D'var Torah

This Friday night, we will be entering the month of Elul — the month in the Jewish calendar set aside for reflection and repentance in advance of the High Holy Days. The metaphor we often invoke for the process of repentance is “teshuva,” literally meaning “return.”

There’s a lot about the concept of teshuva that can be very beautiful and empowering. Jewish tradition teaches that we all have an innate capacity to act in the world for goodness, justice, and mercy, and the idea of teshuva is that when we act justly, we are “returning” to our core selves. Elul’s invitation to us — to spend the month reflecting and opening ourselves up to the possibility of change — is also an invitation to believe in ourselves and in our world. To believe that sometimes, finding our way to doing the right thing might be as simple as turning around.

I have always loved the idea that repentance can be understood as a kind of (re)turning… but I find myself challenged by it, too. This week, as wildfires ravaged Maui, devastating so many communities and taking so many lives, I wondered (as many of us have been wondering all summer and before): what will it take for us to return the earth to a healthier state of being? And what will it take for the survivors of these fires to rebuild their lives? None of it is as simple as turning around.

Restoring the homes of people who have lost theirs, and restoring our earth in the face of climate change, might require new behaviors of us, not just individually but also societally — we might have to do things we have never done before.

As we navigate this challenge, this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, offers us a different metaphor for creating personal and collective change for the better when it says (very famously):

“justice, justice, shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20)

Shoftim, like much of Deuteronomy, spends a great deal of time telling the Ancient Israelites how they should act in the future — once they have entered the land their ancestors came from, once they have set up a self-governing society for the first time in 400 years. As much as the entire group is “returning” to the land of their ancestors, they are also undeniably doing something new, setting up systems of governance they have never experienced. And they are told not to “return” to justice but to “pursue” it — tirdof, the same root (resh-daled-pey) from which our Temple, Rodef Shalom (pursuer of peace), gets its name.

Sometimes return may not be an option — but pursuing that which we have not yet experienced, yet believe must be possible, is. One of the core beliefs of the Torah’s story of collective redemption (and by extension, Judaism’s story of collective redemption) is that human beings can pursue possibilities we have never seen before, ways of beings we can really only begin to imagine. For the Ancient Israelites, this included the promise of pursuing a just society. For us, it can include justice too — for all living things — and for the earth. This Elul, may we find in our experiences of reflection and connection opportunities for return, and opportunities to pursue, lirdof, justice and healing and peace.

Shabbat Shalom!