time; I felt connected to something ancient, and yet foolish, standing in my pajamas, spitting through an ersatz ram’s horn. Ben apologizes profusely for failing his assignment on the first day. I reassure him that I should be the one shouldering this ritual anyway; it’s my Wondering Year, my obligation.
As the Elul days accumulate and become routine, I find myself actually looking forward to the new morning regimen—waking up ahead of my husband; turning on the coffee machine; grabbing my shofar and facing the window. My bleats are sometimes so solid, they surprise me, but more often they’re jerky. I have to balance my desire to practice against alienating my family. “Cut the shofar!” my husband shouts from the next room.
The Medieval philosopher Maimonides described the blowing custom as “a wake-up call to sleepers, designed to rouse us from our complacency.” It forces me to ask myself: “Am I complacent?” About my behavior, my friendships, my parenting, my work? If complacency means, as the dictionary says, “a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself,” the answer is actually no. Just ask my therapist. I offer her a weekly catalogue of self-reproach. But the fact is, I don’t scrutinize myself as comprehensively as I could when it comes to my character. Really, really truthfully: What kind of person am I, and how do I assess my pettiness, apathy, self-interest? The shofar should derail our rationalizations.
Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, author of one of the classic guides to the holidays, The Jewish Way, explains that Elul is a time for “accounting for the soul,” or cheshbon hanefesh (a reckoning with one’s self). Yitz, eighty-two, a friend of my parents (which is why I call him Yitz), who is tall, slim, and somehow ethereal in his erudition, radiates placidity. If I could spend more time with Yitz, I’m convinced I’d be calmer, not to mention smarter. “Just as the month before the summer is the time when Americans go on crash diets, fearing how their bodies will look on the beach,” he writes in his book, “so Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah, became the time when Jews went on crash spiritual regimens, fearing how their souls would look when they stood naked before God.”
I ask some other trusted rabbis how they’d suggest going about this nakedness, this “accounting for the soul.” They recommend choosing one trait a day and examining that one quality. In an attempt to find a list of traits, I Google “Elul exercises” and “Elul practices” and come up with a list of middot (traits or measurements) that will take me through all forty days. It’s an alphabetical litany of optional characteristics suggested by a Toronto teacher named Modya Silver on his blog (since taken down):
CHOOSE ONE OF THESE 40 TRAITS FOR EACH DAY OF ELUL:
