Rosh Hodesh Welcoming Rosh Hodesh Elul

Dear Hebrew College community,

This coming Saturday night, when we mark the end of Shabbat, we will usher in the Hebrew month of Elul, and as we do so, we will fully enter our sacred season of teshuva. Elul offers us a prolonged, preparatory period of personal and communal soul-searching leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is both a responsibility, and a gift. I am increasingly moved by the wisdom of the Jewish calendar and its built-in, boldly counter-cultural recognition that the process of teshuva—like everything that matters most—takes time.

Often translated as repentance, the word teshuva comes from the ancient Hebrew root meaning to return. That small three-letter root makes a large promise—that however lost we may feel, however far we may have wandered or fallen, somehow, we can find our way back.

As I write those words, this year even more than most, my inner cynic immediately starts to clamor. You must be kidding. Everywhere we turn, we are surrounded by devastation and damage that we know cannot be undone. Lives that cannot be brought back. Innocence that can never be regained. Ecological degradation that can never be reversed. In the face of such unfathomable loss, it feels false, dangerous, even cruel, to suggest that we can “go back” to what was before. This is undeniably, achingly true. Which is precisely why teshuva is not about the impossible fantasy of returning to what was. That fantasy is profoundly understandable, born as it so often is out of grief, but it is nostalgia—not teshuva.

Teshuva entails a different kind of return—arduous, uncertain, unpredictable, and alive. It is a return not to what was, but to what is and what might be.

Teshuva entails a different kind of return—arduous, uncertain, unpredictable, and alive. It is a return not to what was, but to what is and what might be. It is a return not to who we were, but to who we long to be. It is a return not to an irretrievable past, but to each other and to God. In this sense, the call to teshuva is a call to both belonging and becoming.

We are invited to begin the season of teshuva not with recriminations and regrets, but with a deep and loving call to belonging. The very name of the month of Elul is understood to be an acronym for the verse from the Song of Songs: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. We are asked to hear a divine whisper beckoning to us across the ages, reminding us, reassuring us: “You are beloved. You belong. Let’s start there.” What might feel possible for us—individually and collectively—if we really started there?

That whisper becomes a full-throated, joyous song in one of the most beautiful piyyutim (liturgical poems) of the High Holiday season, Ki Anu Amecha. At its essence, it is a hymn of belonging.

Ki anu amecha, v’atah eloheinu.
Anu vanecha, v’atah avinu.
We are Your people, and You are our God.
We are Your children, and You are our Parent.

What follows is a richly varied set of images for the relationship between human and divine. We are children, servants, flock, vineyard, beloved, and more. God is parent, king, shepherd, watchman, lover, and more. The origin of the piyyut is a midrash on the same verse that we associate with the name of the month of Elul: “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.” I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. In the midrash, four sets of images are offered. In most machzorim, it has been expanded to twelve. In some medieval machzorim from Germany and Italy, there are as many as fifteen metaphors for our relationship with God included in this piyyut!

I love the range of metaphors offered—the expansive sense of what it can mean —what it can feel like—to live in relationship with the divine. But I also love the deep possessive grammar of the piyyut—the steady repetition of subjects and suffixes as we—first person plural—address You—second person singular. When we sing these verses, what we are saying in four, eight, twelve, fifteen, or a thousand different ways, is simply: We are Yours. You are Ours. We belong to You. And in belonging to You, we belong to each other.

Amidst all the confessionals of Yom Kippur, the recitations of remorse, the acknowledgement of how far we have strayed from who we long to be, these words again and again sing us back to a sense of beloved belonging. It is only once we feel this—that we can knock on the doors of our hearts and pray that something in us will open.

That knock on the doors of our hearts is the call to becoming. As much as we long to belong, we also long to become. We long to learn, to grow, to be better. Teshuva entails a return to that longing within us—as individuals and as a people.

The experience of belonging is meant not to close our hearts, but to open them.

Belonging without room for becoming can be dangerous, dehumanizing, even lethal in both our personal and our political lives. The price of belonging cannot be banishing important parts of ourselves, or interpreting any disagreement as betrayal, or buying our own sense of belonging at an even cheaper price—through the exclusion or diminishment of others—or worse. The experience of belonging is meant not to close our hearts, but to open them.

As we enter the gates of Elul this Saturday night, may we hear the divine voice whispering, singing, calling to us—reminding us that we belong, and gently beckoning us to become the people we long to be.

Hodesh tov,
Rabbi Sharon

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld is president of Hebrew College in Newton, MA.

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