Question 4: How do we do Elul?

One of the things I appreciate about Judaism is our calendar and, specifically, our relationship to the moon. See, it’s easy (particularly in cities like NYC with tons of light pollution) to ignore the moon. We have streetlights and headlights, apartments with open curtains stacked one atop of the other, green orbs beckoning us to the nearest subway and neon signs inviting us to the nearest diner. It can be tough to even notice the moon. But the Jewish calendar reminds us to look up. If you want to orient yourself to Jewish time, you can always gaze skyward to see if there’s a full moon representing the middle of a month, a sliver representing the start or end, or the complete absence of a moon telling us that a new month is beginning.

On Wednesday night, look up. In theory, the dark sky will tell you that the month of Elul has begun.

Elul is a chance to do the work we don’t want to do. Enticing, I know. The work of Elul is often an emotionally draining, wince-inducing, teeth-gritting, nail-biting, tear-jerking affair. And it’s the only way to make sense of ourselves and the lives we live, and prepare with full hearts to enter the new year.

During Elul, we take stock. We analyze our relationships with our family, our friends, our colleagues, our neighbors, even the relative strangers we encounter at the checkout line or next to us on the bus. We look at our relationship with our environment—locally and globally. For the theists amongst us, we consider our relationship with the divine. And, perhaps most challenging, we look at our relationship with ourselves. Some of this work is straightforward, even if it’s not fun. We note our tendency to bring office stress home. We acknowledge our lapsed gym membership and abandoned running shoes. We look at our call history and name the relationships we’ve neglected. We peruse our bank statements and see that we’re not being generous in the ways we’d intended.

Luckily, this kind of thing is solvable with a bit of effort. We commit to taking a 10 minute walk when we get off the train each day to create a stress buffer between work and home. We block gym time into our calendar, and set reminders to text our friends. We sign up for recurring donations to a couple of non-profits. Good good. Missteps (potentially) corrected.

But the work that matters most? It’s the work of grappling with the parts of ourselves that seem stuck, year after year, no matter how much we might want them to change. It’s the work of naming and facing our shortcomings— not the ones we’re willing to bring up in job interviews but the ones we don’t want to bring up even to ourselves. Yes, we, the perfectionists who are afraid to stop and just be. Yes, we, the anger-prone who turn to substances for comfort. Yes, we, the conflict-averse who don’t speak up even when our silence hurts ourselves and others. Yes, we, the progressives who talk way more than we walk. Yes, we, the so self-critical that we can’t ever just be in the moment. You get the picture. Often, the mis-steps we take during the year can be traced to these stuck places within ourselves, and, often, if we want to avoid returning to the same old Elul reflections, we need to sit with them. Maybe you do this every year, but maybe this is new to you. Either way, here’s one path.

Find yourself pen and paper or a google doc or a note on your phone. Ideally, give yourself some dedicated time. Go to a cafe you like or a park or a part of your home where you feel a sense of spaciousness. If you’re a meditator, probably not a bad idea to center with a grounding practice. Then, it’s time to write.

1. Start with the easy stuff. Where are the places you’ve mis-stepped this year? (If you think the answer is “I didn’t mis-step,” your first line can be: “I wasn’t truthful with myself.”). For the purposes of this list, let’s say we yelled at our partner.

2. After you have that less-than-awesome list, it’s time to think about the potential why. First, the obvious (“I yelled at my partner because he didn’t do the dishes”). Then, the why beneath the why (“I yelled at my partner when he didn’t do the dishes because I’m scared of falling into the gender norm of being expected to handle more of the housework than he does.”). The first why only necessitates an apology (“Hey, I was frustrated with you but I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry.”). The second? The second necessitates something much scarier— a conversation with yourself about where you get stuck.

3. Set up your conversations and apologize. If you’ve wronged someone, you need to apologize and commit to changing your behavior. That’s Judaism 101. You can’t make good with God until you make good with humans, and it’s not the job of the people you’ve wronged to do the work of change with you, although you can invite them to. (For an excellent, much more detailed guide on how to engage in teshuvah, I recommend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair.)

4. So you’ve figured out the why, or at least a possible why. Now you can dig deeper. After all, you don’t just want to avoid yelling at your partner in the future— you want to avoid reaching the point where you want to yell. This might start with coming up with more possible whys. Write them all down. You yelled because you were tired, because you wanted time to chill instead of clean, because you generally feel unheard, because you were frustrated with your colleagues, because you felt guilty for not practicing the calligraphy you committed to learning for your sister’s wedding invites. How much of the yelling was really about the dishes at all? How much was circumstantial to that day or week? And how much was about you and how you conduct yourself in general?

5. After you do this with a bunch of mis-steps, note the commonalities in the whys and get to wrestling. This, my friends, is the tough part. If you’ve done your work, you’ll see your stuck places easily in your whys. If you’re lucky, you’ll know what to do about them, whether that means therapy, stepping away a part of your life that’s no longer serving you, or something else entirely. But, if you’re like most of us, naming your stuck places will only invite you to deeper reflection, and, guess what? That’s the work for Elul and into the new year. The work of noting the deeper why when you continue to mis-step (and we all will). Using your insight from this process to create more pause between your triggers and your reactions to them. Seeking that delicate balance between self-compassion and self-discipline in the hopes that, when the next Elul roles around, you’ll be doing better then than you are.

On Wednesday night, let’s look up, look within, and begin the work.