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rue the advent of the month of Elul is the beginning of the serious season the opportunity for the Jew to renew his connectedness with his Maker. And true the daily sound of the shofar is designed to arouse us from our lethargy and to return to the basics of responsible Jewish living. But it is also a time for confession and I must confess that over and above the transcendent messages of Elul the coming of this month always generates a certain anxiety within my being. The anxiety is not as I would love to think because of the need to do teshuvah and repentance. No it is for more mundane considerations that apply only to pulpit rabbis.

For a pulpit rabbi Elul’s focus on the strengthening of our bonds with the Almighty is somewhat diluted by a competing focus: the beginning of a new synagogue year and the start of new responsibilities to ensure that all the gears of the shul are ready to move. Those responsibilities include the Shabbos programs the schools the adult education the youth minyanim — not to mention the requisite meetings with the baalei tefillah and the baal tokeia to review the halachos of the davening and the shofar blowing. And — most tension inducing — the need to prepare four major sermons that will inspire and uplift the hundreds of people who will be in shul and to try to say something that will penetrate their minds and souls and make them better Jews. The stakes are high. One should not fumble the opportunity. So it is understandable that there is a certain Elul anxiety in the air.

But I ask myself have you forgotten? None of this applies to you anymore. You are no longer a pulpit rabbi. You retired some 20 years ago. You no longer have to concern yourself with the new synagogue year or busy yourself with preparing four major sermons for the Yamim Noraim. Why then should Elul create any tension?

All true. But 40 years in the rabbinate and 40 years of Elul pressures do not dissipate that easily. And today years after my formal retirement I still sense the same Pavlovian reaction as before. Elul appears a certain apprehensiveness surrounds me the juices begin to flow — until I consciously remind myself that although this is the same familiar Elul I am not the same familiar rabbi and all I have to do on the Yamim Noraim is show up in shul listen to someone else’s major sermons and do a little teshuvah along the way.

“All I have to do is do a little teshuvah along the way.” Ah there’s the rub. It is then that I realize why I feel anxious even though I have no synagogue burdens weighing upon me. Because at every post-retirement Elul I realize anew that it is much easier to busy myself with efforts to enhance the religious lives of other people to urge them to renew their acquaintanceship with Him to try to uplift and inspire them to engage in serious introspection — than it is to address these issues to one’s own self. To deliver sermons to others is relatively straightforward. To look inward and to work on enhancing one’s own connectedness with the Creator — this is infinitely more complex. And there is no such thing as “a little teshuvah.” (And on second thought the need to look inward and not outward applies not only to rabbis….)

This is why Elul fills one with a certain trepidation. The stakes are high; one should not fumble the opportunity not only to make them better ovdei Hashem but to make one’s own self a better oved Hashem.

From this no one can — or should — ever retire.