The timing of Jewish holidays, and the annual cycle of Jewish religious life, is based on a unique calendar that dates back thousands of years. This calendar is completely separate from the Gregorian secular one that governs most aspects of our everyday lives. Like that of our Muslim cousins, the Jewish calendar is purely lunar so that the start of each month always takes place on the day of the new moon.
Because a solar year is longer than a lunar year, this means that dates on the Jewish calendar fall on different dates in the secular calendar every year (unlike the Muslim calendar, Jews have a system, using an occasional leap month, to keep holidays in the same season so that they fall within the same season every year). All of which explains why you need to look at a Jewish calendar to know the secular dates of holidays such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah and Passover.
This year, the Jewish month of Elul begins this coming Thursday night and Friday, Aug. 18 and 19. Elul is one of the most important months in the Jewish calendar. It’s the last month of the calendar year and is, therefore, the one that leads up to Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, which is followed 10 days later by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
In Hebrew, the period of Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur is called the Yamim Nora’im/the Days of Awe and is usually referred to by English-speaking Jewish people as the High Holy Days or High Holidays. This is the most spiritually intensive time in the Jewish year, during which Jewish people both celebrate the start of the new year and also reflect back on who we’ve been and how we’ve behaved over the last year. While Rosh Hashanah is primarily a joyous day of celebration, highlighted by the blowing of a shofar (a ram’s horn) at services 100 times throughout the day, the rest of these Days of Awe work together with the month of Elul to achieve the work of reflection, repentance and atonement, which is the primary purpose of this season.
Throughout Elul and the Days of Awe, Jewish people are meant to reflect on how they’ve behaved over the past year, to consider how they could have done better and to try to atone for their misbehaviors by, if at all possible, both apologizing and making amends to the individuals to whom they recognize that they’ve done something wrong. This process is called teshuvah in Hebrew; it’s usually referred to in English as repentance, but literally translated it means turning, or returning.
Underlying the process of teshuvah is the recognition of one of the most basic realities there is about being human: that we all make mistakes, that we all have things we’ve done that we need to apologize and atone for, and that no matter what is going on in our lives, all of us can do better. Teshuvah is work that awaits every Jew, really every human, who is remotely realistic about who they are and how they behave.
Practically, there is no set formula for doing teshuvah — reaching out, apologizing and making amends is usually a different experience each time you do it. There’s no trick to it, no shortcut, no way to get around the fact that every year, you’re asked to spend a month admitting your mistakes to those who’ve been affected by them. The work of teshuvah isn’t otherwise addressed by prayer or fasting or study or doing good deeds. The only way to do it is simply to do it. Truly, this is work that any person could do at any moment — we don’t need a designated month to apologize to people — but most of us, no matter our background or religious affiliation, simply don’t. Doing this work is difficult and uncomfortable, and no matter who we are, a lot of us either avoid it, or try to find ways to work around it.
I believe that at our best moments, most if not all human beings intend to be good and kind and just in our dealings with other people. Unfortunately, being fallible humans living in the world means that we frequently don’t live up to our best intentions. We do this work of teshuvah so that we might return to being those best-intentioned selves, to being the people who we truly want to be, the people whom we think God truly wants us to be.
I invite everyone to join us in making this a season of teshuvah, a period of reflection, repentance and return to our best selves.
David Katz is the rabbi at Temple Beth El of Williamsburg.
