This week, the Jewish calendar guides us into Elul, the month immediately preceding the High Holiday season. It’s traditionally a time for focus on our personal self-improvement.
The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, was a diarist, and he wrote a vivid description of Elul in the town of Lubavitch (in White Russia of the time) where he grew up. There was a soul-searching ‘smell in the air’ throughout the town, he writes, with a ‘wind of self-betterment’ blowing through the trees, and rustling the leaves.
Powerful prose.
Now what does this mean in practical terms?
I think of it this way. If we observe ourselves, we can see that our personal emotional posture influences our logic and judgments. That’s human nature. Consider the Torah’s warning against judges taking bribes: “for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise.” How does the Torah call an amoral bribe-taker ‘wise?’
The Torah is telling us that a person can be moral and cognitively sound, ‘wise,’ and yet be blinded by his subconscious emotional posture. The Torah isn’t talking about a greedy villain who knowingly perverts justice for a few dollars. The Torah is talking about someone who wants to be just, who THINKS he’s being just, but is incapable of truly wise thinking because of a personal, subjective connection.
When a person is emotionally available, unencumbered, he is then open to true to intellectual progress. When a person is emotionally unavailable, when he is tied to a position by an extraneous force, he cannot be objective; his cognition is impaired.
The Torah is illustrating the power of emotional availability.
This is a central concept of Elul. We can all say we want to be better. We can even mean it. But are we ready? Is our emotional posture open to it? Are we emotionally available for real change?
It’s difficult to know, and it’s difficult to achieve. That’s why G-d gave us Elul.
Life’s backdrop, the very rustling of the wind, is different these days. Ambience affects us, and the Elul ‘wind’ grants us rare emotional availability, which positions us for real change.
When we’re properly poised; real change can happen. This is the time.