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Resolving on Resolutions

Today, September 4th, is the first day of the Hebrew month Elul. Elul is the month that leads us to the Hebrew month of Tishrei. During Tishrei we celebrate the Jewish New Year, the Day of Atonement, and the Harvest Festival of Succot. It's a big month; lots of thought, contemplation, introspection, revelation - at the personal level. So appropriately the month before is taken as a run-up to this most important of months.

I woke up this morning and thought about the idea of New Year's resolutions - so popular in the US. Not quite such a thing here in Israel, or in the Jewish community in general. I suspect part of it is that the celebration of the Jewish New Year is not a single day, wait for the ball to drop, kind of moment. Rather we take two days to celebrate the arrival of the New Year with customs and traditions in the home and larger community. And then we follow that up with the Day of Atonement 10 days later, with those ten days being viewed as solemn days of contemplation and hope for redemption for the year to come. It's not a time to take anything lightly; the focus of those days is to personally ask those you have hurt intentionally or accidentally to forgive you for your transgressions. That's no small feat.

Judaism is asking us to look out to others around us, to ask them to forgive us and help keep us as part of the larger community for the year to come. It is not a time of the year to announce our individualistic plans to better ourselves for the year to come. Yet, at the same time, this act of turning to our family, our friends, our neighbors, to ask for forgiveness and to give it ourselves, does force us to look inward and contemplate who we are. It is a time that asks us to question and evaluate who we have been and really look critically at our past actions to see if perhaps we'd rather not continue down that path.

Judaism sees that none of us are perfect and that we're not really in control of who lives and who dies each year. But we can be cognizant of that in our efforts to constantly do better. So by taking a whole month as our run-up to the New Year, places a weighty emphasis on the importance of refreshing ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities as we approach the New Year.
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