I suppose it’s always true – but this year, Elul – this month we’re in before the start of Rosh Hashanah – the month that’s supposed to remind us that it’s time to get ready for the High Holidays – it feels special, unique.

Special in a good sense in that Elul is “later” this year than usual. Usually we enter end August and enter September – the return to school, the return to ‘business as usual’, after summer holidays and time away – and crash right into Rosh Hashanah, with no time to prepare. This year, however, Elul almost exactly overlaps with this whole month of September, so we have a whole month of this ‘business as usual,’ hopefully so we don’t get caught unawares by the moral demands of the Jewish New Year as much as usual!

This year Elul feels “unique” – in a more difficult sense – in that this year it also happens to be the last month of this weird, sea-changed, and unfortunately grimmer year we’ve all faced since October 7th, last year…

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So what might the message of our Jewish tradition to us in this Elul, the last month of 5784, be?? As we prepare to enter the new Jewish year, 5875, on Rosh Hashanah – just days away – what are we thinking about? Feeling? Learning?

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Well, there is a good and a bad side to being a rabbi on this particular question. The bad is that, whilst you all are hopefully going to arrive at Rosh Hashanah – and Jewish community memorials for October 7th a few days after that – and get to reflect whilst in those ritua spaces…. the rabbi has to co-coordinate those days. So I won’t have as much time to reflect then!

The good side of this is that it means I have had the chance to take at least one walk through those emotions already, in preparing the structure of those days. X I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on the meaning of this Rosh Hashanah. And for October 7th – as Roman Roy says in the prestige TV drama Succession – I have had a chance to “pre-grieve.” 

(In said drama, Roman says it in a way we’re rightly supposed to be suspicious of – and I agree. So I won’t say I have actually pre-grieved, just that I have pre-prepared. A little.)

And from this vantage point – having had conversations about what the new year means this year, and what it means to approach a year of this terrible war – a year when family members literally from our community were killed or traumatised in the kibbutzim on the Israel-Gaza border, a year when people some of us, including myself, are only one or two degrees removed from have been dragged into lightless tunnels in captivity, a year in which family members of our community have been drafted into this war, a year when other family members of this community have had to endure heavier threats of military and settler violence in Israel-Palestine because the human rights work they do there with Palestinian and Jewish comrades is threatened more than ever by the rise of the ultranatiionalist religous settler right in the WEst Bank – in the context of ALL this and more – 

…in the context of what the American Jewish journalist Peter Beinart reminds us, in the Jewish community, has witnessed a war on Gaza, justified sometimes completely by institutional leadership in our community, including by the Chief Rabbi, which has seen to the destruction of a whole society, not to mention tens of thousands killed. 

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And our communal leadership, I fear, has largely failed to express what we need in this moment. They have either doubled down on bad, immoral opinions or circled the wagons… Or failed to help us unpack our own intergenerational trauma…

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And now threats of true regional war loom in that part of the world.

It is too much to bear. And we all feel in PAIN, and also in different places about it.

In my preparation for the High Holidays and October 7th, that has come through most clearly. That is, that we are all in pain AND that we are all in different places. 

But actually not in vastly different places. We all agree that all human life is sacred. That destroy one life is to destroy the whole world. We all agree that we are afraid of what this seemingly violent future holds. We all want a true peace, founded on justice.

But we are in different places still. 

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What we are united in – I have come to understand – is our need to be listened to and to be heard – and most of all, to be comforted. 

Last year’s chagim time was a catalyst moment of destruction, and we are all still trying to understand what it means to live in its aftermath.

So we turn, as always, to our tradition.

Two pieces of liturgy especially have called to me in this.

When I think of the hostages still in the literal and figurative darkness – and similarly, at least for me, those who are held in administrative detention – those held captive indefinitely without trial, without having committed an offense – I pray the line at the end of Birkat Hamazon, the blessing we can say daily after eating a meal:

HaRachaman, hu y’vareich et kol acheinu …han’tunim betzarah, v’yotzi-eim mei-afailah l’orah

God. Merciful One. May you who blesses – and is with – our brothers and sisters, any of us, those who are held in distress or in tragedy, may you bring those who sit in the darkness – into light. 

And further, the line from Psalm 121, which our ancestors and we recite in times of war and distress –

I lift up my eyes to the hills. Esa einai el he-harim… Mey-ayin yavo ezri? From where will my help come?

The psalmist is in the valley, looking toward the hilltops. In the world of the ancient Levant – and even nowadays – in times of war there, when you are in the valley, you are in the vulnerable, narrow place, and your enemy comes down at your from the hilltops…

This was true for those unsuspecting participants at the Nova music festival massacred in the Negev last Simchat Torah, as well as it is true for those villagers in the West Bank, who lived before then and now, in daily fear of Jewish state-settler violence from the hilltops that surround them…

We, all of us, lift our eyes to the hills, fearful of enemies. But instead, says the Psalmist –

I lift my eyes to the hills, wondering from where will my help come?

My help will come from the Divine,

maker of heaven and earth.

There is hope. There is much we can do. We human beings are in this narrow place, and we as human beings will ultimately, somehow together, be the ones to help ourselves and each other get out.