Dying Takes Practice: The Advent Of Elul

Candlelighting, Readings:
Shabbat Candles: 7:07 p.m.
Torah: Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17; Numbers 28:9-15
Haftorah: Isaiah 66:1-24
Havdalah: 8:06 p.m.

‘Do you have what it takes to survive by yourself in the wild?” So goes the come-on for the hit reality show, “Alone,” where “hard-core survivalists” spend a year in the wilderness — all alone.

Judaism’s spiritual parallel is Yom Kippur. Not exactly “the wild” or “wilderness,” and only for a day, but despite the Kol Nidre crowd, it’s all about being alone with just yourself; and even (to trust the liturgy) surviving. Are you capable of spending even a day alone confronting everything you’d rather not admit: how fast you’re aging, what you have amounted to so far and whether you have it in you to change. Preparation for Yom Kippur begins this week with the reading that introduces the penitential month of Elul: “See,” it begins, “I set before you blessing and curse.” Though addressed to all of Israel, the verb “see” is in the singular, leading commentators to explain, “spoken to each and every person, singly” — as if alone.

The shofar is blown daily during Elul, just a single, lonely blast, quick and piercing to the individual soul – because the commandment to hear the shofar is addressed to each of us, alone: No one else can hear it for us.

And no one can confess for us on Yom Kippur. Though our confession sounds communal (“For the sin which we have sinned…”), the Rabbis instruct us to confess in our own words as well.

Jews are not good at being alone. We like talk, not quiet. Even the so-called “silent” prayer (the Amidah) is noisy. We like to hear each other, to know we’re not alone.

But we are.

Daily moments of aloneness arrive with choices of conscience, decisions no one knows about except ourselves. They wink at us each morning from the bathroom mirror, reminding us of who we really are, before we dress up to look our best. They hammer on our consciousness when we are sick, depressed or weary — when people say, “I know how you feel,” but we know they don’t.

If we are lucky, we will get time to age: another case of being alone, this time in progressive disengagement from responsibilities and schedules; from assistants and associates who once answered beeps and sent us daily emails; and eventually, as loss of memory and mental competence sets in, from friends and family, too.

Final aloneness arrives with death, “the stoppage of circulation, the inadequate transport of oxygen to tissues, the flickering out of brain function, the failure of organs, the destruction of vital centers” (says medical expert Sherwin B. Nuland in “How We Die”). Others watch, even hold our hand, but we — alone — must face the awful fact of being, really, “here today” but “gone tomorrow.”

Our model for aloneness is Moses himself, as human a character as ever lived. Moses leads as we wish we could, but errs as we know we do. He loses his temper (kills the taskmaster), suffers self-doubt (needs Aaron as his spokesman) and is not your ideal parent or family man.

But he masters being alone. As a solitary desert shepherd, he sees the Burning Bush. Alone atop the mountain, he receives the Torah. Alone again, atop another mountain, he will die.

Or Hachayyim thinks Moses himself is saying “see,” instructing us the way God instructed him, in lonely solitude. “We all inherit a spark from Moses,” says the Zohar: the spark of knowing how to be alone.

But the spark needs fanning — for which we have Elul: to try each day to disengage, at least a tiny bit, from the din of daily wear and tear; to reflect each day on who we are and who we want to be. To arrive at Yom Kippur, prepared to be alone, as if it were the day of death itself. Do that, and it won’t be so bad even on the day we really die. Like anything else, dying, too, needs practice. And it’s never too soon to start. 

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, co-founder of Synagogue 3000, and professor of liturgy, worship and ritual at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, is the author of “My People’s Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries” (Jewish Lights), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.