awake! awake!

in which we quicken to the call to rouse from our soul’s deep slumber, the very essence of Elul, the month when we turn toward the holiness of the coming Days of Awe. . .

Ambling to the water’s edge—before the night curtain rose on the theater of another day under the sun—seemed a wise way to get things going. After all, the sages, the prophets, and the rabbis are clear in their insistence: Awake, awake!

And this, the rabbis specify, is the month to do it.

To await the rising of that blazing orb seems a certain way to shake the cobwebs from the soul. It surely beats a swift glance through blurry, barely-opened eyes toward the red-hot digits glaring from my bedside teller of the time.

Awake, awake!

It’s the prescription of every religion, of every path toward the Sacred. Do not slumber through this lifetime. It’s your one and only shot at partaking of this voluptuous existence. Even more so, it’s your one and only shot at bringing to the planet the singular shard of light you’re meant to bring—the very reason, quite frankly, you’re here in the first place.

Palpably alive to the truth that time is on its own clock, and that we are not to read it but to live it, I pack my days with wisdom where I find it. I find it, deeply, in the Jewish calendar. In the ancient texts that unfurl the dotted lines pointing toward the Sacred, toward the Divine Holiness that I believe breathed life into all creation, and into each and every one of us.

We have entered the season when holiness permeates in its richest tones, its amber and golden tones. When the days feel drenched in that honeyed slant of sunlight. Soon, the Days of Awe will be upon us. The holiest of holy days in the Jewish calendar.

Now, though, it is Elul. The month that calls us to awaken. To rise up from the slumber induced by sin, so the rabbis teach. To repent, repair, return to who we’re meant to be. A prescription I understand to mean: to return to the holiness with which God first imagined us. The endosperm of who we are, nestled deep beneath the hurts and scars that life has layered, one atop another.

“You are walking through the world half asleep,” Rabbi Allen Lew writes. “It isn’t just that you don’t know who you are and that you don’t know how and why you got here . . . A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. The time of transformation is upon you.”

Everything about the month—about these days before the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, and the day of deep atonement, Yom Kippur—is calling for a cleansing of the soul, of an awakening to the majesties and magnificence all around. To the simple precious beauty of our simple solitary selves.

We are to sound the shofar, the ram’s horn, every morning on awaking. We are to recite each day the thirteen attributes of God’s mercy (among them: God is compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness, and in truth; forgiving of all our sins, premeditated and otherwise. Note to Self: aim for even one this month.) We are to drench ourselves, in every which way, in whatever shakes us from our stupors.

Of the shattering cry of the shofar (a bellows likened to the cry of a mother in labor, to the sound of creation, to the hundred wails of the mother whose child is never to return), Torah scholar Rachel Anisfeld writes: “The shofar speaks in a language that does not have words, is beyond words. It is the soul’s language, somehow mournful, joyous, triumphant and pleading all at once, beyond time and space, eternal, primordial and otherworldly. . . . This is how God speaks to humans.”

She goes on: “There are places inside us that speak this shofar language regularly, and they, too, are the voices of God, though we recognize them not. They cry out without words to be heard . . . We dismiss these messenger angels at our peril. . . . When we learn to listen to them, when we begin to turn towards them instead of turning away, what we are doing is a very deep teshuva, a returning both to ourselves and to the God who has been calling to us.”

So I threw off my bedsheets, and I stumbled to the water’s edge, where I sat and waited for the orb to climb the curve of this old blue marble, or so it seems in the skewed-up physics of our mind, where we do not realize quite how it works, so we grasp the plainest, bluntest equation.

I know the sun comes up. It’s done so for the last 25,438 days of my life. But I swear to you, as I sat there waiting, and as the first red light ever-so-barely inched across the flatline of the far-away horizon, I gasped. I admit to astonishment. It is a mighty thing to watch the eternal play out according to its script. Each morning is its own miracle. That’s how it felt to me, sitting there on the sand, beach flies biting me up and down my legs.

I learned this week that the very word Elul is meant to be an acronym for the Hebrew phrase, “Ani L’dodi V’dodi Li,” which translates to “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (In Hebrew, where acronyms are visually rather than phonetically derived, that very phrase אני לדודי ודודי לי is stripped away to give us א (Aleph—a silent letter) - ל (Lamed) - ו (Vav) - ל (Lamed).) In the fourteenth century, Hebrew scholars and sages reverse-engineered its four letters and pinned them to the line from the Song of Songs. It’s called a bacronym. In other words, a phrase made to fit an already existing word, something like squeezing a bosom into a corset.

Originally, the word’s roots trace to the ancient Akkadian word ulūlu or elūlu, which means “harvest” or “harvest time.” In the ancient Babylonian calendar, the month was known as Araḫ Ulūlu (”harvest month”), literally “the time when the produce of the land is brought in.” Aramaics, whose language became the mother-tongue of the fertile delta we know as the Holy Land, morphed the word into one meaning “to search” or “to inspect,” fitting for a time in which we’re meant to examine the very threads that comprise the warp and weft of the soul.

From whatever the derivation, it seems a mighty thing to root a month in such a phrase: This is the month when I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. This is the month when my sacred duty is to contemplate that holy twining. I will dwell on that next time I saunter to the sunrise. And, better yet, I’ll do so even on the mornings when my sleepy head rises no further than the lump in my old pillow.

One of the most beautiful teachings of Elul is the parable that tells us that during the rest of the year Adonai, the King, is tucked away in the palace, guarded by elaborate protocol and ritual, sequestered behind a phalanx of locked gates and ministers of whatnot. But not so this month. In Elul, Adonai the King leaves that harbored existence and takes to the field, walking amid the ordinary folk who might plop down upon, say, a log or bench and share a word or three. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, blessed be his memory, taught that God is not met only in “cathedral” moments of grandeur, but in the gritty of everyday life.

Ours is a God we can meet in tall grasses, amid the sensommer churr of the katydid and the whirring of the dragonfly, ours is a God we might bump into any old Friday—if, especially if, we stay awake to the God so close to us we might feel the brushing against us of the Holiest of Holies. Or stir to the wordless cries of the God who speaks within.

So help us Holy, Holy God.

What awakens you these days? How will you awaken?

a few footnotes:

1.) How the Acronym Works

The word Elul is spelled with four Hebrew letters:

• Aleph (א) stands for Ani (I).

• Lamed (ל) stands for L’dodi (to my beloved).

• Vav (ו) stands for V’dodi (and my beloved).

• Lamed (ל) stands for Li (mine / to me)

2.)The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy:

YHVH - I am God before people sin

YHVH - I am God after people sin if they repent

El - (All-powerful) God

Rahum - Compassionate

VeHanun - Gracious

Erekh Apayim - Slow to anger

Verav Hesed - Abounding in lovingkindness

Ve’emet - And in truth

Notzer hesed La’alafim - Maintaining lovingkindness for 1,000 generations

Nosei avon - Forgiving premeditated sins

Va’fesha - sins committed in rebellion

Va’hata’ah - sins made by mistake

Venakeh - acquitting the penitent.

*This passage is an adaptation of the Hebrew written by Max Arzt in his book Justice and Mercy, based on a 12th-century Talmudic commentary by the grandson of Rashi, said to be the most famous commentator in Jewish history.

3.) Benevolent blessing to Rebecca Minkus Lieberman, the scholar-in-residence at Sukkat Shalom, our synagogue, who this week led a short course on Elul, and who brought a passel of glorious readings to my wide-awake attention. You can find her beautiful writings on Substack here.

4.) To read more of the glorious Torah scholar Rachel Anisfeld, find her here.