The original month of Elul was one of the happiest months of the year. It carried not a trace of the fear and trembling that are standard today in the yeshiva world. The sages said of these days that “there were no better days for Israel [than the days between] the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur.” The complete opposite of the anxiety that envelops so many during the month of Elul.
The days of early summer are mostly days of mourning: the mourning period of the Omer count, and afterwards the Three Weeks of mourning over the destruction. Fittingly, in those days summer is at its peak, the sun beats down, the work in the fields is hard and fruit is scarce. But from Tu B’Av onward — and especially in the days of Elul — the air grows cooler, one can go outside, and the pleasant part of summer arrives.
In this season, the days of Elul, when the ancient pulse of life was agricultural, the joy was great:
In the hills they harvested the grapes with songs and great rejoicing; in the winepresses the vintners trod the grapes to rhythmic shouts of joy (Jeremiah 48:33); in the valleys they cut down sweet dates, and onto the people’s tables came fruits and sweet delicacies not seen every day, like figs and pomegranates.
All of nature came back to life after the long days of scorching heat. Azaria Alon once wrote that all those poets who write about autumn in sad tones were apparently influenced by Europe, not by the autumn of the Land of Israel. The Israeli autumn is not one of withering but of renewal; certain trees bud anew and the wild trees are laden with fruit: the buckthorn, the strawberry tree, the raspberry and the hawthorn — red, sweet fruits that feed millions of migrating birds (and also the people who know their worth. Buckthorn jam is wonderful — try it sometime).
The sea squills rose up in their masses all across the country and painted it in purifying white. It was as if summer had made peace with us — granting us two months of grace. White days.
But in exile, the days of Elul became burdensome. Days of Awe. We no longer had agriculture, and with it went the natural joy of farmers picking their fruit in song. Autumn, especially the European one, was colder, more withered and more dispiriting. Along with it grew a month of Elul of soul-searching, dread, fear and the recounting of sins.
In recent years, many find the “Days of Awe” hard to bear. The “Elul” atmosphere that forcibly hunts for the bad things we have done suddenly seems wrong to them. Alongside this, one hears more and more the call to look, during Elul, at all the good things in which we have grown — and not only a soul-reckoning of “sins” from which it is hard to lift oneself. Sivan Har-Shefi wrote about this wonderfully. Not only “we have sinned, we have betrayed, we have spoken slander,” but also “we have loved. We have matured. We have grown. We have spoken beauty.”
In my view this is far more than trendy New Age. It is a deep feeling that seeks to return to the original Israeli Elul in which, just as the fruit is gathered in, one also gathers “the deeds, the words and the signs, like a harvest of blessing, heavy to bear.”
Three Israeli women poets who keenly felt the pulse of the Land of Israel’s year wrote in their poems about that Eretz-Israeli Elul — an Elul entirely different from the one we know.
The poet Rachel wrote of an Elul that is full of “fragments of life”:
“On an Elul morning the world is pink and azure, showering consolations.”
Naomi Shemer described an Elul in which one sets out on a journey that ends with “happy with them, pleasant and good — the journey can go on without end.”
My neighbor from Peduel, the poet Naama Henkin, who was murdered in Samaria on Sukkot six years ago, expressed this feeling so beautifully:
Not with a bowed head and not with a bent body.
My spine upright and taut, so as not to miss
that moment when the broken notes gather into
one great and whole tekiah.
And the sound of the shofar grew ever louder,
and with a light hand I draw aside the muslin veil
that divides the chambers of my heart.
(from the trilogy Malchuyot – Zichronot – Shofarot)
I think that the Sephardic Selichot too — which hold, alongside the awe, an endless sweetness, in their melodies and in the sweet tea — know how to weave together an Elul of asking forgiveness with the joyful, good-spirited Elul.
Last year, on the first day of Selichot in Sapir in the Arava, someone brought bowls of sfenj doughnuts, served alongside sweet tea. Those were sweet Selichot, and when we stepped outside into an Arava breeze among the date orchards heavy with fruit, I felt the return of the Eretz-Israeli Elul.
