There are Purim Jews, there are Pesach Jews. My teacher Rabbi David Ebner was an Elul Jew.
Elul is the last month of the year, the season of repentance, when we are called to account for the people we are. It is the month of self-improvement. For Rabbi Ebner, the best self-help advice could be found in the great Jewish texts and in the well-timed Chasidic story. He did not hide his struggles from his students: struggles in life, with Torah, and indeed with God Himself. In so doing, he modeled a kind of authentic, intimate relationship with God that I feel acutely this holiday season.
I learned from him for a year before college, at the post-high school yeshiva he led. But I really came to know him in the decade or so we studied, over Skype, and then Zoom, weekly, until his passing a year ago. Everything else in my life changed: I switched jobs, moved apartments, got married, had a kid, and more. One hour with Rabbi Ebner and the Sfas Emes, the work of a Chasidic master he loved to teach, became the anchor in my week and life.
Jewish tradition teaches that during these Ten Days of Repentance, we are encouraged to do more – give more tzedakah, treat others generously, take extra care in our observance of Jewish law. But our sages knew well that most of us would return to our ways faster than you could say “Break-Fast.” Doesn’t this ring of a kind of fakery? Is God fooled by it?
In Yeshiva, Rabbi Ebner understood that for many of his students, that special year might be the peak of their Jewish observance. He looked out at a room of eighteen-year olds and recognized that we would all make our own choices. But he believed that to be educated as a Jew properly, you had to live like one. And so he encouraged us, in Elul, to try on a new way of Jewish living, to immerse ourselves completely for that one year even if we did not expect to keep it up after we started college. At the very least, he would say, we would live the rest of our lives knowing what was possible, understanding a little better what we should be aiming for even if we never again got so close.
So it is with Elul, where we have an opportunity to give ourselves a taste of extreme closeness to God and to our tradition.
The final prayer of Yom Kippur is called Neilah, "closing." Most of us understand this to mean that the gates of prayer are shutting and our time for prayerful petitions is running out. The Lubavitcher Rebbe offered a different, beautiful reading: the gates are indeed closing — but you are inside, just you and your Creator, in a space even the angels do not dare enter. All of Elul is preparation for that moment.
Rabbi Ebner was an accomplished poet, all too rare in the world of Orthodox yeshivot. That sensibility lent itself to these Days of Awe, in which the hopes and angst and yearning of this season cannot always be expressed in well-organized prose. His poetic sensibility gave him an ear for the many layers of meaning in a word and a phrase. It helped him understand and teach his students to appreciate Torah on multiple registers. And it gave him a keen understanding of the human condition, fragile as it is, and never more so than in these days. I think it also helped him imagine our Elul selves as they deserved to be seen: not as imitation or fakery, but lived aspiration.
You will get a sense of the deep soul, the full heart, his own “quest for authenticity,” in the essay here. And you can read the full collection of his essays and poetry, published by 18Forty.
Daniel Bonner is a writer and Jewish communal leader whose work explores Jewish life, culture, books
