren” — and then ve-noshantem: if you grow old in this land, this aging may indeed lead to the self-destruction of the Jewish people. But HaKadosh Baruch Hu (the Holy One, blessed be He) saw to it that this aging would not end in death. How? Two years before the threat of death could come to pass, He exiled His people from the land; and this exile is a way of reshaping the people elsewhere, so that it may think itself through anew and choose, of its own accord, a new direction — the one that will bring it back to its land.

And at bottom, the word ve-noshantem, this aging, shares its root with the verb yashen, with shenah — sleep. Sleep — this state of indolence, of routine — is the very greatest danger. The greatest danger, because children and grandchildren live in other conditions, in new conditions, not those of their parents, their great-grandparents, and so on. The world moves forward, and it moves forward with “ha-mechadesh be-tuvo be-khol yom tamid ma’aseh vereshit” — “Who in His goodness renews each day, continually, the work of creation.” He renews life. The conditions of life are not the same, since, as we have said, there is a beginning, and therefore there is an end, a purpose; there is a history unfolding from the creation until the coming of the messianic world. And so one day is not like another, and one generation is not like the one lived before it; this is borne out by the movement of the generations — their new trials, and the way each generation, in its time, overcomes its challenges.

So we are taught that bringing the exile forward, ahead of the appointed time, was meant to forestall the disappearance of the people among the nations. And what is the disappearance of the people among the nations? It is when the Jewish people wishes to become like the other nations. There it is, melted into the nations, assimilated among the nations — that is its form of disappearance: one no longer tells a Jew from a non-Jew. Now HaKadosh Baruch Hu has promised that the Jewish people will never disappear: “ki ka-asher ha-shamayim ha-chadashim ve-ha-aretz ha-chadashah… ken ya’amod zar’akhem ve-shimkhem” — “for as the new heavens and the new earth… so shall your seed and your name endure” (Yeshayahu 66:22). Like the new heavens and the new earth, your descendants will always be there. The Jewish people is bound to the very physical existence of this world, and so one cannot for a single moment imagine its disappearance. What, then, is happening when HaKadosh Baruch Hu brings calamities and imposes harsh trials on the Jewish people?

It is not — it is never — to banish it from the land, but always to enable it to survive, to come through its trials and renew its vital energies. And for that reason the kelalot, the curses, are in their essence a blessing. Our Sages conveyed this phenomenon through the following image. When you throw a ball hard against a wall, it comes back to you — not with the same intensity, of course; with less force — but it has met a wall, it cannot destroy it, and so it comes back. The same phenomenon arises in Jewish thought; only here the force that throws the ball is that of the terrible trials G-d imposes on His people. For the tablets of the Law — on the very day the giving of the Torah was being celebrated — were profaned by the sin of the Golden Calf; and from there a true fall begins, a decline, which hurls us toward Tisha be-Av, toward total destruction.

Forty days later the tablets of the Law were broken — the first tablets. So we are on a slippery road, a steep slope toward nothingness; but at that very moment there rises up G-d’s promise never to separate the destiny of the Jewish people from the being of creation, of the universe. And so this movement of decline meets that primal force, G-d’s promise, which thrusts it back hard, so that there is no longer any choice — on the contrary, now one must pull oneself together. That is the phenomenon of the first curses, those that precede Shavuot, which form a single whole with the curses that precede Rosh Hashanah — the curses before Rosh Hashanah, which evoke the destruction of the Second Temple and prepare the new giving of the Torah that will come on Yom Kippur. And this begins on Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the month.

We begin to count these forty days in which we truly try to rethink our existence, our lives, and to shape with our own hands the tablets of the Law that we broke the first time. And how is it done? There are two things. There is the invocation of the Thirteen Attributes of G-d’s kindness, for everything is “bedil Vaya’avor.” Bedil Vaya’avor? What does this bedil Vaya’avor mean? We ask HaKadosh Baruch Hu to remember our fathers — Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, David, Shlomo — and we ask Him to grant us His favor, to save us, to heal the sick among the people of Israel, and so on; and always: bedil Vaya’avor, bedil Vaya’avor, bedil Vaya’avor.

What does this bedil Vaya’avor mean? “Because of Vaya’avor” — “And He passed by.” And what is Vaya’avor? It is the invocation of the Thirteen Attributes. But what is the secret of these Thirteen Attributes? It is when HaKadosh Baruch Hu said to Moshe: now that you ask Me for the secret of My conduct toward the people of Israel, know that “ve-chanoti et asher achon ve-richamti et asher arachem” (Shemot 33:19) — I will grant grace to the one whom I surround with that grace, and I will show mercy to the one who will receive that mercy. And the Sages gave it this interpretation: I will grant grace even if he does not deserve it; I will show mercy even if he is not worthy of it. That is to say, there comes a moment when HaKadosh Baruch Hu Himself sets aside the threat “heref mimeni ve-ashmidem” (Devarim 9:14) — “let Me be, and I will destroy this people” — and grants His grace to His people.

And we, in our prayers, when we invoke these Thirteen Attributes of grace, say: “Do this for us, grant us that — and it will be so, it will be so, since You promised it to us.” You promised it when You revealed Yourself to Moshe, when he interceded — when he interceded to ask a reprieve for the people — and You promised him that so it would be. That is the first thing. The second — the second is the shofar. And the shofar is meant le-arbev et ha-Satan, to confound the Satan — to throw the Satan into confusion. What is the Satan? “Hu Satan, hu yetzer ha-ra, hu mal’akh ha-mavet” — “he is the Satan, he is the evil inclination, he is the angel of death.” The Satan is the angel of death.

The Satan is the one who nurtures in us a sense of pride, a boundless arrogance — that is when he is hot-blooded, like a bull charging at a man. Or else he is like the chamor, the donkey, when he has chosen to put up with things, to stay in his place, to stand there, to pay attention to nothing, not to keep watch. He puts up with things […] — the burden, he bears it, but he is utterly indifferent. That is the mal’akh ha-mavet, that is the Satan — that one is the angel of death, the angel of death. And how does one confound the Satan? How does one throw these two tendencies into confusion,

the one active, the other passive? Through the sound of the shofar. The sound of the shofar. Oh yes: “Im yitaka shofar be-ir ve-am lo yecheradu?” (Amos 3:6) — shall the shofar be sounded in a city and the people not tremble, not fall into disarray, into charadah? Today people talk about charedim, but they do not know what the word means. The source of the word charedim lies in the words of the prophets: “Shim’u devar Hashem ha-charedim el devaro” (Yeshayahu 66:5) — “Hear the word of Hashem, you who tremble at His word”: you who tremble, who are thrown into turmoil, when you hear the word of G-d. For this we must go back to the origin of the verb charad in the text. When does the verb appear for the first time? When Yaakov, clothed in Esav’s garments, presents himself before Yitzchak to take the blessing; and there it says: “Va-yecherad Yitzchak charadah gedolah ad me’od” — “And Yitzchak trembled with an exceedingly great trembling” (Bereshit 27:33).

Yitzchak was seized with trembling, with utter bewilderment — for, think of it, he had a course of action, a plan; but the fact is that Yaakov appears before him in Esav’s garment, and so his plan is foiled. His plan was foiled — that is charadah. And we find this sense of charadah a second time — a second time — when the sons of Yaakov come up from Egypt, laden with all the sacks of grain that Yosef had given each of his brothers to fight the famine that had gripped the land of Israel and struck the family. And when they opened the sacks, they found their money — the money they had given Yosef to pay for the grain — and the brothers ask themselves: what is being prepared for us? They had leaned on their assumptions, and they were mistaken: they thought they were moving with the right current of history, and it turns out they were not. So what is charadah? Charadah is that jolt which halts the course of a deed, of an event, and compels one to rethink it, to see it in a different light. And that is the power of the shofar.

Will the shofar be sounded in a city and the people not tremble, not ask itself why it is standing there — because the shofar has sounded? Unfortunately, today we have somewhat stripped the shofar of all its resonance, of its deep vibration in the conscience […]. Today children play with the shofar, and there are contests for the best shofar blower; but the shofar is the outpouring of the soul. What outpouring of the soul? There are three stages in the manifestation of speech: nefesh, ruach, neshamah. This shows clearly that when G-d set man apart from all the animals by the breath of speech, it was called nefesh chayah, a living soul — speech was called nefesh chayah. But this nefesh chayah is a breath in motion, a breath in motion that has been articulated: it has become nefesh, it has become speech.

But this breath began in the neshimah, in breathing itself. A child does not yet know how to speak. He has his neshimah, his breathing, but he has not yet given shape to his breath; he has nothing but his crying, and it is through crying that he expresses his needs. Later on he will articulate this breath, give it a body, give it a form. What is the shofar? The shofar is the primal neshamah of speech. When it manages to express itself, it can do so only through wails, gasps, cries, moans and tears. It is speech in its first gestation. So when our Sages spoke of the shofar, they spoke of a sound that cannot be translated into words.

It cannot fit itself to any musical line. It remains in its raw expression — what the soul, in its very depths, can express: its neshimah, its neshimah. And that is why we speak of teki’at shofar, teki’at shofar. What does the verb taka mean in Hebrew? The verb taka means “to drive in.” Litko’a yated is to drive in a peg — to force one object to fit into another. And why was this term chosen — litko’a ba-shofar, to “drive in” the shofar? The meaning is that we have adopted a somewhat formal language that lets us dress up every situation a little, politicize our speech, seduce, lie, deceive. But to combat this phenomenon of a language that has lost all proportion — as happened to the first dibrot, the first words, through the sin — a new sound is needed: the sound of the shofar.

That is why, at the moment G-d revealed Himself to the people of Israel, “va-yehi kol ha-shofar holekh ve-chazek me’od” — “and the sound of the shofar grew ever louder” (Shemot 19:19). The sound of the shofar went on swelling; the sound of the shofar keeps swelling, and the whole world falls silent. No bird chirped, no beast made a sound; the earth stood frozen — all of creation. Language must be re-created, found anew. And it is this process of re-creating language that will lead us to the second dibrot. The second dibrot are the second language — the dibbur, speech. The first dibbur of HaKadosh Baruch Hu was falsified, distorted; now it must be restored in another way. That is what we apply ourselves to from Rosh Chodesh Elul onward.

For, regardless of all the texts that vary from community to community, and of the dates on which the selichot (penitential prayers) begin, and so on, there is one thing on which every community agrees: forty days before the restoration of healthy communication between G-d and man, we begin to sound the shofar. We begin to give back to the primal breath in man its true nature. Now, the world was created by speech; speech must be given back its creative power, its vibration. That is what we set ourselves to from the very start, from Rosh Chodesh Elul, until at last we complete this liberation of our being from all the artifices of speech through the sound of the shofar.

[…] You know, our Sages found rashei tevot — acrostics — for the month of Elul: alef, lamed, vav, lamed. If we were to look for all such acrostics in the Bible, we would find fifty-seven of them; but what one generally finds, and what people remember, are four. What are these four? “Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li” — “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Shir ha-Shirim 6:3): ani — alef, le-dodi — lamed, ve-dodi — vav, li — lamed. Now the first falsification that threatens a human being is the falsification of love — when there is no reciprocity in love. Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li: my beloved is mine, and I am my beloved’s. This is the secret of recognizing every person —

of recognizing them in their very existence. For we must know that the relationship we live with G-d in the absolute is the one we live in miniature in the relationship of a couple. This love must be given kiddushin — a sense of holiness, a sense of holiness. That is what we try to do, and on it the success of this first point depends. But it engages a whole generation, the education of every generation: for if this love fails, the first to bear the consequences are the children. Then the second — the second acrostic of Elul: “U-mal Hashem Elokekha et levavkha ve-et levav zar’ekha” — “And Hashem your G-d will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring” (Devarim 30:6): et, levavkha, ve-et, levav — alef, lamed, vav, lamed — Elul. This is the circumcision of the heart. For what is circumcision, after all?

It is a primal act: going against nature, against the order of things, against natural and moral givens. Circumcision. So the first awakening is to perform circumcision upon evil. One must not leave it in its first nature, its raw nature; one must rectify it through the very flesh. And so one must teach a person to love, not to remain unfeeling, not to kick away all that the parents have built — to try to draw the new generations toward the true heritage of their parents. It is hard, it is hard […]. But what we invoke in our prayers […] is the strength, the strength of our fathers: it is what gives to us — it is that source which gives to us.

So Elul commits us not only to give new vigor to our holy love, but also to place greater emphasis on the education of our children, on which our future likewise depends. What is at stake is ourselves, our dignity, our education. And a third aspect. […] But what matters — as I have always told you — is the idea that takes shape through “ish le-re’ehu u-matanot la-evyonim” — “[portions] to one another, and gifts to the poor” (Esther 9:22). It is in the Megillah of Esther: there is a movement of unity within the Jewish people, in which each person recognizes himself through his fellow, […] and generosity toward those who lack everything. And take note: the lack can be of different kinds — a lack of consolation, an intellectual lack, a lack of the physical means of existence, and so on.

So the third focal point of our reconsideration for this new year is our community life, which can recover its communication, its ease of communication, its unity, only through the gift of self. I say it often: reciprocity breeds nothing but violence. You said this to me, so I said that to you; you did this to me, so I did that to you; I pay you back in your own coin, and so on. It is the worst of all conduct, the worst of human behavior. No — one must always know how to stand within a berit, a covenant. Yes, a covenant binds both parties equally to do certain things; but I see it as a berit hesed, a covenant of kindness: I do not set things in total equality, but in an inequality in your favor — in the other’s favor.

That is the third chapter of the reflection, and finally a fourth: “Ve-ha-Elokim innah le-yado ve-samti lekha makom” — “but G-d brought it about by his hand, and I will appoint you a place” (Shemot 21:13). This concerns someone who has killed inadvertently. HaKadosh Baruch Hu gives him a possibility of refuge, of reconsidering the accident he caused without seeing it — an accident that gnaws at him because a man died, and that gives him no respite under the weight of remorse. So what about you? There are moments of crisis in life. There are situations we did not want. There are mistakes we have experienced. […] And it haunts me. “I will help you rebuild yourself from there.”

It is a fact, because even when we ourselves cause no accident, we are sometimes the victims of accidents caused by others — of their misconduct, their irresponsibility, and so on. We did not want it: others drag us into war […], and it costs us. […] That is the fourth. I think I will have to stop here. I will continue this reflection — not next week, because I will be taking part in a family event, a joyous occasion […], G-d willing. So we will meet again another time. And now, if you have any questions, I will gladly take them. — I wanted to ask you a small question. With all your explanations about the shofar, one wonders how one can truly listen to the shofar and take it in before Rosh Hashanah or before Yom Kippur. Because as long as one has not been “cleansed,” so to speak, by […]