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?
