Some Thoughts for the Month of Elul: Taking the Initiative

This is a time of awakening from below. In Hasidic thought, there are two kinds of awakenings -- that from above, when God initiates and causes something to happen inside us or in the world, and that from below, when we humans take the initiative in the divine-human relationship. This period of 40 days between Rosh Hodesh Elul (the fist day of the month of Elul) until Yom Kippur (the 10th day of the month of Tishrei), a period of teshuvah, repentance, is a period of awakening from below, a time when it is we who attempt to awaken ourselves to the service of God and to awaken God Himself to be our partners.

That is why, says the Sefat Emet, the rabbis say that the word for this month, Elul, stands for Ani L’Dodi V’Dodi Li. “I am for my Beloved, and my Beloved is for me.” It is we who must start – must take the first step in feeling that “I am for my Beloved.”

Historically this time-period is understood as the time period in which the first national sin was repented for, the Golden Calf. This is the 40 day period of repentance at the end of which, on Yom Kippur, God sent Moshe down with the second set of Tablets, showing His complete forgiveness of the people. These second set of Tablets, says the Sefat Emet, thus represent the Torah as it is won by the people’s own spiritual work. The first set of Tablets came down purely as a gift from heaven. For this reason, they could not last. But the second set of Tablets were earned by the people’s sincerity and devotion, and so this is the Torah that remains with us to this day, the Torah that we earn through our hard work. No wonder, then, that it is at this time of year that we celebrate Simchat Torah, the joy of Torah; what we are celebrating is our ownership and participation in the Torah that we have brought down to earth.

Open miracles don’t happen anymore. God does not cause plagues to reign on our enemies (at least not in obvious ways) nor do we see Him revealed at the top of a mountain filled with thunder and lightning. Our experience of the divine, of revelation, our understanding of Torah, comes only through our own hard work. As the Sefat Emet often says, the more you put in, the more you get out. The more you believe, the more will be revealed, the more you work on yourself spiritually, the more you will be conscious of the divine in the world. Religious sensibility is a muscle like any other; the more you work out, the more fit you are.

What a good message for the beginning of the school year! Learning is not a gift that descends from above. It is hard won. And yet, it is also a gift; we should not forget the end of the verse – V’Dodi Li, “And my Beloved is for Me.” If we put in the energy, if we take the initiative, then God, too, will play His part; we will also receive – from above – more than we put in. As the ancient rabbis put it in God’s voice, “If you make an opening for Me as narrow as the eye of the needle, I shall make the opening wide enough for camps full of soldiers and siege engines to enter it (Pesikta deRav Kahana 5.6).