Rosh Chodesh Elul: Transforming Your Soul Through Practical Spirituality with Yarin Weltsman

We just had the Shabbat before Elul, which is very special this past weekend.

Rosh Chodesh is Thursday, which I'm super excited about.

And one of the things I love about Elul for me personally, is that I've always talked about how intentional the flow of the months are with where we're at in life and where we're heading.

Instead of just going into Tishrei and Rosh Hashanah, the new year and what are we going to do? And Elul for me is a closing up of the whole year, which is even more powerful than thinking, oh, how do I want this new year to be? For me, this idea that you have this section of time to look back and see what you've accomplished and see where you've come to and see what didn't work or what did work and where you want to work on to head into is really powerful for me and i'd love to hear more about what people can tap into in that way in this month and really step into looking back and the looking forward and how they really mix

for sure beautiful so yeah i definitely feel like that metaphor of l being It's both the bridge between the year that was and the year that's coming and also the gateway because we know that, like you said, every Hebrew month has its own unique energy and that energy is like a gateway into the next period of time.

So for me, Elul is the bridge.

It's the gateway.

And I would even say that it's the womb.

We have 40 days from Rosh Chodesh Elul, the new month of Elul, leading up.

Then we have 30 days later is Rosh Hashanah and 10 days later is Yom Kippur.

Those 40 days, we know in Judaism, 40 is a very powerful number.

It's a number of transformation.

The number of 40 years in the desert, 40 weeks of a baby being in its mother's womb.

So 40 is a very powerful number.

And that's why this journey is like a journey of rebirth and renewal.

And I think that one of the things that I always emphasize is that when we think about January and we think about New Year's, we think about resolutions.

It's open.

January has come, I'm thinking about things in a very masculine, boom, goals, what I want to achieve this year.

And Jewish time comes and it says something different.

It says, actually, this is a period of time for reflection.

It's not about resolutions, it's about reflection.

And like you say, not just looking back, the whole, I would say the crux of this month is the idea of Teshuvah, which people mistranslate as repentance.

but really the root of the word Teshuvah is Lashuv, which means to return.

So this whole month is a work of return.

And we know that it says, like a woman doesn't need to be calm, she only needs to reveal.