It’s been a year of hardships.

As I right this, we are beginning the month of Elul, the final month of the Jewish calendar, the one whose job is to remind us that nothing ever stays the same. Families once whole, torn apart by barbaric groups, hell bent on evil and destruction. It is our job to have these families not only in our thoughts and prayers—but in our actions, in our renewal.
Our lives are an open book right now, open on the heavenly table. Our Creator, King of all kings, Master of the World, is now taking accounting. Our actions, thoughts, speech, all jotted down. Our coming year please GD is being determined.
Life or death. Sickness or health. Love or loneliness. Rich or poor and everyone in between. It will all come down to how we use our time during the upcoming Days of Awe – the holy period which ends the yearly book by Rosh Hashana, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

The prelude is Elul. It’s our alarm clock, or calendar reminder to prepare, to practice. Elul asks us to roll up our sleeves and wade into the waters of truth, of return; the loving embrace of our Father in Heaven. The moment the month of Elul comes to an end, our moment of reckoning begins.

We begin blowing the shofar, the trumpet call that is sounded to stir us to a mood of thoughtfulness and personal accounting. Can you hear its cries? Are we awake and cognizant, or are we in a spiritual slumber? The Shofar’s sharp cries are ever present, pointing out what we have neglected in others, ourselves, and the world around us. It is now our duty to become alert to where we are empty, working from introspection to action.

This week, we celebrate the Bar Mitsvah of Alexander Saban, son of Ori and Hayley Saban. Alexander has taken this time in his life to invest in learning his portion, asking questions about our customs and beliefs, and has looked toward his future as a proud Jewish man.

As Alexander starts his next chapter of life, so do we. While Alexander reads from the Torah this week, he will read the words that have been uttered for thousands of years. While the world has evolved, our bond to our ancestors remains as strong as the ink on the Torah scroll. At times, there may be drops that splatter, perhaps some smudges in the words themselves, it is us who must take ownership of those imperfections in order to attain the strength of our bonds between us as descendants of our forefathers and foremothers, between husband and wife, between parents and children, among friends and within communities.

With Elul comes our opportunity to see our relationship with our Creator shift. It can become a deep, tenacious, old kind of relationship, old kind of love. As a boy becomes a man, he must expect less, embracing responsibility. It is us who must look for the everyday kindnesses in our relationship with our Creator; my eyes open each morning, birds chirp outside the window. It’s the small, seemingly uninteresting daily happenings. While Alexander is now taking on his responsibility to listen to the words of our Torah, we too must listen more carefully to the wisdom in the call of the shofar, to the wisdom of the call to action.

Let us use this Bar Mitsvah, together with Alexander and his family, as an opportunity to listen. Listen to the words of our Torah—for they are not simply on a scroll, but in every one of us. They are in the sunset, the trees and the stars, and as we listen, we can hear the reminder that there are no guarantees. We can be sure of one thing in our physical world — the inevitability of change. If we let it, the newness of each day, of the Bar Mitsvah boy and of the month of Elul can soften us. It can help draw us closer to our Creator, our Father in Heaven, to find new meaning between the lines of the story of our lives and time, or we can allow it to cut us down.

It is likely we find our truth somewhere in the middle, in that precarious place between love and fear. In the meantime, let’s pray that good awaits all of us as Elul turns us a new page.