In his spiritual memoir, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes his first trip to Oxford University as a young man in 1916. A scholarly boy, Lewis traveled to this fabled center of learning, known as the “city of dreaming spires,” with tremendous anticipation. But upon leaving the train station, Lewis became more and more bewildered; could this succession of “mean shops” and unimpressive streets really be Oxford? Lewis walked through the unimpressive town until he reached open country; only then did he turn around and look. “There, behind me… never more beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I had come out of the [train] station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.” The glories of Oxford, its spires and towers, were right behind Lewis, after all. All he had to do was turn around.
The spiritual seekers of our community – and there are more than we realize! – are frustrated; they are yearning for “spires and towers,” but finding none. Though we fill our days with rituals and obligations – religious, communal and social – we are left with a gnawing feeling that somehow, we are missing the main course. For the most part, religion is perceived and experienced as a set of ritual and ethical practices – practices that may make us better people, but which have little relevance to our deep, inner yearning for a relationship with the eternal. We know that there must be something deeper, something far more extraordinary – if only we knew where to look.
According to the sages, the Hebrew letters of the word Elul (אלול), the name of the Hebrew month leading up to the High Holidays, is an acronym for the words found in Song of Songs:
The Hebrew words for “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” are “אני לדודי ודודי לי”. The first letter of each of these four words spell Elul (אלול). Elul is the “big picture” month when we remember that the ultimate goal of all the rituals and obligations is to achieve a real, personal – and even romantic! – relationship with our Creator. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” – Elul is the antidote to “transactional” religion; it is our opportunity, finally, to see the spires and towers that we long for.
The first step towards a deeper connection with God is to acknowledge that something fundamental, something essential, is missing from our religious lives. In other words, the first step is to yearn for something deeper; to feel a profound emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that can only be filled by a personal relationship with our Creator. This, fundamentally, is the theme of the month of Elul.
The English poet and painter William Blake once wrote: “I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weariness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.”
In every face he meets, Blake finds “marks of weakness, marks of woe.” Every community has its share of woes – political, financial and more. No one has ever lacked difficulties and challenges. But worst of all are the “mind-forged manacles,” the mental prisons of our own creation – the tragic ways in which we limit our religious experience to the technical and superficial.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, wrote that the people who live during the final generations before the Messiah arrives will no longer be satisfied with the details of religion. They will demand to see the forest, the panoramic view.
We are in a generation where people are searching. Young people are not rejecting God, but rather seeking a form of faith that is deeper than what they grew up with. They yearn for a profound connection with the Divine, a glimpse of those “spires and towers” that C.S. Lewis so poignantly described. The month of Elul is a reminder that the essence of faith lies not in the minutiae of religious practice, though they are important, but in cultivating a personal, transformative relationship with the Creator.
As we approach the High Holidays, let us take a moment to turn around, like Lewis did in Oxford, and behold the spiritual magnificence that has been behind us all along. Let us break free from our “mind-forged manacles” and embrace the opportunity to deepen our faith, to see beyond the “mean shops” of routine observance and discover the awe-inspiring vistas of genuine spiritual connection. And as more and more people search for the forest beyond the trees, for the panoramic view of faith rather than just its details, we may dare to hope that we are witnessing the dawn of the Messianic age.
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