Elul Day 7

Dear Elul Writers,

Every now and then you encounter a teaching from a thinker of another faith that not only inspires you, but actually deepens and enriches your understanding of your own tradition. That is exactly how I feel about spending time with the writing of Howard Thurman, the great 20th Century, African American, mystic and theologian.

I have often shared a tradition that ties the name of the month of Elul to a verse from Shir Hashirim. 

אני לדודי ודודי לי  

ani l'dodi v'dodi li 

I am my beloved's - my beloved is mine. 

In the past, I have asserted that this teaching is a reminder that the soul searching we do this month should be rooted in love. If Elul is really an acronym for a line from a sacred love poem, I argued, then the work of the month should be about creating greater intimacy with ourselves, with others, with the Divine.

Yet, encountering Thurman, I wonder whether the message we are meant to receive in the verse from the Song of Songs might be less about love and affection, and more about our most basic interconnectedness. He writes:

“Every living thing… belongs to every other living thing, and I can never be what I ought to be until the last living manifestation of Life is what it ought to be. For better or for worse, I am tied into the idiom of everything that lives. And if I forget this, I profane God’s creation. If I remember it, I come to myself in you and you come to yourself in me.”

For Thurman, the verse from Shir Hashirim might better be translated, I am my beloved, my beloved is me. In this reading, we are able to meet our potential when we recognize that we are linked to all life. We grow into ourselves and we come into our own through one another.

Prompt

So much of cheshbon hanefesh, the careful accounting of our deeds and behaviors, can feel personal, even solitary. Yet, Thurman teaches that we cannot transform into the people that we are meant to be, until all life is what it is meant to be. No person is an island. We grow into ourselves through being in relationship with others and to the wider world. In what ways does being in relationship to others help you come into yourself? If, on some level, we recognize our interconnectedness to humanity, to animals and plants, how can we live it out in the year to come? 

Laila tov,

Jordan