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The new moon that ushers in the Hebrew month of Elul just passed, announcing loudly that it is only one month until Rosh Hashana. Elul is the leadup and launching pad for the day that begins the next year of our lives. My post last week was on the theme of human sensitivity and I’ll stick with it because it is so fitting to this season.

In the religious framework, Rosh Hashana is the day on which we are judged and found worthy or unworthy to continue our earthly journey. Spiritually, it is an opportunity to review and reset our trajectory in life. In either case, the days of the month of Elul are an opportunity to review, go deeper, take responsibility, and make resolutions that will help us elevate our lives closer to our potential, the process known as teshuva.

The word teshuva means “to return” and, classically, that has been presented to us as an injunction to return to God, from whom we have become separated over the year.

In the Talmud (Rosh Hashana 16b) the Mishnah says: “On Rosh Hashana, all the inhabitants of the world pass before God like sheep [being counted].” And the Gemara continues “Three books are opened on Rosh Hashana….”

The righteous and the wicked are immediately inscribed in their respective books, while the judgment of people who are not so clearly one or the other remains suspended from Rosh Hashana until Yom Kippur. Most of us are neither saintly nor evil and, for us, the process of judgment begins on Rosh Hashana. That gives impetus to do teshuva during Elul: why wait for the court to convene before putting one’s affairs in order?

Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz (1873-1936), the famed and revered Mussar mashgiach [spiritual supervisor] of the Mir Yeshiva, framed the teshuva process in terms of spiritual growth:

Teshuva is the highest and most exalted level [a person can attain], since it is the level of humanity itself. This means to say that [when we do teshuva] we are returning to our true selves. The “self” is the highest and most exalted level of a human being…. This is the meaning of the Talmud’s statement (Yoma 81a), “How great is teshuva, for it reaches the Throne of Glory.” (Daat, Chochma U’Mussar, vol. 3, letter 161, pg. 171)

Rav Yerucham is interpreting the Talmud by drawing on the traditional notion that the human soul, the neshama, is hewn from the Throne of Glory. For him, rather than returning to God, the process of teshuva means returning to our true inner selves. Somehow, over the year, we have wandered away and lost sight of and connection to what we know deep inside to be our true desire and responsibility in life. Teshuva is the process of reconnecting to the real you and exposing the pure, good, inner essence that is your truest self.

At the core of Mussar teaching and practice is the understanding that our deepest essence is pure and holy, but this inner radiance gets obscured when our thoughts, emotions, desires or actions are out of line with our true selves. This misalignment creates a blockage called timtum ha’lev, meaning “a stopped-up heart.” This is the obstruction that prevents us from being in touch with our true selves.

It is our natural desire to want to connect deeply with others and with God. It is our unbalanced state that distances us – from holiness and Godliness, from other people, and from our true selves.

This is the call that issues on Elul. Teshuva is the process of becoming aware of and knowing our true selves, and realigning our lives with our true goals. The work before us is to remove the barriers that prevent the radiant light of our pure souls from shining through, to return ourselves to the sensitive inner condition that is our true nature. Then we are truly alive.

The Talmud says (Berakhot 18a–b): “The wicked are called dead even in their lifetimes.” There is more to life than a beating heart and even the firing of neurons.

This seems to me to be an especially important time to be hearing these ideas because it is so evident that the majority of people in leadership positions – in politics, business, the arts, education, and even religion – are not focused on the ailment we call timtum ha’lev nor on doing what it takes to become sensitive people. Indeed, being sensitive is portrayed as weakness. Far from it. It takes incredible strength to be true to our tender hearts and remain feeling people in the face of the brutalization of life taking place all around us in the name of profit and privilege.

Again, we can draw guidance from Rav Yerucham. When he heard about the scientific invention called the seismograph, which is so sensitive that it can register the smallest, imperceptible earth tremors occurring thousands of miles away on the other side of the world – as well as those happening right under your feet that you can’t even feel! – he immediately recognized the analogy to the human heart. The heart is like a personal seismograph, registering every tiny spiritual influence, moral choice or emotional nuance, even those we might not be aware of.

We have to be careful here. The goal is not to become so sensitive that we are immobilized. But we do need to lean in the direction of sensitivity to counter the distorting influences of contemporary life that almost exclusively work in the opposite direction, desensitizing us, stopping up our hearts, and rendering us the walking dead.

This is the work of teshuva that is embedded in the month of Elul. Of course, it should be our work all year long. When someone asked the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) what the best time was to begin teshuva, he did not give the expected answer of “on rosh chodesh Elul,” but rather “right after Neilah,” which is the closing service of Yom Kippur.

We well know that as we go about our lives, most of us wander, lose our way, forget. Then comes the blast of the shofar on rosh chodesh Elul, calling us to wake up, to remember, to seek out the true path again, to return – to our true and sensitive selves. Do you hear it?

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