When you go on a journey, you usually spend some quality time reading guidebooks or websites, packing and preparing for the best and most meaningful trip. Right now is a time to prepare for the spiritual journey of the Jewish New Year.
Our passport to the New Year is the practice of teshuvah, often translated as “repentance,” but I prefer its literal meaning is return or reconnection. Think of teshuvah as reconnection: returning to other people, returning to God, and returning to our deepest selves.
Here are some ancient and modern practices to help us on our journey (including nature practices of course).
Returning to Others
One of the simplest traditions of this season is sending Shanah Tovah greetings. Remember actual New Year cards? I miss them! But we can broaden that custom. Elul can be a time to reach out to someone we’ve lost touch with, or someone we want to thank. Write a note, make a call, or even send an email.
Elul can also reconnect us with those who came before us. There is a custom of visiting the graves of departed loved ones before the High Holidays. If that isn’t possible, we can simply take time to remember them, do a mitzvah in their honor, or create a little corner in our homes with photographs or memorabilia.
And we connect to the larger community through tzedakah: making an extra donation, or buying and gathering food for our Yom Kippur food drive.
Then there is the harder—and very traditional—work of seeking and granting forgiveness. Jewish tradition teaches that Yom Kippur can bring forgiveness for sins between ourselves and God, but for wrongs committed against another person, we first have to approach that person ourselves.
So Elul is a time for making amends and seeking forgiveness. You can even use this post as your excuse: “rabbi said I had to call you before the holidays!”
(Remember that full teshuvah means more than saying we’re sorry. It means making amends where we can and trying to behave differently in the future.)
Forgiving others is more complicated, and our tradition does not treat forgiveness as one-size-fits-all. There are different levels: mechilah, letting go of a small offense; selichah, a deeper forgiveness that results from compassion for our shared humanity, and kaparah, atonement, reconcilliation—allowing a painful past to be incorporated into a larger story. Like Joseph who was able to forgive his brothers when he learned to see his life from a larger, even Godly, perspective.
Returning to the Divine
Elul is also traditionally understood as a time primed for spiritual closeness: to God, your soul, your inner life.
The Hebrew letters of Elul—אלול are traditionally read as an acronym for a verse from Song of Songs: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li—“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” The relationship between ourselves and the Divine is imagined not primarily through fear, but through love.
There are many traditional practices for cultivating that connection. The shofar is sounded each weekday morning during Elul as a kind of spiritual wake-up call. We begin reciting Psalm 27, with its message of trust and hope. A communal tradition is Selichot, the special penitential prayers offered late at night or early in the morning. Some people also choose a book to accompany them through the season, such as Rabbi Alan Lew’s This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.
One of my favorite images for Elul is “the King is in the field,” a teaching of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism. He compared the High Holidays to the time when a king is in the royal palace. Approaching the throne is formal and intimidating. But before the king reaches the palace, he travels through the countryside. Anyone can approach him there. The point is that during Elul, God is especially accessible, in our everyday lives.
Shofar, JHD
Returning to Ourselves
And finally, Elul invites us to return to ourselves.
One traditional practice is Heshbon HaNefesh—literally, “an accounting of the soul.” It means taking stock of our lives, not simply to judge ourselves but as a springboard for growth.
The Mussar movement developed a methodical approach to this practice. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Leffin’s Heshbon HaNefesh, published in 1812, offered a systematic way of working on our middot, our qualities of character. During Elul, for example, we might spend each week paying special attention to one quality: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, or zerizut—alacrity, the ability to act promptly on our good intentions. You can find modern adaptations of this practice online, such as the Mussar Institute.
But there are many ways to make a Heshbon HaNefesh. You could devote each week of Elul to a different dimension of your life: body, relationships and emotions, mind, and spirit.
There is even a modern version of this called 10Q, and I heartily recommend it. Beginning on Rosh Hashanah, you receive one question a day for ten days. Your answers are then “sealed away” in an online vault and returned to you a year later, giving you an unusual opportunity to see how you—and your life—have changed.
In the Field – returning to Nature
Lately, though, I find myself drawn to practices that help me return not just to my thoughts, but to my body, my senses, my personal relationships, and to acting locally when I feel overwhelmed by all the thinking globally. That can include the very physical pleasures of preparing for the holidays: finding or baking a round challah and honey cake, choosing crisp apples, soft dates, sweet honey, pomegranates and new fruits—even choosing something new to wear for the New Year.
And personally, I love connecting with nature at this time of year.
Remember the teaching that “the King is in the field”? A contemporary Torah teacher, Gavriel Strauss, suggested taking that image literally: go out into an actual field. Go outside and experience the natural world as a place where we can encounter Divine presence.
For me as a nature lover, this is a perfect way to prepare for the Days of Awe. Go outside and notice the subtle change of seasons beginning. Hear the crickets and cicadas. See the echinacea beginning to dry and the first hints of fall foliage. Feel the changing texture of the late-summer air. Open your senses and attention.
If the image of a “King” in the field seems too patriarchal, I sometimes prefer to say, “The Majesty is in the field.” Even more beautifully, the Zohar describes the Shechinah—the feminine, indwelling Divine Presence—with the imagery of a fragrant, verdant field.
Perhaps that is the deepest preparation for the New Year, not trying to become an entirely different person, but learning to return: to one another, to the Divine, to the world around us, and to the deepest part of ourselves.
Consider:
If teshuvah means “return,” what is something you would like to return to this Elul? How will you do that?
Photos by Rabbi Julie H. Danan
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