Rabbi Steve Cohen: The Days of Openness

Shabbat shalom everyone!  It is wonderful to be back.  I have missed you all…and I still miss being with you! I am so longing to gather all together, to be together physically.  But I am grateful to Zoom, and to all of you, for this opportunity to see your faces, and occasionally to hear your voices, and to welcome Shabbat with all of you…even remotely. 

I would like to share with you briefly that my two months off were wonderful.  Marian was still working (remotely) at her job, but she and I had a lot of time together, sometimes hiking, sometimes just being at home, sometimes in conversation, sometimes just reading.  I took a nap almost every day!  I think that may have been the very best thing about my time off.  We tried a number of new recipes, and watched some TV shows.  At one point, Marian commented: “this feels normal!”  And I had a lot of time alone, walking, reading, praying, thinking.  That time alone is deeply nourishing for me, and healing.  I cannot fully express my gratitude to the congregation for the gift of the past two months, and I look forward to sharing with you some of what I discovered and some of what I rediscovered, over the course of the coming weeks and months. 

Now, tonight, I would like to talk about this season of the year, how it is understood in our tradition, and how I try to apply that understanding to my own life. 

The moon is full tonight.  It is a Jewish moment. 

After tonight, the moon will wane….becoming smaller each night of the next two weeks, eventually becoming a crescent and then just a sliver.  And when the moon disappears completely and is about to be reborn, two weeks from tonight, we will celebrate Rosh Hashanah.  We are in the middle of the month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah, which our ancient sages refer to as “Y’mei Ratzon,” which may be translated as “days of openness.” Literally, ratzon means “will” or “desire.”  So when the sages said that these are days of ratzon, it sometimes gets translated as “Days of Desire,” but I believe a more correct translation is Days of Openness.   

I will tell you the story of why. 

Shortly after coming out of Egypt, our people came to a mountain in the wilderness, Mount Sinai.  There we heard the voice of God, and Moses went up the mountain, where he spent forty days and nights receiving the Torah, and then came down carrying the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.  It was late spring, on Shavuot, when Moses went up and he came down 40 days later in mid-summer, early July.  On returning to the people, Moses saw that in his absence they had made a Golden Calf and were worshipping it, and he flew into a rage and smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments and burned the calf and ground it into dust and mixed the dust with water and made the people drink it.  That day of the smashing of the tablets was in the middle of the summer.  The 17th day of the month of Tammuz, which is traditionally a fast day, and mourning. 

As the Torah tells this story, after that moment of collapse, of bitter disappointment, everything goes dark….and it even seems possible that the story is over.  The special relationship between God and the Jewish People has completely fallen apart.  And there are forty days of silence, mistrust, guilt and brokenness.  Those forty days go from the day of the breaking of the tablets, to the end of the month of Av.  So first, Moses was up on the mountain for 40 days of love and revelation, and then there were forty days of silent bitterness. 

And then comes the new moon of Elul.  That was two weeks ago. 

In this month of Elul, Moses begins to pray.  He is in that moment the representative and the embodiment of the entire people, and he prays a prayer of apology, a prayer of humility, a prayer of hope that there might be the possibility of forgiveness.  He goes back up the mountain and he works to repair the relationship, from the new moon of Elul and continues for a third period of forty days….which ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Forgiveness. 

That is why the sages speak of the entire month of Elul, and the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, as 40 Y’mei Ratzon, 40 Days of Openness.  These are the days after the rage and the bitterness.  After the disappointment and resentment.  These are the first, tender, delicate days…of apology.  Of humility.  Of hope in the possibility of forgiveness.  

 The letters of the name of this Hebrew month, aleph lamed vav lamed…the letters spelling “Elul”, are often seen as an acronym, that is, as initials of the four words in the phrase from Song of Songs ani l’dodi v’dodi li, meaning “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”  But it is imperative to recognize that the love of this time of year is not romantic infatuation, it is not love at first sight.  It is not the perfect love of fairy tales. 

The love of Elul is the love of apology and forgiveness.  The love that comes after disappointment.   The love of a relationship which was broken, and then….with care, with patience, and with courage….the relationship is repaired and healed.   

In my own life, over the years, this drama of rupture and repair has played out in a range of important relationships.  My marriage….especially in the early years, when we were still getting to know each other!  But even now, after more than thirty years, we still have our explosions and meltdowns.  And with my parents, with my children, with my siblings.  Life with family is always breaking down and needing to be rebuilt…..which is exactly why the first book of the Torah, the book of Genesis, is all about families in conflict, and seeking repair and reconciliation.  And also with my partners at work, my wonderful partners….these are the people I spend more time with than anyone else, and we often disagree, and need to compromise and to communicate and to support each other.  Sometimes we let each other down, and break trust….and we need to start again. All of which takes emotional, psychological, spiritual strength and courage.  

On Yom Kippur, Moses comes down the mountain again, this time carrying a second set of stone tablets.  The sages of the Talmud note that while the words of the commandments on the tablets are essentially the same as on the first set, there is a huge difference…which is that while God gave the first set of tablets to Moses already carved, the second set Moses had to carve himself.  That second set of tablets embodies the relationship between God and the people after the terrible betrayal, after the anger, after the bitter silence between them. 

The second set of tablets Moses had to carve himself, because they represent all the hard work that goes into rebuilding a relationship after it has fallen apart.  And according to the sages, the second set of tablets….the ones made by human hands…. were of greater holiness than the first set, which had been carved by God. 

We are right now in the holiest time of the Jewish year, the Y’mei Ratzon, the days of openness.  This has not been an easy year for anyone.  The strains of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, social isolation, political polarization, economic collapse and school lockdowns have brought out the best in some people but also the worst.  We have been brought face to face, once again, with the enduring searing reality of racial injustice in our country.  Many bonds have been broken, the fabric of our society seems in danger of tearing apart, and we are longing, we are hoping for healing, for our families, our communities, our nation, our world….and our own hearts. 

May this month of Elul, these Days of Openness, be for all of us a time of turning toward each other in courageous conversation.  A season of turning toward God, in humility and honesty.  A time of love….not the love of fairy tales, but the patient, thoughtful, grownup love of real human beings, working together to heal this world.     

Shabbat Shalom
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