emunah, tefillah, a little mussar, and a shmeck of geula

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Leveraging Elul



Don’t sit with your back to the door of Elul because Tishrei’s on the other side, and the only way to get to and through Tishrei in good order is to walk through that door.

Trying to negotiate Tishrei by any other route is like going to court without a lawyer.

Elul is not something to be finessed or gotten around as if it were Tachnun in search of a bris or Rebbishe yahrzeit.  It’s about being honest with oneself.  It’s about exposing your fault line and going eyeball to eyeball with the spiritual rot of your existence, one peeled off layer at a time, because an introspective and wrenching Elul is the breeding ground for a confident and articulate Tishrei that will bring a good kvittel in its train.

Last year, as Elul rolled in we endeavored to place it in its proper perspective, with proper perspective meaning that while a kavanadike Elul will take one's spiritual horizons to the max for the ensuing year, those horizons will only be reached by means of those Elul kavanas permeating Shevat.

As we said in EmunahSpeak: A Real Deal Teshuva (2), In Elul you are what you want to be.  You are the sum total of all the aspirations and kavanas you have for growth in the ensuing year.  During the rest of the year, however, you are what you do on a daily basis, with the reality check of what you aspired to in Elul being what you do on a daily basis in Shevat.  If your growth was real enough to take root then it will still be around to blossom in Shevat.

We also mentioned the credit of Rabbeinu Yona. 

In EmunahSpeak: A Real Deal Teshuva we said in the name of Rabbeinu Yona that once you have seriously accepted upon yourself to make a real Teshuva, it is accounted to you as if you already did it.  You have activated something that will carry you forward.

There is, however, a catch.

Just as one has to pay off the credit charges that he piled up as they come due, so too here.  That boost you got up front vis á vis your Tishrei resume presumes that the “bill” will be paid in the course of the coming year.

The problem is that a year is a long time, and in terms of the Teshuva resolves that we take on in Elul, a year may be too long, because as was pointed out in EmunahSpeak: Whence the Real Deal Teshuva (2)?, here we are in Nissan already, and my Elul Do List is still in mint condition, finger print free, and I probably could sell it to a collector on eBay.  The way things are going I may well be spared writing a new one for this coming Elul.

And it wasn’t like I put it into a drawer or something.  I had it right on my desk next to my laptop along with sundry reminders scotch taped to my desk lamp and my laptop so that it has been in my face since Elul.

So what happened?  The same thing that happens every year:

Nothing.

And after giving it some serious thought I think I understand why.  For one to take on to improve in any number of given areas over the course of the coming year is like deciding to do something between now and the rest of one’s life.

A year is simply too long.

And as we said there, with the finish line so far off into the distance of next Elul/Tishrei we tend to space out as to the immediacy of it all, and with all the time in the world to get started we never do.

The solution, as such, consists of reducing the year to a month, which forces us to start now, not then.  And the month I chose was Cheshvan because Tishrei was to busy a time to make a serious start on our Elul kavanas.

It all comes down to this:

Make sure that by Cheshvan the latest, you can put something significant on the table for all the aspirations and kavanas you had for growth in the heady days of Elul.  It has to be serious enough for the remainder of your Elul vision to work its way into reality in cruise control mode over the remainder of the year as opposed to swimming against the tide.

But then again why even settle for this, a big improvement though it may be?

Why not simply take Rabbeinu Yona’s Elul credit and turn it into cash and carry by actually effectuating the Teshuva in Elul instead of promising to?

Come Tishrei you’ll be a cash customer, and who wouldn’t prefer to deal with a cash customer rather than to extend credit?