Elul Day 4
Dear Elul Writers,
For an avid garage sale junkie, like me, the world of online marketplaces is a dangerous place. I am targeted by posts about pottery wheels, hand-cranked coffee grinders, native plants, old siddurim and taxidermied armadillos. It can be a lot to cull through. That said, I was quite pleased to land a robotic vacuum on the cheap this past year. Tasked with daily sweeping responsibilities, I felt ready and willing to offload those responsibilities onto this robotic helper.
Now, most nights, as we close down dinner service in the kitchen and wipe down the counters, we will press a button on our robotic vacuum and send it out to do its work. For an hour or so it will bump around dining room chairs, venture under couches, and glide through the hallway. Then, it will announce, “battery low, returning home.” It is this return journey that is most fascinating and confounding to behold. The machine, worn out from its evening’s labor, slowly creeps back towards the charging base. This trek home, though sometimes only fifteen or twenty feet, can take the better part of a half an hour. It moves exceedingly slowly, it bumps around clumsily, it tries turning again and again to orient itself correctly towards its home.
Last night, I was watching it knock around for ten minutes, quite literally, only a few feet away from the charging base. I had the realization that this felt very familiar in the midst of our season of teshuvah. We may be very close to returning, but still it can feel exceptionally difficult to get there. We turn and we turn and still we can’t quite get our angles right. We miss by six inches this way, so we have to turn again. Our batteries are low, our movement is at a snail’s pace, we grope in the darkness. We are not far from home, but getting there can feel nearly impossible.
Prompt
In a few short weeks we will be reminded by Moshe Rabbeinu that we are actually not so far from where we hope to be. The repair and repentance that we seek is not in the heavens or across the sea.
כִּי קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד…
Ki karov eilecha ha’davar me’od.
This thing is exceedingly close to you…
There are places in our lives where we are exceedingly close to where we want to be. We may feel distant, but that distance is only an illusion, a result of having our batteries depleted. We are moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. Today I encourage you to consider where in your life might you be closer to home than you knew. What is keeping you from getting your angles right? Finally, what will it feel like when you are eventually able to recharge?
Laila tov,
Jordan