In the Jewish calendar, the month of Elul holds profound spiritual significance. Occurring in the late summer or early fall, it serves as a period of introspection and preparation leading to the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
This year, Elul begins at sundown on. Aug. 17 and ends on Rosh Hashanah, which begins Friday evening Sept. 15.
Five area rabbis weighed in on the meaning and rituals associated with the month of Elul.
“It is a chance to focus, breathe and work in preparation for the sacred season,” said Rabbi Elianna M. Yolkut, a rabbinic scholar and director of Beit Midrash and Mikvah at the Conservative Adas Israel Congregation in the District, in an email. “We reflect to be one step closer to face the deepest questions about our life, our souls and our communities.”
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are “a gut punch and the month of Elul softens the blow,” emailed Associate Rabbi Eliana Fischel of the Reform Washington Hebrew Congregation. “We enter sanctuaries across the world for these two holidays and get bombarded with our potential sins and our inevitable mortality. For the month of Elul, we can think each day about a value or characteristic we hope to embody and how we are going to make that happen.”
There are rituals that aid in this endeavor. During Elul, there is a shofar blast daily at the end of morning services and the recitation of Psalm 27.
“One of the most powerful and moving choices the rabbis made is to ask us to blow shofar,” Yolkut said. “To revitalize your soul is the essential work of this season. The shofar is a call each day to garner not simply the ability to look honestly at one’s falling short, but to gain the strength, the courage, the discernment, the extra soul we need to do the work of repair and return.”
Rabbi Rachel Simmons of the Conservative Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac said in an email that blowing the shofar is “clear, loud and intense. It cuts through whatever else is happening and shakes us out of complacency, in a sense waking us up to ourselves, to God and to the world around us.”
Psalm 27, an exuberant declaration of faith, is also recited daily in the month of Elul. “That is the classic Elul text,” emailed Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda. “The shofar blast and Psalm 27 are meant to pierce through our defenses and habits and biases so we can better identify what we can and must change.”
One popular line in the psalm, achat sha’alti (one thing I ask from God; one thing I seek) invites us to reflect on what matters most to us, what we deeply desire,” Dobb wrote.
“Another line speaks of directing our hope toward The One, which I understand as keeping faith in our ability to make positive change we seek, and keeping hope alive within us and the world.”
“Psalm 27 has many beautiful verses that can nurture compassion and goodness in our hearts: ‘Trust in the Eternal. Strengthen and fill your hearts with courage,’” wrote Rabbi Lia Bass of the Jewish Institute for Lifelong Learning and Innovation in Arlington. The month of Elul “beckons us to start the process of repentance, gently examining our actions and our motivations and growing from this experience in order to deal with the outcome of this examination, ask for forgiveness, and change.”
“With a well-spent lunar month of preparation, we reach Rosh Hashanah a bit more aware of ourselves, and by Yom Kippur we’ll commit to sustained improvement,” Dobb wrote. “Embracing Elul can be an act of spiritual resistance in a hurting world,” Simmons said in an email. “Instead of embracing materialism and self-serving behavior, Elul brings us closer to one another, reaffirming our responsibility to each other and to God.”
Rabbi Shlomo Buxbaum of the LEV Experience, a Jewish outreach organization in Bethesda, said by phone that Elul is a time preparation for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur “because everything I see in Judaism is the more that we put in beforehand, the more preparation there is; the more we’re going to get out of it. It’s a time that’s infused with the energy of sparking a new, refreshed relationship with God.
“It’s a very personal time for people to ask what do the high holidays mean for me this year. What is this coming year going to be for my own spiritual growth,” Buxbaum said.
The time of Elul has significance in the Torah. After Israel committed the sin of the Golden Calf and the tablets of the Ten Commandments had been broken, Moses ascended Mount Sinai for a second time to bring back the Torah to his people, staying there until the Day of Atonement, the end of the period of repentance.
Buxbaum said, “Because this was the time in the 40 days when Moses was mending this relationship between God and the Jewish people and God was essentially giving the Jewish people a second chance, this infuses these days with this energy like we might have messed up but we can start again. The door is never closed and there’s always this opportunity for renewal and rebirth.” ■
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.
