This Elul, You Do You

When Elul rolls around, Jews who are in sync with the Jewish calendar know that our thoughts turn to teshuva – repentance.

 

That’s a heavy topic. REPENTANCE. It calls up images of falling to one’s knees, dredging up all the sinful, immoral, embarrassing things you’ve done and punishing yourself for every failing. Who wants to go there?

 

But what if teshuva didn’t actually require any self-flagellation at all? What if doing teshuva simply meant that you could improve on “you doing you”?

 

We are, all of us, a combination of body and soul. We pay plenty of attention to our bodies every single day. We feed them, we groom them, we dress them, we use them to be intimate with other human beings, we rest them. Some of us even exercise them on a regular basis. Our bodies demand and command a lot of our attention.

 

But what about our souls? Most of us are not studying Torah full-time or praying every day or even doing regular Jewish meditation. So what do we do to nourish the part of us that isn’t physical? How much attention do we pay to our souls that are, according to Jewish tradition, a spark of Hashem, a bit of Godliness within each of us?

One way of understanding teshuva is simply to relate more to the metaphysical aspects of ourselves, to become more in touch with a part of us that exists, even if it’s being neglected as we focus on getting in shape or getting a degree or getting married or getting a new job or getting anything else in the material world.

 

What if teshuva was as simple as acknowledging that, whatever else we are, we are also spiritual  beings. And the more in touch we are with the entirety of ourselves, the more easily we can positively impact the world in exactly the way we are destined to.

Imagine God is extending a hand to us, to our souls. Teshuva is as easy as grabbing God’s hand, getting a burst of energy from the spiritual aspect of ourselves, becoming more fully who we are. And then finding ways to nurture that part of ourselves, in a way that’s consistent with who we are in our deepest selves.

Many of us spend years, even decades, nurturing our bodies, our minds, even our emotions. How would your life change if you began actively nurturing the spark of Divinity within you that we call the soul?

It would enable you to “do you” even better than before, because once you begin paying attention to an aspect of you that you’ve neglected, you’re more authentically yourself.

No self-flagellation required.