Elul Day 16

Dear Elul Writers,

I like to collect random minhagim and customs. Some I just stow away to occasionally pull out and delight in. Others are incorporated more fully into my life and the life of our family- we make them our own and act as if it’s always been so. This is how it is with the lulav that we shake during Sukkot. At some point, I read that it is customary to hold onto the lulav from the end of Sukkos in the Fall to erev Pesach in the Spring. Then, on the morning preceding the first night of Passover, when it is time to burn all of the remaining chametz in your possession, you use the lulav to ignite the fire. I was immediately drawn to this custom because it feels like a way to most fully make use of the lulav; the palm-frond equivalent of hoof-to-horn thinking.

The fact that our home had two random, small hooks adjacent to the front door when we bought it meant that we had a built-in lulav holder. So, each year between October and April, there is a progressively drying date palm branch, just next to our door. We don’t talk about it much, you might not even notice it, but it quietly stays there, stretched out horizontally, keeping watch over our house for half the year.

This year, when I took the lulav from its set place to help build a fire for our chametz, it felt almost like I was reaching back through the year. It wasn’t a Proustian transportation per se, but more like a gentle recollection of a different season. Grasping hold of the lulav, I remembered the first cool nights of fall, the breeze that sneaks its way in through the Sukkah’s thin walls, the fragile joy of the holiday. Here I was, on the cusp of Spring and its miraculous rebirth, preparing to celebrate our liberation, being fueled by the practices of another season. I felt the full-circle nature of the custom in a way that I had not before, in a way that I hope I can replicate again and again.

Prompt

Now I find myself in Elul wondering how we might stretch back across the year, to find resources from another time to help us in our work. I don’t mean that we should reach into the back of the cupboard for six-month old matzahs (though my parents don’t seem to mind, nor my grandmother before them). What I am imagining is a way that the lessons of another time of the year might inform our soul accounting. How might the lessons of it fuel our fires as we engage in the trying task of teshuvah? Could your interpersonal work be uplifted by the joyous spirit of Purim? Might your soul-searching be enhanced by the flames of the chanukiah or the questions of the Haggadah? 

Bivracha,
Jordan