How many of us have experienced unexpected, radical disruption to our schedules or to our physical or emotional health over the last several months? How and to what degree do these disruptions continue to color our understandings of the world, our emotional lives, and our relationships? Elul--a month of reflection and spiritual preparation leading up to Rosh HaShanah and the High Holiday season rolls in every year just about this time to challenge us to take a hard look at what is real and in what manner. What is in flux and what feels foundational? What is the nature of our own power and vulnerability. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that there is essential, cosmic significance to this time:
The essence of teshuvah--spiritual (re)turning--is in the Month of Elul, for these are days of will. This is when Moshe ascended to receive the second set of stone tablets and opened up a paved path on which to walk. (Likkutei Moharan II:82:3)
In a time where health, employment, even housing and access to food have felt more uncertain for many of us, we see that castles we have built indeed sit on foundations of drifted sand. In the morning blessings we recite as part of our daily liturgy we express our wonderment and awe at a G*d who is רוקַע הָאָרֶץ עַל הַמָּיִם--the one who firmly-establishes land upon the waters. How truly remarkable it is that The Holy Blessed One establishes the solid, life-nourishing, ground of our very existence upon the fluidity of our shape-shifting universe.
Some of the earliest rabbis of our tradition teach us to attend to and appreciate our first experiences of this power each morning! In Berakhot 60A they teach:
כִּי נָחֵית לְאַרְעָא, לֵימָא: ״בָּרוּךְ … רוֹקַע הָאָרֶץ עַל הַמָּיִם״
Upon descending [from one’s bed to the ground] let one say, “Blessed...who firmly-established the land upon the waters.”
And are we not also, in this respect as well, created in G*d image? Do we not have the ability--even if different in degree from that of the divine--to ground ourselves amidst or above the flux? This Elul let us examine the אֶרֶץ we have sought to set firm upon the מָּיִם. How reliable is it now? In a time when so much is shifting, which relationships, and practices, and what values have sunken or eroded?
This is the month of ascending to receive the second set of tablets, about which Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin taught the following:
In the first tablets, there was only the Ten Commandments, but now since you have toiled, I give to you the midrash halachot and agadot (the ability to interpret both law and narrative). And the intention of all this was that in the first tablets, the power of innovation was not given.
May it be G*d’s will that this Elul be a month be a month of innovating new modes of investment in relationships, practices, stories, laws, and values that establish firm ground for ourselves and for others and may we merit to bless the sacred in the moments we feel held firm above the tumult.
-Rabbi Scott Slarskey, St.Louis, Missouri
