Category Archives: Elul

The ninth day of Elul

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“And God lifted me out of the pit of destruction, etc.” Did David really descend into a pit? Rather, David said, “I was already on my way down to the pit, and God did not let me fall.” And so it says (Psalm 16:11), “You make known to me the path of life.” Therefore it is said, “God lifted me out of the pit of destruction,” and not only that, but God lifted me up to a high place, as it says (Psalm 18:34), “God made my feet like the feet of deer and set me secure on the heights.” Why did God do this for me? Because of my hope in God. God did not desire sacrifices or offerings, but rather hope. (Midrash Tehillim 40:2)

The Midrash on psalm 40 reminds us that we are not alone, that the universe is neither random nor intentionally cruel. That if we continue to strive for hope, even in the face of what may feel a lot like despair or destruction, then God will not be far away.

Nachman of Bratslav- a famous depressive – is reported as having said it is forbidden to despair:

At the time he spoke the torah on Va’etchanan, which was published in Likutei [Moharan], Part II, section 78, and he’s speaking there about it being always forbidden to bring oneself to despair, however things are, heaven forfend. And he said it this way: “Men tor zich nisht m’ya’esh zayn. Gevalt! Zayy aych nisht m’ya’esh!” [It is forbidden to despair! Oy! [or: Bloody murder!] Don’t despair!” And he really drew out the word “gevalt” as one who does who cautions and cries out from the heart’s depths. (Chayei Moharn 49)

The main thing is to encourage oneself in every way possible {for there is no such thing as despair! (What he said was: Kein yiush iz gor nit fahr-handin !) He drew out these words Kein yiush…, and said them emphatically and with very amazing and awesome depth, in order to instruct and hint to each and every person throughout the generations not to despair under any circumstances, no matter what happens to him.} And be what may, even if one has fallen to where he has fallen, God spare us, since he encourages himself with something, he still has hope of repenting and returning to God.(Likutei Moharan, Part II 78:7:1-3)

It is indeed important not to despair – but maybe it would be easier to remind ourselves to continue to have hope. That, as the midrash says – God does not want our sacrifices or our offerings – God wants us to have hope.

Eighth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The previous three questions can be found in the previous three posts

The last question the soul is to be asked is this “Tzipita l’yeshua?” do you anticipate redemption, are you living in a state of hope?

Hope:

The theologian and philosopher Emil Fackenheim wrote “to be a Jew is to hope,”

And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks added “to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope”

Future Tense – How The Jews Invented Hope by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
“Judaism is a religion of details, but we miss the point if we do not sometimes step back and see the larger picture. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. There is no more challenging vocation. Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home, of hope.”

The seventh day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The third question

The third question we are to be asked is this:
Nasa’atta b’emunah? Did you act with honesty and integrity in your dealings with others?
Maybe one of the hardest questions to answer – we may at some level be aware of whether we are connecting to our people and engaging in living Judaism, We are probably aware – if only through feelings of guilt and inadequacy, of our record with family relationships, but our dealings with other people – so many of them – how can we really reflect on each one and ask ourselves this question?

The reality we should acknowledge is that what we say isn’t always what we mean; We need to admit to ourselves that even when we mean to do something and say we will do it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we actually do it, and so we create a dissonance that we have to address. Once we recognise that we are not living up to our expressed and internal values we are able to take the next step to try to realign our reality to our principles, to behave differently, to try to be that wonderful thing, a mensch. The act of teshuvah is really the realigning of our saying with our doing, the ongoing process of matching our behaviour with our ideals. And here again is the same issue. Nasa’atta b’emunah? Are you going about your business like a mensch? Are you really acting as though you are b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God?

Nasa’atta b’emunah – were you a mensch? Did you stay true to your values? Did your behaviour make people respect you or did it make them fear you? Did you behave in a way you would like others behave towards you?

The previous two questions can be found in the previous two posts. Tomorrow will bring the fourth question

The sixth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The second question God asks is this:
Asakta b’priya u’reviyah?
Did you devote yourself to family?
If engaging in Torah is a way of reaching both forwards and backwards in time and of pulling both into our worlds, how much more so is the family the touchstone of our immortality. We inherit so much from our parents and from their parents – not only physical looks and inherited tendencies, not only gestures and ways of being in the world. We inherit all sorts of other things – second and third generation groups will speak of the damage that can be passed through families. Dynasties of musicians or scientists demonstrate the intangibles that get passed on. Social workers can speak of the cycles of abuse or neglect; community rabbis can testify to the many non Jews who come to them to convert to Judaism – because they feel Jewish, because on further research a Jewish grand parent or great grandparent has been discovered, because they just know they have a Jewish soul.
Our liturgy speaks of a Book of Life in which all our actions are recorded. It is a powerful image, a metaphor for the truth that nothing we do – neither good nor bad – is ever really lost in this world, even if we forget. The book of Life exists in a number of ways, it exists within our own souls, but we also write it upon the souls of our family – our children, our parents, our partners, our family relations and the friends who act as our family in this modern more fractured world.
In particular, the book of our life is inscribed upon our children. They take on our pain and they internalise our experiences. They pay for many of our mistakes, and they struggle not to take on our lives and our expectations instead of their own.
The question we are asked after we die will not be did we love our family, or did we leave them well provided for. It is more subtle and complex than that. Rather like the first question it is about how we set our priorities in our life more than the actual acts we did or did not do. So, did we set aside time for Torah means did we engage in Jewish activity and covenant, but it also asks – did we control our time in such a way that we were able to make the choices we wanted to make? Did we fritter away our time or give away the control of our lives to someone else and abdicate from the responsibilities of our freedom? Asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? Means did we busy ourselves with our families, did we devote our energy and our thoughts to them, did we make their needs our preoccupation?
It is a truism that when we look back in our lives, what we regret tends not to be the things we did, but the things we didn’t do. All community rabbis will tell you that no-one regrets not spending more time in the office, but many people regret not spending more time with their families. So here is the question – asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? – did you engage with and invest in your family? Did you make time for them and be with them? Because when you look over your life, you will see that your family provide your structure, your history and your future. You will live on in them and with them; they are the ropes of life into which your soul is bound.

The first question can be found in yesterday’s post

Fifth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.
The first question is this
“Kav’ata Itim L’Torah? Did you set aside time for Torah?”
Did you set aside time for torah? Not, you’ll notice, ‘did you study Torah’. Nor ‘did you follow all the halachic requirements predicated on torah text?” But did you set aside time for Torah – the question isn’t academic.
Torah you see isn’t simply a book, it isn’t a text that we can learn or a narrative we teach our children. Torah has many more dimensions than that. It is a process, it is a history, it is the ongoing dialogue across generations between Jews and Jews, and Jews and God. So when we get ourselves involved in Torah, when we join the conversation and add the experiences and reflections of our lives to the living narrative of Torah, that is when we fit ourselves into our people and truly enter the Covenant. To set aside time for Torah is to be willing to identify in, to be prepared to challenge our ancestral understanding of God, to be ready to encounter God in modernity with open heart. To set aside time for Torah is to say “I will engage with life as a Jew – and in doing so I hope to enrich Judaism and deepen life. And I will add my link to the chain of tradition that remembers the past, supports the present and reaches out to a future I will not know”.

The next question will be posted tomorrow

Fourth Day of Elul

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In the vidui, the confession to be recited so many times at this season, we find the phrase “Al cheit she’chatanu lefanecha b’tim’hon ley’vav – For the sin we have committed before you by giving in to despair.” It slips by almost unnoticed most of the time as we recite a catalogue of misbehaviours by rote. But is despair really a sin and can we repent of it and actively change our attitudes? R. Nachman of Bratslav is credited with crystallising the concept, saying “there is no such thing as despair” and even, on his death bed: “Assur l’hit’ya-esh – It is forbidden to despair – never give up hope” (Likutei Moharan ll.78).
In our machzor the phrase comes in a set which includes the sins of plotting against others, hard heartedness, arrogance, and giving in to our evil impulse and secrecy. It is a strange positioning – The giving in to despair is sandwiched between a sense of our own arrogance– literally eynaim ramot – raised eyes, and our own yetzer ha’ra – our selfishness and base inclination. This placing seems to suggest that when we choose not to engage with reality, either by refusing to see what is around us or by allowing our internally constructed world view to dominate us – that is when despair creeps in.
Nachman also wrote “Im atta m’amim she’y’cholin lekalkeil, ta’amin she’y’cholim le’taken: – If you believe that it is possible to break things, you must also believe that it is possible to repair things”. So whatever we have broken in the past year let’s not despair, but know that it is time to repair by really noticing what is happening around us rather than living in the bubble of our own self constructed realities.

Third Day of Elul

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Martin Buber wrote in The Way of Man “To begin with oneself, but not to end with oneself; To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself. To comprehend oneself, but not to be preoccupied with oneself (Martin Buber 1878-1965)

His near contemporary Achad Ha’Am wrote “Judaism did not turn heavenward and create in heaven an eternal habitation of souls. It found ‘eternal life’ on earth, by strengthening the social feeling in the individual by making them regard themselves not as isolated beings with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as part of a larger whole. As a limb of the social body…I live for the sake of the member. I die to make room for new individuals who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus values the community as their own life, and strives after its happiness as though it here their individual wellbeing, they find satisfaction and no longer feel so keenly the bitterness of their individual existence, because they see the end for which they live and suffer.” (Achad Ha’Am aka Asher Hirsch Ginsberg 1856-1927)

Both speak the same truth – we are intimately connected with others, we cannot become so focussed on our own needs or desires that we ever forget that our lives are one thread in a continually weaving fabric, that we need other people and other people need us – we cannot hide in an ascetic practise and leave the human world behind, for we are a fundamental and necessary part of that human world.


In the words of Buber, Judaism does not make personal salvation our highest aim but “Judaism regards each [person’s] soul as a serving member of God’s creation, which, by the work of human beings is to become the Kingdom of God; …True, each [soul] is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake – neither for the sake of its temporal happiness nor for that of its eternal bliss, but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world” (p37 The Way of Man)

The Second Day of Elul

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מוֹדֶה אֲנִי לְפָנֶיךָ מֶלֶךְ חַי וְקַיָּם שֶׁהֶחֱזַרְתָּ בִּי נִשְׁמָתִי בְּחֶמְלָה, רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ:
I give thanks to You living and everlasting Sovereign, for You have restored my soul with mercy. Great is Your faithfulness. (Weekday shacharit service, prayers of preparation)
Every morning our liturgy gives us these words of gratitude. Jewish tradition views sleep as being like one sixtieth of death (Berachot 57b) and the Gemara goes on to suggest prayers before sleeping “One who enters to sleep on his bed recites in his bed from Shema Yisrael.. Then he recites: Blessed…Who makes the bands of sleep fall upon my eyes and slumber upon my eyelids, and illuminates the pupil of the eye. May it be Your will, Eternal my God, that You make me lie down in peace …. Let neither bad dreams nor troubling thoughts disturb me…. Enlighten my eyes in the morning lest I sleep the sleep of death, never to awaken. Blessed are You, God, Who gives light to the whole world in Your glory. (Berachot 60b)
Many religions see sleep as being related to death, and describe this observable loss of consciousness as the soul leaving the body; dreams become the experiences the soul encounters, portents from another place. And Judaism is no exception – we thank God for restoring our souls to our bodies upon awakening. But this prayer goes further than gratitude for another day of life. The two words “rabbah emunatecha” – your faith/faithfulness is great” add an extra layer of meaning for us. Most prayers elaborate on our faith in God, or at least our aspiration to have such faith. But here we describe the entity with faith not as the human being grateful to God, but God themself – who has faith in us.
The phrase comes into the liturgy from the book of Lamentations (3:22) and reminds us that however hard we are finding life, however low we might feel, or dislocated from and abandoned by God, God continues to have mercy on us, God continues to have faith in us. All we have to do is to turn and find our way back to God, and God will be ready to greet us. A repeated message in the liturgy of the season of the Yamim Noraim, that God is waiting for our teshuvah. But also a daily message – this may be the season for teshuvah, but the gates of repentance are never closed.
“To recall my distress and my misery/ Was wormwood and poison;
Whenever I thought of them, I was bowed low.
But this do I call to mind, Therefore I have hope:
The kindness of GOD has not ended / And God’s mercies are not spent.
They are renewed every morning— Ample is Your grace!
“GOD is my portion,” I say with full heart; This is the One in whom I have hope.
(Lam. 3 :19-24)

First Day of Elul

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Elul is traditionally a month of introspection and preparation for the coming Yamim Noraim – Days of Awe.
Like many months of the Hebrew calendar its name is Babylonian in origin and probably has its roots in the Akkadian word for a harvest, though it has resonances also of the verb “to protrude” אלל (‘alal), and of the noun “a futile thing” אלול (‘elul)
In Aramaic, the verb אלל (‘alal), means “to encircle” or “to search out”, which corresponds to the Hebrew verb עלל (‘alal), to glean.
We might drash on this that Elul is month that demands our attention, a month we might use to search our lives and the way we are living, both in order to gather together and celebrate our best characteristics and allow them to nourish the way we live our lives, and at the same time to sift out the empty and futile aspects of ourselves and our lives.
There are many rabbinic explanations for the name of this month, two of which are:
That it is an acronymic reference to the first letters of the phrase in the Song of Songs אני לדודי ודודי לי “I am by Beloved’s and my Beloved is mine” – the “Beloved” in this reading being God rather than a more temporal partner. And
That it is a reference to a verse in the Book of Esther אִישׁ לְרֵעֵהוּ, וּמַתָּנוֹת לָאֶבְיֹנִים “Each person to their neighbour, and gifts to the poor”
Wildly different books and contexts – but what brings them together?
The four words in each reading not only have the letters of “Elul” represented, but each word asks a similar question for us while we glean and search ourselves, separating the futile from the worthwhile as we turn ourselves towards God once more.
The first word Ani/Ish represents our human selves. Who am I? What is my “selfhood”? What is my humanity about?
The second word – LeDodi/l’Rei’eihu bespeaks relationship with others or the “Other”.
The third word “V’dodi”/Matanot asks “What does God want from me?” “What can/do I contribute to the world?”
The fourth word Li/le’evyonim nudges us into asking “How do I get to my best self?” How do I bring about change?
The verse from Esther is set in the context of change – turning mourning to joy. It reminds us that such a journey can be made, change can happen – even in the most unlikely circumstances
The journey of Elul begins with the self and ends with the self, but the self at the end of the process is not the same as the one who began it.

Sermon Kol Nidrei Lev Chadash 2025

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In the daily Amidah and also many times during the Yamim Noraim, we recite a prayer:

Shema koleinu Adonai eloheinu, chus verachem aleinu, vekabel berachamim uvratzon et tefilateinu שמע קולינו יהוה אלוהינו, חוס ורחם עלינו, וקבל ברחמים וברצון את תפילתינו. 

Hear our voice, O Eternal our God; spare us and have mercy upon us, and accept our prayers in mercy and favour.  

It is based on a passage in the book of Psalms (65) where we call God the “shomei’ah tefillah” – the one who hears prayers.

Yet this psalm begins with a phrase that is hard to understand and so is often mistranslated:

 לְךָ֤ דֻֽמִיָּ֬ה תְהִלָּ֓ה אֱלֹ֘הִ֥ים בְּצִיּ֑וֹן וּ֝לְךָ֗ יְשֻׁלַּם־נֶֽדֶר׃

“To You, silence is praise, God in Zion, and to you vows are paid”

Followed by the verse which informs our prayer                שֹׁמֵ֥עַ תְּפִלָּ֑ה עָ֝דֶ֗יךָ כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֥ר יָבֹֽאוּ׃

“Hearer of prayer, all human beings come to you”

The psalmist begins with silent praise, and with the completion of vows made to God, and only then says that God is the one who hears prayer – the prayers of all human beings.

The Talmud tells us that “Devarim she’balev einam Devarim” – words not formed out loud are not halachically valid – in the case of promises, just having an intention is not enough. (Kiddushin 49b) – and yet the psalmist understands – the feelings in our hearts, the ideas in our minds – these too form part of our connection to God.  We do not HAVE to verbalise them for God to hear them.

We Jews are – par excellence – a people who exist within words. We have always relied on them to make sense of what is happening to us, to communicate with others, to create and to transmit meaning. We read our texts and examine every letter, every word, to draw meaning in every generation. We protect the language of those texts, turning the object that holds the narrative into a holy item, a sefer torah.  From the moment Moses tells the Children of Israel to write his words into a sefer that will travel with them for all time, we are bound to the integrity and extraordinary elasticity of the Hebrew language.

Two of the most frequent verbs in torah are  “Amar” and “Diber” – to say and to speak.   Between them they appear almost seven thousand times in Tanakh – far outstripping any other verbal root. We are the people of the book. Words are our currency. Just as God brought the universe into being through the power of speech, so do we create meaning and develop understanding through words.

Yet since 7th October 2023, we find ourselves heartbroken and lost. The phrase that is most often heard in Israel and in Jewish communities is  “Ein milim – there are no words”.

 It feels like there is no vocabulary for what we have experienced and what we continue to live through.  The medium that has sustained us and provided for us – language – has suddenly shattered and we are left feeling adrift and powerless in a hostile environment.

Unable to use words to describe or to make sense of our reality, we are like Noah – famously silent in the face of the destruction of the world by flood. Or like Aaron who was silenced by his grief when two of his sons died after having offered strange fire before God. We are overwhelmed, voiceless, unable to know what we can possibly say or do to make sense of what is happening, or to be able to act in order to change it.

In the book of Psalms there are many pleas for God to hear our prayer, to listen to us and to act.  And there are even more petitions that God not be silent but that God responds to us. It is a regular theme, the lack of words between us and God and the ensuing fear of abandonment.

But silence does not have to be a negative thing. Silence can express our feelings even beyond the ability of words to do so.

In Pirkei d’Rav Eliezer, a medieval midrashic text, we read that “The voices of five objects of creation go from one end of the world to the other, and their voices are inaudible. When people cut down the wood of a fruit tree, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is inaudible. When the serpent sloughs its skin, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and its voice is not heard. When a woman is divorced from her husband, her cry goes from one end of the world of the world to the other, but the voice is inaudible, when the infant comes out from the mother’s womb and when the soul departs from the body, the cry goes forth from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is not heard.” Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer 34:4

The midrash is describing moments of existential trauma – and the accompanying sound of the inaudible voice.  

The sound of silence reverberates through Jewish tradition. Possibly the most well known is the story of Elijah and his encounter with God.

“There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Eternal; but the Eternal was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake; but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake—fire; but the Eternal was not in the fire. And after the fire—the voice of slender silence [kol d’mamah dakah].” (I Kings 19:11-12)

Kol d’mamah dakah.  When Elijah heard this, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold a voice was with him and said to him: “Why are you here, Elijah?”

God here is a sound, or paradoxically we might say that God here is the silence within the sound. And somehow the communication is complete. With this one question, Elijah is comforted and challenged and given back his life’s meaning. Having fled Jezebel in fear for his life, having begged God to take his life, having reached the depths of despair and stayed in his cave alone and paralysed with sadness – it is the sound of the silent question that returns him to life.

After the seventh of October, we have no words. Like Elijah we are fearful and we are angry and we feel ourselves to be so very alone. It is almost as if we cannot begin to imagine a future, because imagining something usually requires language and we have no words. But while language may structure imagination and help us to communicate it to others, there is another, visceral, sensory, intuitive human faculty that allows us to imagine without words.   We can dream, perceive, feel, pray – all without words.

Elijah is reminded by God that ultimately the connection between us and God does not require words.  The overarching sound of Elul and of the Yamim Noraim is not all the words spoken in prayer, but the cry of the Shofar. It is a sound that takes us back to Mt Sinai, to our first meeting with God as a people, to the creation of a covenant that cannot be broken.

The word shofar itself comes from the root shin-peh-reish which has the basic meaning of “to be hollow”, though it has a secondary meaning of “beauty”.  Again, there is the curious and paradoxical connection here – instead of silence and communication, we have emptiness and beauty.  It seems that always in our tradition the idea of there being “nothing” is challenged and juxtaposed with the idea of there being “ something” that is very special. What seems to be silent is in fact full of communication, what seems to be empty turns out to be full – nowhere more clear than the wilderness in which the Jewish people were formed – Midbar – a word which connotes empty wilderness, and yet which is formed from the root “davar” which as a noun means “a thing” or “a word” and as a verb means “to speak”.

While we may feel ourselves to be empty and hollow, with no words with which to imagine a different future or to create a new idea, our tradition comes to remind us that we are not alone, not abandoned. As the psalmist writes, even silence is praise of God, and God hears even what we do not speak or even form into words.

While we are a people of words, living in a world which our tradition tells us was created by the speaking of God – “God said…. And there was….”  We are also a people of commandment, of covenant and of action.  While the verbs for speech are the most frequent in bible, the verbs “to be” and “to do, to make” are the next numerous in our texts.   In a world where words feel inadequate or wrong, we are still able to act in order to fulfil our purpose and meaning. Our actions at this time may indeed speak much louder than words ever could.

I’d like to conclude with a story by Loren Eiseley, (The star thrower, an essay published in 1969 in The Unexpected Universe)

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a child picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the child, he asked, “What are you doing?” The child replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Child,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”

After listening politely, the child bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, said…” I made a difference for that one.”

At the moment we may have few or no words. We may be hurting and filled with fear and pain and anger. We may feel less safe, and less certain of what the future will bring than ever before. But even so, we are Jews. We must bring our whole selves to living our lives. We will petition God to hear our prayers, blow the shofar to call both our attention and God’s attention. And each of us, in our own way, will find our way forward. We will find beauty in the emptiness, praise in the silence, and through our actions our voices will be heard.