Ellul, which begins next week, is the month of home-coming, when we first hear the shofar’s cry calling us home in teshuvah to God, our community and our best selves. Teshuvah means “return”. So is it different this lockdown year with its isolations and restrictions, when most of us haven’t strayed very far in the first place?
This has been a time of difficulties unequally shared. Some have faced illness and grief, often without the comfort of relatives abroad or even friends nearby, whom lockdown has prevented from visiting. Some have suffered abuse, with no protection or escape.
Many have worked all hours in health care and key services which, hopefully, we now appreciate properly. Many have had to home educate. Among the true lockdown heroes are the parents who’ve had to teach, work, cook and keep themselves and their children sane all at the same time.
Yet the challenges of the year have also presented opportunities, albeit not easy to grasp. We’ve been summoned home, sometimes literally by a ping from an app. With outward-bound travel restricted, we’ve had to look inwards for our emotional resources.
We’ve rediscovered the importance of neighbourhood and community and we’ve deepened our awareness of nature. All these are essential elements of teshuvah, return to who we truly are and what matters most.
Writing of the months when her daughter Paula lay in a coma from which she didn’t recover, Isabel Allende describes the long nights in which she delved down into herself and discovered “interior spaces — empty, dark, strangely peaceful — I had never explored before.” She calls them “holy places”, safe from the storms around her.
Mercifully, few of us have had to face such tragedy, but uncertainty and mortality have come closer to us all. With fewer distractions to divert us, we’ve had to seek resilience and inspiration within. Perhaps we’ve prayed at screens instead of synagogues, the sacred words entering the intimacy of our homes and hearts.
We may have meditated or practised yoga and other arts which draw attention to the breath and core of our being. We’ve faced questions we may previously have evaded: What do I do with our consciousness? How does it taste, sweet our sour? Who or what can revive my soul?
The Zohar speaks paradoxically of a deep well on high. I want to believe that if we descend far enough into ourselves, like thirsty travellers in a parched land, we reach a quiet depth where life-giving water seeps back into our heart, restoring our spirit. Perhaps this last year has made us search more fully for our God, or whatever we call this unnameable source of all vitality.
More practically, many of us have come to appreciate the street-community where we live. “When I commuted into town, I hardly noticed my own locality,” a friend told me; “I care so much more for my neighbourhood now.”
The rabbis of old didn’t known about What’s App groups, but they had something similar in mind when they taught that Ellul is an acronym for Ish Lere’ehu Umatanot La’evyonim, words from the Megillah instructing us to help our neighbours and give to the needy.
Many streets have collected for local food banks, sadly more needed now than ever. People who, before lockdown, scarcely knew each other’s names have left food and medicines for isolating neighbours. We’ve learnt not to take for granted the men and women who stock the shelves in the local shops, collect our rubbish and recycling, deliver the post and, despite the risk, continue to drive the busses. This, too, is teshuvah, coming home to support and value our neighbours, friends and those on whose services we depend.
It’s not just the human, but also the natural world, that many of us have noticed more. We’ve observed little things, the slow spring, allowing flowers to bloom longer, the birdlife, the changing leaf colour of the trees. If we’re privileged to have access, we’ve found physical and mental relief in parks and gardens.
They’ve restored our soul. Like the poet Andrew Marvell, we’ve been glad to let the pressures of lockdown dissolve into “a green thought in a green shade”. “The trees are my comfort,” a woman told me, after she lost her husband to Covid.
Perhaps this deeper appreciation of nature will inspire us to make those urgent changes to our life-styles and habits of consumption which will enable nature to return to us. There is no more urgent teshuvah than this.
Despite its difficulties, unjustly distributed, these Covid months have brought challenging opportunities to rethink our values and the priorities of our society and civilisation. This is teshuvah; Ellul and the New Year call us to take it to heart and make whatever good we have learnt a permanent part of our lives.
Jonathan Wittenberg is senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism
