Rabbi 360

This weekend we begin the Jewish month of Elul and officially begin the High Holiday season. The holidays themselves are “late” this year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar (they, of course, fall the same time each year on the Hebrew calendar), but no matter when they fall, we get a month warning with the onset of Elul.

With the onset of Elul, the month that precedes Rosh Hashanah, we are meant to formally begin our spiritual preparation. It is customary to blow the shofar each morning of the month as to announce the coming holidays and, just as it does on the day of Rosh Hashanah itself, it is meant to “wake us up” to the spiritual work we are meant to do at this time of year.

And that work, of course, is teshuvah. Teshuvah is usually translated as “repentance” but the etymology is from the word “turn.” We turn from our past bad behaviors and turn towards good ones. The work of the High Holidays is not just about atoning for past wrongs, making amends, asking for and granting forgiveness, it is about personal turning, about creating a new vision of ourselves, about making new commitments and doing what it takes to meet them.

In short, the work of the High Holidays is change. And change, as we know, is very difficult.

I came across an interesting article recently about change and the difficulty surrounding it. It spoke about research that indicated one of the things that can help with making personal change is feeling one has the permission to do so. As the author writes,

Seeking approval and external validation is part of the human experience, but when it comes to making a big life change, they can be hard to find. People expect you to stay how you are, to maintain the status quo, to stay the course. And if you get bogged down looking for that affirmation to make a change, you may never make it.

So if we feel we have another’s permission to make the change, then we are more apt to do it. Interestingly, this permission can be very simple. A recent study found that people were happier after making a major life decision if their choice was validated by a coin toss (whether or not the coin toss motivated their decision in the first place.)

The author concludes:

This week, take one major change you’re wanting to make and figure out if the only thing stopping you is waiting for permission. Be brutally honest with yourself. Force yourself to identify what’s standing between you and making that change.

He then grants the reader permission to make that change.

As we enter into the month of Elul, into the season of change, we may very likely find that the only things stopping us from making important change in our life is the affirmation or permission from another. Yet we would do well to remember that we already have that permission–we grant it to each other.

The litugy of the High Holidays is strikingly in the plural. When we come together at the synagogue during the holidays and we proceed to recite the vidui, the confessional liturgy, we rise and say “for the sin we have done before You…” many times, each followed by an enumeration of a transgression.

One way of understanding this is that while we each individually acknowledge our own wrongs, we do so in the context of community. So when we say “we” we do so to allow the individual in community the privacy and discretion to speak their transgressions aloud without standing out.

We also use the plural to acknowledge that while individually we have done some of the wrongs, collectively we have done all of the wrongs, and that the guilt of the individual and the guilt of the collective (and the subsequent atonement) are not always that separate.

But now we can understand the liturgy anew: when we say “we,” we are affirming that “we” want to change. And when we say “we” want to change, we are granting both ourselves and our neighbors the permission to do so. We are saying: we are all in this together, we are all seeking to better ourselves, so let’s support one another in our individual work. We are opening up to the possibility of change, and by affirming it is possible in ourselves, we recognize how it is possible in others. I can change, you can change. We can change.

We give each other permission. And it might just be that permission that allows us to turn the way we wish to turn and give us the strength to do the spiritual work of these most important days.

So as we enter Elul, let us give each other the permission to make the change we wish to make. And then, now that you have our permission, make the change.