up” to who we’ve been in the last year and who we aim to become in the next one. The horn is notoriously impossible to blow, especially with its prescribed cadence and strength. Try it some time: it’s really hard. Synagogues troll for the brave souls who can actually pull it off without making the congregation cringe at the sad attempts that emit tense toots or dying wails.
This year, I’m committed to fulfilling the commandment of hearing the shofar blast not only on the new year itself, but on nearly every morning of the Hebrew month of Elul, the weeks of self-examination that begin before Rosh Hashanah and end on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
So I’m standing at the kitchen sink, spewing tap water ineptly as my children look at me askance. My seventeen-year-old son, Ben, picks up the tawny plastic horn. “Let me try.”
He kills it.
I hit on an idea. “I need you to be my blower every morning for the next thirty days.”
“Sure,” Ben answers blithely, despite the fact that he can’t be roused before noon during the summer.
Before this project, I didn’t know that the shofar gets blown daily for thirty days before the Jewish new year. (It’s actually fewer, because the horn can’t be honked on Shabbat nor the day before Rosh Hashanah.) Elul is the month prior to Rosh Hashanah and leads into the Days of Awe—the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Elul begins a forty-day period of repentance, judgment, and forgiveness. These forty days recall the weeks that Moses prayed for God’s forgiveness on behalf of the Israelites who had sinned by building a forbidden idol—a golden calf. During this period of Elul, we ask forgiveness for that first, faithless idolatry and for our countless modern missteps.
This is new to me: starting the path to repentance in August’s eighty-degree weather. I’d previously thought that self-abnegation was a one-day affair—the Yom Kippur Cleanse. And that was plenty; twelve hours in synagogue without eating has always felt to me like ample penitence. But now I’m learning a new rhythm. Contrition starts daily, early, forty days before the mother lode, spurred nearly every morning by a noise one can’t ignore.
It’s immediately obvious that there’s no way I’m rousing Ben to blow the shofar for me. He’s on Teenager Time. I’m on my own. The first day, I pick up the plastic trumpet and go into a room as far from my sleeping family as possible. I lift the horn to my mouth and try to follow the contradictory directions to simultaneously relax and purse the lips, whistling air into the mouthpiece. To my shock, out comes a blast. It’s not pretty, but it’s hardy. I keep my gaze out the window, thinking how bizarre this is and, at the same time, how visceral. The sound of the shofar is Judaism to me: raw, rousing, plaintive, adamant. I blow one more time, a little tentatively, because I don’t want to disturb the house. I then sit down on the sofa to Google the twenty-seventh Psalm on my iPhone because I learned we’re supposed to recite it aloud every morning from the first day of Elul until the end of Sukkot, the holiday that follows Yom Kippur. That’s a lot of one psalm.
The verses are about God’s protection, which we’re going to need—Elul reminds us—during the upcoming days of judgment. I hear my voice saying the words, and they’re oddly comforting—despite the motif of dread.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
. . .
Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise up against me, even then will I be confident.
I then attempt the entire psalm in Hebrew, and manage to get through it. Slowly. But I’m proud of the fact that I can, in no small part thanks to Joel Goldman, my no-nonsense Hebrew tutor.
When my kids wake up, they inquire about my shofar debut. I tell them it felt poignant and pointless at the same time; I felt connected to something ancient, and yet foolish, standing in my pajamas, spitting through an ersatz ram’s horn. Ben apologizes profusely for failing his assignment on the first day. I reassure him that I should be the one shouldering this ritual anyway; it’s my Wondering Year, my obligation.
As the Elul days accumulate and become routine, I find myself actually looking forward to the new morning regimen—waking up ahead of my husband; turning on the coffee machine; grabbing my shofar and facing the window. My bleats are sometimes so solid, they surprise me, but more often they’re jerky. I have to balance my desire to practice against alienating my family. “Cut the shofar!” my husband shouts from the next room.
The Medieval philosopher Maimonides described the blowing custom as “a wake-up call to sleepers, designed to rouse us from our complacency.” It forces me to ask myself: “Am I complacent?” About my behavior, my friendships, my parenting, my work? If complacency means, as the dictionary says, “a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself,” the answer is actually no. Just ask my therapist. I offer her a weekly catalogue of self-reproach. But the fact is, I don’t scrutinize myself as comprehensively as I could when it comes to my character. Really, really truthfully: What kind of person am I, and how do I assess my pettiness, apathy, self-interest? The shofar should derail our rationalizations.
Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, author of one of the classic guides to the holidays, The Jewish Way, explains that Elul is a time for “accounting for the soul,” or cheshbon hanefesh (a reckoning with one’s self). Yitz, eighty-two, a friend of my parents (which is why I call him Yitz), who is tall, slim, and somehow ethereal in his erudition, radiates placidity. If I could spend more time with Yitz, I’m convinced I’d be calmer, not to mention smarter. “Just as the month before the summer is the time when Americans go on crash diets, fearing how their bodies will look on the beach,” he writes in his book, “so Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah, became the time when Jews went on crash spiritual regimens, fearing how their souls would look when they stood naked before God.”
I ask some other trusted rabbis how they’d suggest going about this nakedness, this “accounting for the soul.” They recommend choosing one trait a day and examining that one quality. In an attempt to find a list of traits, I Google “Elul exercises” and “Elul practices” and come up with a list of middot (traits or measurements) that will take me through all forty days. It’s an alphabetical litany of optional characteristics suggested by a Toronto teacher named Modya Silver on his blog (since taken down):
CHOOSE ONE OF THESE 40 TRAITS FOR EACH DAY OF ELUL:
