It’s a question that vexes all of us, each and every year during the season of Elul and the High Holidays: WHAT’S THE POINT?
Does this process really accomplish anything? Are we really that much different now than we were a year ago, when we went through the same thing?
Every year, we pray the Selihot prayers, we tell ourselves we need to be better, we hear the shofar, we spend Yom Kippur fasting and praying…and here we are, the same people, just a little older.
So, what’s the point?
Let me add another question, jumping ahead to Yom Kippur.
If I had to decide what to do on the day especially set aside for repentance, I would suggest something like this:
· Every member of every congregation has a meeting with the rabbi, and perhaps also a meeting with the assistant rabbi, during which they go over the different areas of their lives. Their observance of Shabbat, their observance of kashrut, their recreational activities, their marriage, their parenting, their business practices, and so on.
· They make a list of things that the congregant could and should be doing better.
· They arrange the list in order of priorities, from most crucial to least crucial.
· Together they work out a plan for which changes the congregant can commit to make, and how it should be done.
If the goal is self-improvement, then this is the best way to do it, right?
So why do we spend all of Yom Kippur praying? What does it accomplish?
To answer this question, we need to take a fresh new look at the true goal of this period, and at what teshuvah (repentance) really is.
The Honeymoons YEARS After the Wedding…
Let’s imagine a husband and wife who get into an argument, or one of whom said or did something insensitive to the other. They apologize, they say, “It’s ok,” and agree to move on. This is certainly a lot better than allowing the argument to snowball into a full-blown fight, but lingering tensions and hard feelings remain.
In many marriages, these tensions and hard feelings accumulate over the years, creating distance between the husband and wife and hurting the relationship.
What a husband and wife really need to do is to HONEYMOON.
The practice of taking a honeymoon right after the wedding, and then never – or very rarely – doing it again, is backwards. Right after the wedding, the bride and groom feel very close to one another. They don’t need a honeymoon at that point. But ten years later, with several children, appliances that need repairs, a huge stack of bills to pay, and demanding jobs or businesses – that is when they need a honeymoon.
It is years later that the husband and wife can drift apart, and so it is then that they really need the honeymoon to strengthen their bond and their connection to one another. The rigors and pressures of life, as well as the quibbles that invariably arise, can create distance between the husband and wife. Periodic “honeymoons” are critically important for breaking the distance and bringing them closer together.
And the same is true of our relationship with Hashem.
The Mabit, one of the great Jewish thinkers many centuries ago, wrote a book called Bet Elokim, in which he speaks at length about the concept of teshuvah. He explains that teshuvah – which means “return” – is mainly about coming closer to Hashem. Sin causes us to become distant from Hashem, and so we need to do teshuvah so we can become close again.
I’m fairly certain that every conscientious religious Jew understands what the Mabit is talking about. When we do something we know we’re not supposed to do, we feel a little further from Hashem. Whether it’s going to a place where we shouldn’t be, eating in a place where we shouldn’t eat, seeing something we shouldn’t see, doing something dishonest in the office, or saying words that we shouldn’t be saying, we don’t feel so close to Hashem. Certainly not as close as we feel when we do something that we can be legitimately proud of.
Teshuvah is not just about forgiveness. This time period is not just about our hopes and wishes for the coming year, and our effort to earn Hashem’s forgiveness so we can get what we want. It is SO MUCH DEEPER than that. It’s about building our connection with Hashem, a connection which – like in a marriage – tends to become eroded over the course of time.
One of the sources of teshuvah is the pasuk, ושבת עד ה' אלוקיך – “You shall return to Hashem your G-d.” This is what teshuvah is – getting closer to Hashem after having grown distant.
There are two blessings in our daily Shemonah Esreh prayer that deal with repentance. One is השיבנו אבינו, and the other is סלח לנו. In the second, we ask G-d to forgive our sins. We don’t want to be punished for what we’ve done wrong, and so we ask Him to forgive us. But in the first, we ask that Hashem help us come back to Torah and to His service. Teshuvah is not only about earning forgiveness – it’s also about coming back to Hashem, making our connection to Him stronger.
Greater Than the Tzadikim!
This explains the name of the month we are in – אלול, a name which represents the famous pasuk in Shir Hashirim, אני לדודי ודודי לי – “I am for my Beloved, and my Beloved is for me.” This pasuk doesn’t say anything about sin, punishment, the new year, or fear of judgment. It is about the love between us and Hashem. And that’s what Elul is about – enhancing our relationship with G-d.
This explains one of the most surprising statements by the Rabbis about teshuvah. The Gemara teaches us: מקום שבעלי תשובה עומדין צדיקים גמורים אינם עומדין – the completely righteous tzadikim do not reach the level of somebody who sinned and performed teshuvah.
How is this possible?
Let’s imagine somebody who for years neglected religious observance, eating whatever he wanted, watching whatever movies he wanted, going wherever he wanted, without praying or doing mitzvot, but he then changed and embraced an observant lifestyle. How can he be on a higher level than the fellow who was always religious, who never ate non-kosher in his life, who never misses a minyan, who spends every free moment learning Torah?
To answer this question, let’s go back to the example of a husband and wife.
Imagine a couple that has been struggling in marriage. They’ve been arguing regularly, and they are beginning to wonder whether the marriage can or should continue. They take the courageous step of going to a professional for counseling. They put it in a lot of time and effort, and gradually, they succeed in rebuilding the relationship.
On some level, their bond is now stronger and closer than that of married couples who have never undergone this process, who never had any sort of serious strain in their marriage. The work they needed to put in to make the marriage work brings them especially close to one another – even closer than they would have been if they didn’t have the problems in the first place.
This is true also of our relationship with Hashem. When we realize how important our relationship to Hashem, and we spend the time and put in the effort to make it better, it becomes more powerful than that of a righteous person who never sinned. The process of working to enhance the relationship has the effect of making it stronger than it ever was in the past.
So when we work hard to get closer to Hashem, we can be even greater than the righteous tzadikim who never sinned.
A New Perspective on Prayer
Now we can start to understand what we’re doing in Elul and on the Yamim Noraim (High Holidays) – we’re building our connection, our closeness to Hashem.
And the way this is done, primarily, is through prayer.
Many people have a mistaken perspective on what prayer is and why we are required to pray so often. They assume that prayer is about trying to get what we want or need. When we need something, we pray for it, because we believe that Hashem decides everything that happens, and so we turn to Him to get what we want.
But this is only one aspect of prayer. It is certainly true that we are to ask Hashem to provide us with what we want and need. But prayer is so much more profound than that. It’s about building our connection with Hashem.
After all, halachah does not tell us to pray every time we need something or want something. It requires us to pray three times every day. And many of the prayers we are required to recite have nothing to do with asking for what we want.
This is because obtaining what we want is a small part of what prayer is. It’s mainly about building our connection to Hashem. Just as a husband and wife need to make time when they are together alone focusing on one another in order to build their relationship, we need to make time when we step away from everything we’re involved in and focus on Hashem.
We can prove this from one of the important halachot relevant to the Shemonah Esreh, the main prayer that we recite three times each day.
The Rambam writes that if one recited the Shemoneh Esreh without kavanah (concentration), he has nevertheless fulfilled his obligation – as long as he had kavanah when he recited the first blessing of Shemonah Esreh. But kavanah during the first blessing is a “deal-breaker” – without it, one does not fulfill the prayer requirement. In principle, the person would be required to recite the prayer again. (In practice, this is not done, because it is very likely that he will not have kavanah the second time around, either.)
However, later in the Rambam’s discussion of the laws of prayer, he appears to contradict this ruling. He writes that having kavanah in indispensable for prayer, and without it, one does not fulfill his obligation – implying that kavanah is necessary not only during the first blessing, but throughout the entire Shemonah Esreh prayer. In this passage, the Rambam implies that a lack of concentration at any point in the Shemonah Esreh invalidates the prayer – directly contradicting his earlier ruling, that this is true only in the first blessing.
One of the greatest experts on the Rambam, Rav Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk, gave a famous answer to resolve this contradiction. He explained that there are two different kinds of kavanah. The first is concentrating on the meaning of the words, thinking about what one is saying. This kavanah is necessary only for the first berachah. Of course, we should try to pray the entire Shemonah Esreh with kavanah, but only in the first berachah does the absence of kavanah invalidate one’s prayer.
But then there’s a second form of kavanah – the awareness that one is standing before G-d. This kavanah, Rav Chaim explained, is absolutely necessary for the entirety of the Shemonah Esreh. The reason, he said, is because this is the very definition of prayer.
Saying words is not prayer. Prayer is the experience of standing before Hashem and speaking to Him. And so if one said the words of prayer without having this awareness, he has not prayed.
When we pray, our main objective is to spend time with Hashem, so we can become closer to Him. This is what prayer is all about.
Do Selihot Change Us? YES!!
And this is the reason why we spend Yom Kippur praying. Because Yom Kippur is the day of teshuvah – and teshuvah is about building a stronger connection with Hashem, which we do through prayer.
Somebody once asked me: People get up each morning for the entire month of Elul to recite Selihot. They come to the synagogue, they pray and they sing. Does this have any effect? Is anybody changed by this experience? Does this make us better?
My answer is: ABSOLUTELY YES!!!
No, Selihot is not going to magically change us and make us perfectly righteous people who never speak a word of lashon ha’ra, who never get angry at our spouse, who never forget to recite a berachah, and who never waste any time.
But that’s not the purpose of Selihot.
The purpose is to bring us closer to Hashem. And yes, if we spend extra time each day for a month, and then during the first ten days of the next month, praying to Hashem, thinking about what we’ve done wrong, and expressing our hopes to improve, we enhance our relationship with Hashem. Just like we enhance our relationship with our spouse by spending time focusing on one another and our connection to one another, we enhance our relationship with Hashem by spending extra time focusing on Him and on how we can be better.
This is the answer to the question we started with, the question we all ask ourselves: Is this whole thing worth it? Does this whole period of Elul and Yamim Noraim accomplish anything? The answer is: Absolutely. It might not make the drastic change in our characters which we want to make and should be making, a change which we hope to make over the course of time, but it heightens our awareness of Hashem, our love for Hashem, and our commitment to Hashem.
Building a Jewish Conscience
An awful story was once reported on the news about the owner of kosher store in a very large Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, who for years sold non-kosher meat as though it was kosher. This meat was 100 percent taref. It’s not that it did not satisfy all accepted stringencies, or that there was some question about its status. It was, without any doubt, completely taref and unquestionably forbidden to be eaten by Torah law. The number of Torah violations this man caused is incalculable. Literally thousands of people ate non-kosher meat over and over and over again, for years, because of this crooked man.
It boggles the mind how a man could do such a thing. I imagine that if any of us was offered $1 billion to pull off this scheme, we would refuse without giving it a moment’s thought. Anyone with a religious Jewish conscience is simply incapable of doing something so horrible. We understand human weakness, that sometimes we are tempted to do or say something wrong, and sometimes we struggle against our sinful instincts and we don’t always win. But if we have a basic religious conscience, we could not possibly do something as terrible as what this storeowner did.
The period of Elul and the High Holiday builds our Jewish conscience. It won’t make us perfect, but it will strengthen our connection to Hashem and help us, at very least, to maintain our commitment to Him.
The story is told of a religious soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who, in 2005, was sent to the Gaza Strip to participate in the “Disengagement,” removing the Jewish residents from their homes as part of the Israeli government’s plan to withdraw from Gaza. The soldier very strongly believed that this was a very bad idea, and he pleaded with his superiors to be exempt from this assignment. He fervently prayed not to be forced to do this, but his superiors refused. He had no choice but to take part in this painful process of removing the Jewish residents from their homes.
With tears in his eyes, he hugged the people whom he had come to remove from the area, prayed with them, and helped them onto the busses.
When it was all over, just before he left, he took the siddur he had used for praying, and buried it in the ground.
Sometime later, this soldier was deployed to Gaza for a certain mission. He pitched his tent in the designated area, and as he was digging, to his astonishment – he found his siddur. He was now at the exact spot where he was when he finished his work during the Disengagement.
He knew Hashem was telling him something, but he didn’t know what it was.
The soldier arranged a meeting with Rav Chaim Kanievsky of Bnei-Brak, and he told him the story.
Rav Chaim said to him, “It’s very simple – Hashem is telling you that you need to keep praying. You buried your siddur thinking there was no longer any reason to pray. But this is wrong. You always need to keep praying.
Whether we get what we want or we don’t, our prayers are so precious and valuable, because this is how we stay close to Hashem and build our relationship.
May we all utilize this beautiful time period for its true purpose – to draw closer to Hashem, and to strengthen our commitment to Him for the coming year and for the rest of our lives.