Elul All Year Long

Tuesday night, the day before Erev Rosh Hashanah, there was a knock on my door. It was a person who my husband usually deals with; a person who’s had a difficult few years, and who we try to help whenever we have a bit of spare money earmarked for charity. But this year, the person had left it too late; my husband had left for Uman, and all I had in my purse by Tuesday night was one and a half shekels.
 
I don’t have a check book anymore, so that wasn’t an option. I simply had nothing to give him. The person came very close to having a meltdown on my front doorstep. He had no money for his family to have food for Rosh Hashanah (which was a three day marathon this year); he was going back into hospital the following Monday, probably for more serious surgery; and he was days away from being thrown out of his apartment (again) for not paying the rent.
 
Now, to cap it all off, he’d just been round my village to all of his ‘regulars’ – and all of them had either left already to Uman or couldn’t help him.
 
He started telling me how despairing he felt; how angry he was; how he felt like he was going to go home and cut his kids peyot (side curls) off, because if this was how G-d treated a religious person, who needed it?
 
I’ve had some conversations with this person over the past few years, where I’ve tried to tell him about talking to G-d; about doing regular hitbodedut (personal prayer); about not relying on people, but only putting our trust in G-d. Easy for me to say, in my own home, with my earning husband, with food on the table, thank G-d. Which is why the conversations have always been very gentle, and they’ve stopped whenever they got uncomfortable.
 
But that’s not what happened Tuesday night. Maybe it was the fact that I’d just sat down on the armchair for the first time all day two seconds before he rang the door bell; maybe it was the fact that my gas had just run out, and I was trying to think of ways of cooking everything I needed without it; maybe I was missing my husband, who’d left the day before to spend the new year in Uman; maybe it was the latent ‘stress’ of a looming three-day yom tov, and the feeling that so much was hanging in the balance this Rosh Hashanah.
 
All I can tell you, is that I really went for the poor man’s jugular. I told him he was a liar, and that he wasn’t really a believing person – because if he did really believe in G-d, he’d be talking to Him for six hours a day until he got the help he needed.
 
We argued for more than half an hour on the doorstep, and instead of getting more sympathetic, I got more and more ‘hard’ with the poor man.
 
I had no idea what was going on, really, because all week – all Elul – I’d been trying so hard to work on judging favorably, and on doing kindnesses for my fellow Jew, and here I was saying some unbelievably harsh things to a person who was already feeling about as low as he could go.
 
I asked him to forgive me, and he did, at the end of the conversation. But I closed the door feeling as though G-d had just set me up to lose my World-to-Come, G-d forbid. For the rest of the evening, I was extremely agitated and upset. I decided that the next day, I was going to devote a big part of my personal prayer to asking G-d to help my down-and-out visitor.
 
The next day started at 4.38am, when I woke up from a very strange dream, with the very clear thought that I had to find the man, and I had to give him 1,000 shekels to buy food for Rosh Hashanah.
 
I had the strong feeling that my own judgement for Rosh Hashanah depended on it.
 
But I had no idea how I was going to do it. The bank machine hasn’t given me more than 150 shekels a day for the last few months, and I didn’t really know anyone who could lend me such a big sum at such short notice the day before Rosh Hashanah.
 
But I had to help the man – and myself.
 
So at 5am, I got in the car and drove to the nearest bank, and asked G-d for help. I put the card in, and miracle of miracles, the bank machine actually gave me 1,000 shekels.
 
Now, I had to try and track the man down – which again, was not so straightforward as it’s my husband who deals with him, and he was incommunicado  in Uman.
 
I ran round my village for a couple of hours until I finally found someone who had the man’s number. I called him, and before I even told him I had some money for him, he told me that he’d spent the night talking to G-d, and he felt like a new person.
 
I was so pleased (and relieved…) I almost cried. For a day, I felt as though Hashem had used me as a ‘stick’ to hurt someone else the day before Rosh Hashanah; to be told that it had ended ‘well’ was such a present, and I started to hope that maybe I’d been used to do something ‘good’ instead.
 
We arranged for him to pick up the money (and as it turned out, someone else had also come through for him as well…) and I tried to get back to getting everything done for the New Year.
 
A little later on, my husband called, and I told him what I’d done, and why. It turned out that my husband had 1,000 shekels set aside for the man, but hadn’t got around to giving it to him before he left.
 
It was the nice ‘finishing touch’ on what had been a real emotional and spiritual roller-coaster ride.
 
I went into Rosh Hashanah in quite a funny mood; I felt very humble, very grateful, and very ‘low down’ the pecking order of Jews. I write a lot of things, I do a lot of praying, I try to change. But I still have so much work to do.
 
My prayers were not great over the holiday – I was pretty tired, mentally and physically, and I felt quite washed-out by all the drama of the last few weeks, and days.
 
I only managed to hear the minimum amount of shofar blasts each day. I didn’t do a ‘whole’ service. I spent hours and hours trying to fight off my very judgemental yetzer hara, that was trying to pull me into picking holes into every single other Jew I met.
 
It was exhausting, and a bit disappointing, if I’m honest. But two things kept me going: my husband was praying in Uman, and that was my ‘ace up the sleeve’ for Rosh Hashanah; and I also knew that G-d wasn’t just judging me based on these two days – my whole year last year felt like Elul, because I’d been trying to work on things and improve them the whole time.
 
I want to do better. I want to be a good Jew. I want to at least want what G-d wants for me. I know I’m really never going to get there. But I realized this Rosh Hashanah, if G-d wants me to serve Him by falling down again and again and again – I can’t argue against it.
 
I can only do my best to accept what He wants for me, and hope that in some strange way, my failures are crowning Him as King of the world at least as much as my successes.