It’s Elul. The Rabbis and mystics have so much to say about what this final month of the Jewish year signifies. Realignment, return, renewal, reintegration. Finding our way back to ourselves and our center. Figuring out how to live well with the life we have. Wondering how on earth to actually process the nightmarish year we’ve had. Oy. Here we are. Sometimes, the high and lofty pronouncements about Elul can feel really alienating, impossible, and separating. This is true especially for many of us who’ve been conditioned into self-hatred and reproach. What is there to do teshuvah for if I’m constantly running on a looping soundtrack of all my faults and failures? What kind of tradition tells me that this is exactly where my focus should be for a spiritually significant period of the year?
This past year has been one of fracture and deepening. My contemplative practice is growing and I’m allowing that part of me to find more and more expression. Simultaneously, it feels like everything is unmoored and unreliable. We don’t know what’s coming. The enormity of the tragedy and horror of this year isn’t something we can carry alone. I cannot know the enormity of what each of you reading might be holding. At a time when our foundations are crumbling—or perhaps already have crumbled—what is still here?
In a treasured text at SVARA, Pirkei Avot, we receive several teachings about the foundations upon which the world stands. In the second Mishnah of the first chapter, Shimon HaTzadik teaches us that the world stands on three things: on Torah, on avodah and on gimulat chasidim.
Torah is the expansive wisdom that we get to immerse ourselves in every time we engage in learning. It’s ancestral wisdom, rabbinic wisdom, the wisdom that flows through our lives, the wisdom that we are encouraged to offer up at SVARA. When I immerse myself in text, I feel not only a deeper connection to Jewish ancestral wisdom but I notice that my perspective radically widens. Torah is so much bigger and vaster than I am. I have the immense privilege of adding my svara to that which has come before. In doing so, I allow myself to be fully a part of and accountable to Torah. If Torah is a foundation upon which the world sustains itself, how do I help support that foundation through learning and teaching a Torah that is just, life-giving, and nourishing? Delighting in Torah isn’t enough if I, if we, are not transforming ourselves and it. There is a lot of Torah in this world that has caused harm, chas v’chalilah. That fact causes my heart to break again and again. And I know I can’t turn away from it. Instead, I must reinforce my efforts to live and teach a Torah whose paths are pleasant and whose ways are ways of peace.
Avodah, according to the likely pshat or plain reading of the Mishnah, refers to Temple worship. This is curious though, isn’t it? The Rabbis simultaneously sustain and subvert what has come before. The world stands on avodah but that avodah is transformed from sacrificial rites to the service of the heart—avodat halev. Pirkei Avot is a text later added to the Mishnah and is comprised of a lot of wisdom passed down rabbinically. It was compiled in the century following the second Temple’s destruction, when the Jewish people and tradition were undergoing a massive transformation. Avodah—service of the heart, which later became widely understood as prayer in the ritualized sense—became the daily way of offering what we could to that which was far vaster than us. I often imagine the Rabbis secretly being grateful for this spiritual change, even as they remember the avodah that came before. This avodah challenges me. If one of the world’s foundations is spiritual practice—whatever that means for you—how can I square that with the world I actually live in in which no amount of avodah seems to change external circumstances?
In the siddur I daven with, there is a Talmudic passage nestled between Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv. It’s a tiny baraita in which Rabbi Eliezer teaches in the name of Rabbi Chaninah that an increase in sages—in bearers of wisdom—brings peace to the world. The more we root ourselves in our avodah, the more we preserve that part of ourselves that can access our learning and make choices from the best of our tradition. It’s not that somehow, more learning magically makes the world peaceful. If only! It’s that if we take our learning seriously and we believe our learning can lead to action—inner and outer—we can show up to our lives better and bring a bit more goodness into this world so in desperate need of it.
Gimulat chasidim, acts of kindness, is how I think this Mishnaic teaching imagines us actually bringing forward the first two foundations. Ultimately, I think this is what teshuvah is. Yes, sure, part of the work is self-introspection—done with a lot of compassion, of course! It’s also about how we show up with and for those who are right here, right now. I’ve been asking myself a lot lately what more I could be doing to realize this foundational idea. Not in the kitschy way many of us were taught—”do a random act of kindness today!” No, this is bigger and more intentional. How can I be an active contributor to the betterment of the lives of the people around me and in my community as a manifestation of the teshuvah Jewish tradition moves us towards this time of year?
There is an idea that in Elul, the Divine is in the field. The sense here is that the Divine is easily accessible, right here, right now. Knowing that this imagery does not work for us all, we might expand this idea, or subvert it in our own way. Elul is a time for radically thinking about the future beyond us we cannot imagine. Torah, avodah and gimulat chasidim, each in its own way, can be a guidepost for us as we breathe this future into being.
The tools we learn at SVARA have guided our ancestors through periods of radical destabilization and uncertainty. This isn’t new. We’ve been here before. Our ancestors created technologies that sustained them and have sustained us. The Talmud is an ingenious way of making space for both radical rootedness and huge change. Now, anchoring in our own svara, we can do the same for ourselves and the Jewish future beyond our grasp. What new spiritual technologies can we dream into being? Let us use our svara this Elul to begin that imagining, for ourselves and each other.
