The Days of Awe are filled to the brim with trial imagery. Sin and punishment, chest-beating confessions, a Judge who is both Parent and Sovereign — all the ingredients for a compelling courtroom drama are there. If our actions are going to be on trial, it is tempting to use Elul, the time we’re supposed to spend in self-reflection, to work on our defense arguments.

One might think that God would be impatient with arguments from the likes of us. If God is omniscient, what would be the value in it? What would be the point of the following request in Isaiah?

Help me remember!

Let us join in argument,

Tell your version,

That you may be vindicated. (Isaiah 43:26)

I don’t think it is the Eternal’s memory that needs refreshing. Mine almost certainly does, however, and there is nothing quite like an invitation to explain how I was right and justified in everything I did this year to get the gears of memory cranking. When I start unpacking my words and deeds to state my case, though, I run into trouble. I find my well-honed arguments trailing off as I see how shaky some of my excuses really are.

It would be easier, in some ways, to fling my defense in the face of an unrelenting Accuser. When I feel under attack, the walls of self-righteousness go up by reflex; there is no way I will admit even the possibility that I could have been wrong. There is a way around my instinctive barricade, though, and the One who professes to need help remembering has it all figured out. The One who speaks in Isaiah 43:26, rather than confronting me with all my shortcomings, solicits my side of the story and patiently waits for me to see the holes in my own rationalization.

Only then, when I see for myself how self-serving my memory can be, is there the possibility for my vindication through teshuvah, through turning and repentance and atonement.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

I first read Rabbi Alan Lew’s This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation during last year’s run-up to the High Holy Days, and I’m reading it again this year. The version I have is an ebook, which means that I felt free to do something I cannot bring myself to do with printed books: highlight passages that spoke to me in some way. (I cringe at the thought of dog-eared pages and scribbled notes in the margins, and I fully accept my own peculiarity on this score.)

This year, as I read, I occasionally run across a section of text I electronically highlighted during my first reading a year ago. It’s interesting to see if a particular passage jumps out at me as strongly this year as it did in my first reading. Here’s one that still has something to say to me today:

Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past. This may sound like a joke, but how many of us refuse to give up our version of the past, and so find it impossible to forgive ourselves or others, impossible to act in the present?

A hope for a better past… I know I indulge in such revisionist-history fantasies every once in a while. (Okay, probably more than just once in a while.) While in the midst of that kind of reverie, the kind where all the “if-onlies” come out to play and lead to a better conclusion, or at least a conclusion in which I come out looking better, there is a kind of satisfaction. Our memories are more malleable than we’d like to admit. The question is, is it worth my time to sit down, roll up my mental sleeves, and spend my energy sculpting a vision of the way things “should” have been?

Or should I instead leave the past alone, unpolished by self-justification, and walk forward? I know I will miss the mark sometimes and need to ask forgiveness, and I know people will need to ask for mine. With such a journey ahead of me, who has time to worry about what cannot be changed except in imagination?

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

Sometimes counting is straightforward.

• How many places do we need to set at the table?
• How much brisket should we cook?
• How many pounds of apples will we slice?

Sometimes counting defies simple arithmetical calculations.

• How many times have I missed the mark?
• How much more could I have done as a friend… a wife… a daughter… a sister… a Jew?
• How many times will I choose to open my heart rather than harden it?

Cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, is not nearly as clear-cut as the problem sets I used to churn through in math or physics. I can’t write a few lines of code to speed up the tallying. It’s hard work, this inventory of deeds done and undone and not done quite as they ought have been, and a knack for numbers isn’t much help.

Does effort count? I certainly hope so.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

In addition to my mother’s fair skin and love for the written word, I inherited her nearsightedness. I have worn corrective lenses in some form for most of my life. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is fumble for my glasses. If I can’t lay hands on them immediately, I can make out nothing but fuzzy shapes and colors. Without a lens bending the light coming into my pupil, my ability to resolve my surroundings into sharp focus is limited to no more than six inches in front of my face.

Sometimes my glasses get dirty without my notice. Since it happens so gradually, only when I recall that it’s been a while since I busted out the little microfiber cleaning cloth do I realize that I have had a smudgy, smeary barrier between myself and the world around me for who knows how long. It’s something of a shock to put on my newly de-fingerprinted glasses and see how much clearer my view is, considering that I hadn’t even noticed that they were dirty in the first place.

I think we all have a spiritual lens through which we look at the world. Mine is a Jewish lens; others may have Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or Wiccan lenses through which they seek a clear view of that which gives human existence meaning. As we go through life, I think these “lenses” can get smudged by the day-to-day crud we encounter: cynicism, disappointment, a painful news story, casual unkindness. Eventually, that crud will distort the picture we see of the universe and our place in it.

What smudges are between you and a clear view of the world?

For Jews, the month of Elul is a time to prepare for the fresh start of the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Just as we might wipe off our eyeglasses before we expect to see a particularly important or beautiful sight, we ought to take time to ensure that there is nothing gunking up our spiritual lenses and preventing the clearest possible view of the supernal light.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.