Rosh Chodesh Elul

Rosh Chodesh Elul begins today - a month that has a deep mystical essence... But is actually just regular days, no yomim tovim!

And yet, it's here the shofar enters the picture, sounding every morning until Rosh Hashanah. Which is exactly what bothered the holy Alter Rebbe.

Elul is when the thirteen middot ha-rachamim open up, the widest mercy of the year, and the Alter Rebbe asks the following: "למה הם ימות החול" - why are these ordinary weekdays?

Then he answers with a mashal.

A king is on his way to the city, and before he gets there, "יוצאין אנשי העיר לקראתו ומקבלין פניו בשדה" - the people go out toward him and greet him in the field.

And out there [in the field], "רשאין כל מי שרוצה לצאת להקביל פניו" - whoever wants to go out and see him is allowed to, and "הוא מקבל את כולם בסבר פנים יפות ומראה פנים שוחקות לכולם" - he receives all of them with a warm face, and shows a smiling countenance to every one of them.

'Come all without, come all within'.

Out in a field, nobody's getting vetted at the door. No bouncer, no security to drag you out if you get too close to the stage.

Then the mashal follows the King back to his home. Back in the palace, nobody comes in without permission, "ואף גם זאת המובחרים שבעם ויחידי סגולה" - and even then, only the choicest of the people are allowed.

So for one month a year the throne room sits empty, and the King's out past the gate.

'Beside him was an empty throne'.

Which answers the Alter Rebbe's question.

Elul runs on ordinary weekdays because a field is an ordinary place, and the field is exactly where He comes.

The commute to work. The dishes piled up in the sink. The Thursday night grocery run...

the whole unglamorous mid-week grind is EXACTLY where He comes to meet you.

And all he asks from you while he's out there... is to come over and say hello. אני לדודי ודודי לי, whose roshei teivot spell אלול, puts ani l'dodi first for a reason. He came the entire distance. We still have to WALK OVER TO HIM.

The hishtadlut of this month is that walking towards. The shofar every morning is the sound of Someone already standing out there, 'listen[ing] for my horn'.

Picture a gigantic field of a parking lot, with the show long over and the stage gone dark. Plattsburgh Air Force Base, August 16, 1996. Three sets and an encore, and then a fourth set that happened nowhere near the stage: a flatbed truck rolling out through the campground, playing to whoever was still awake out there. The tape lists it as set four. Everyone in that field was equally far from the stage, and then the music got on a truck and came to them, 'Sharing in the Groove' with a diesel engine under it. That's the Alter Rebbe's mashal, on an airfield in upstate New York.

So Elul asks for one small move, made from wherever you happen to be standing. Rosh Chodesh itself is the model for it: the moon's at its thinnest tonight, barely a sliver, and it's here at the sliver that the month starts - 'We still got the light of the moon'.

And once you've walked over to greet the King, you're allowed to actually enjoy standing out there with Him, close and uncomplicated, before any of the Yamim Noraim scales and logic barge in with their relentless energies.

'You're the flower of my heart' is the tone of this whole month, and He says it to us first, by coming out to greet us in the lot.

May we each find the inner koach to get ourselves out to the field this year, in work clothes, dirt and sweat on our brows, with the day still unfinished, and may the closeness we find standing there, greeting our King, and realizing he's been standing there waiting for us to come say hi, hold us fully all the way to Rosh Hashanah.

Chodesh tov, phriends.