Here we are approaching the first Shabbat of Elul, and we haven’t so much as uttered the word teshuvah. It’s like those old billboards in Louisiana that used to chide me every December, “Have you forgotten the reason for the season?!” If I was asked, in one word, to say what’s the reason for this High Holy Day season, that word would undoubtedly be teshuvah. It is a word that encompasses the turning and returning, the reorienting and repenting that we seek to do as we head toward the new year. It is a process that, each year, I seek to understand better.

Each Elul I turn to poetry, and each Elul I contend with a fear that, for some, poetry feels like foreign terrain. What if these short, little lines prove too steep? What if readers can’t quite get their footing, stumbling on metaphors, losing their traction in the loose dirt of the figurative. And, yet, poetry’s power is derived, in no small part, from its precariousness.

I am drawn to the perennial. Strolling through our local nursery, a begonia or vinca may catch my eye, but I usually head straight for the black eyed susans or gardenias, the coneflowers or mountain mint. I love the idea that season after season, year after year, these flowers will come back to us. An annual may find a place in a window box or a small planter, but I want our garden to be full of returning guests, old friends who arrive from early Spring to late Summer.

Halachic literature on the month of Elul is pretty light. The Jewish legal tradition doesn’t have too many things to say about how best to spend this month of introspection. The Shulchan Aruch does speak to the recitation of selichot, with differing practices between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The sounding of the shofar is mentioned, the inclusion of Psalm 27 and customs around fasting on erev Rosh Hashanah are retained, but the material begins to thin out around there. 

In twenty-nine days a new year will be upon us. Whether we spend time reflecting or not, whether we reach out to make repairs in our relationships or not, whether we dare to imagine a version of ourselves that is more whole and more holy or not, Rosh Hashanah will arrive because that’s what dates on calendars do.