WARNING ‼️

Elul Has Come Home

Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 — the Judean Hills, Israel

My teacher, Rabbi Azriel Chaim Goldfein zt”l, once described what happened when Elul arrived in the Lithuanian town of Telz. The change was not confined to the yeshiva. It entered the street. People spoke differently. They carried themselves differently. There was a sharpened sense of responsibility, a fear of judgment, and an awareness that the King of the universe was not an abstraction. Rosh Hashanah was approaching, and human beings would soon stand before the God of Israel with nowhere to hide—not behind reputation, routine, clever excuses, or last year’s good intentions.

Rabbi Goldfein did not teach us this to terrify us. He taught it to wake us.

He had studied at the reestablished Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland from 1953 to 1962, becoming a close disciple of Rav Mordechai Gifter zt”l and learning from great Telzer rabbanim who had survived the destruction of European Jewry. He then carried that Torah to South Africa, where he built the Yeshivah Gedolah of Johannesburg upon the principles of Telz: Torah without compromise, integrity, responsibility, derech eretz, and service to the Jewish people.

The original Telz Yeshiva had been founded in Lithuania in 1875. Its faculty, families, and most of its students were murdered by the Nazis. Yet in November 1941, while European Jewry was being consumed, survivors opened Telz again in a house in Cleveland. The murderers destroyed its home and slaughtered its people. They did not cancel Elul.

That chain matters to me today. The voice of old Telz passed through Cleveland, reached Johannesburg, entered the soul of a student, and is now being remembered on Rosh Chodesh Elul in the Judean Hills. Jewish history has a rather glorious habit of refusing to remain dead.

This coming Rosh Hashanah will be my third in Israel. I say that slowly because I never want the sentence to become ordinary. I am here. My family is here. The Hebrew language is outside my window. The limestone hills of Judea catch the morning light. Vineyards grow on mountains where empires once promised that Jews would disappear. Children argue, pray, laugh, and complain in the language of Isaiah. Even the bureaucracy is in Hebrew; redemption, apparently, also comes with forms.

But Elul does not permit me to turn this achievement into self-congratulation. It turns privilege into responsibility. It asks not only, “How did you get here?” but, “Now that you are here, what will you become?”

The first message of Elul was addressed to returning exiles

There is a remarkable Elul text hiding in plain sight. The book of Haggai opens on “the first day of the sixth month”—Rosh Chodesh Elul. The Jews had returned from Babylonian exile. They were back in the Land, but the House of God remained in ruins while everyone rushed to complete his own home. Through the prophet Haggai, Hashem gave them a command that could serve as the motto of the entire month:

שִׂימוּ לְבַבְכֶם עַל־דַּרְכֵיכֶם — “Set your hearts upon your ways.”

Then came the order: “Go up to the hills, bring wood, and build the House.” (Haggai 1:5–8)

That is Elul in one chapter. Look honestly. Correct your priorities. Then build.

The prophet did not tell the returned exiles that arriving in the Land had completed their redemption. Physical return had created a new obligation. They had rebuilt private life while neglecting national holiness. Their answer was not another conference, another slogan, or a beautifully designed statement about their values. It was to climb the hill and begin carrying timber.

Elul is not a mood. It is construction.

The fear of Elul is the fear of wasting a life

Jewish tradition locates the beginning of Elul’s forty-day journey after one of the worst failures in our history. Moshe descended from Sinai on the seventeenth of Tammuz, saw the Golden Calf, and shattered the first tablets. According to Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 46, Moshe ascended again on Rosh Chodesh Elul to receive the second tablets. A shofar sounded through the camp so that Israel would not repeat its betrayal. Forty days later, on Yom Kippur, Moshe descended with the tablets of forgiveness.

Elul therefore begins after catastrophe, but it ends with a renewed covenant. Its central symbol is not the broken tablet. It is the second tablet.

The Tur explains that the shofar is sounded through Elul to warn Israel to repent, invoking Amos: “If a shofar is sounded in a city, will the people not tremble?” (Amos 3:6; Tur, Orach Chaim 581). The Mishnah teaches that on Rosh Hashanah every human being passes before God like sheep through a narrow gate, while the Talmud speaks of the books of judgment being opened (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2; Rosh Hashanah 16b).

That is real fear. Judaism does not reduce Rosh Hashanah to apples, honey, and a seasonal family photograph. We stand before the Judge who knows not only what we did but what we could have done; not only the words we spoke but the damage they caused; not only the opportunities we lost but the excuses we polished until they looked respectable.

Yet this fear is not panic before a cruel ruler. It is awe before a just Father and King. The same month whose shofar makes us tremble is hinted in the words of the Song of Songs, אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי — “I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine.” The initial letters spell Elul, as noted by the Abudraham. Judgment and love are not opposites here. We fear losing the relationship because the relationship matters.

The Rambam hears the shofar saying: “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep… examine your deeds, return in teshuvah, and remember your Creator.” (Hilchot Teshuvah 3:4). His definition of repentance is brutally practical: abandon the sin, remove it from one’s thoughts, regret the past, confess, and resolve not to repeat it (Hilchot Teshuvah 2:2). No public-relations language. No blaming “the environment.” No solemn post followed by the same conduct on Tuesday.

The fear of Elul is ultimately the fear of reaching the end of another year unchanged.

Teshuvah means return—and return has a geography

In English, teshuvah is usually translated as repentance. The translation is not wrong, but it is too small. Teshuvah means return: return to God, return to truth, return to the person one was created to become. For the Jewish people, return also has a national and geographic meaning.

The Torah describes exile, awakening, repentance, ingathering, and renewed life in the Land as parts of one movement: “You will return to Hashem your God… then Hashem your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion upon you, and He will return and gather you from all the peoples.” He will bring us to the Land of our fathers and then “circumcise” our hearts so that we may love Him fully (Deuteronomy 30:1–6).

Ezekiel presents the process with another emphasis: “I will take you from among the nations, gather you from all the countries, and bring you to your own land. Then I will sprinkle pure water upon you… and I will give you a new heart.” (Ezekiel 36:24–26)

Read the order carefully. The prophet does not say that every Jew will first become spiritually perfect and only then be permitted to come home. He describes ingathering followed by purification. The return to the Land is not the end of teshuvah; it creates the conditions for a deeper teshuvah. Haggai said the same thing in the language of his own generation: you have returned, but now set your hearts upon your ways and build.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook gave this idea its clearest modern expression. In Orot HaTeshuvah 17:2, he wrote that the awakening of the nation “to return to its land, its essence, its spirit, and its character” truly contains the light of teshuvah. In Orot, Eretz Yisrael 1, he insisted that the Land is not an external possession or merely a tool for physical security. The Land and the people are joined by an inner bond of life.

That does not mean that every Israeli is righteous or that the State is beyond criticism. Anyone who has met Israelis—or opened Tanakh—should be cured of the fantasy that Jewish sovereignty automatically produces Jewish perfection. It means that the national body has come back to the place where it can live its full covenantal life. A body can be home and still require healing. In fact, once home, the demand for healing becomes greater.

The Ramban counted possessing and settling the Land as a continuing Torah commandment: we are not to leave it under the rule of other nations or allow it to remain desolate (Hasagot to Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 4). The Talmud says that a Jew should live in Eretz Yisrael even in a city with a non-Jewish majority rather than outside it even in a Jewish city (Ketubot 110b). This is not a license to belittle the Torah, sacrifice, and courage of Jews in the Diaspora. It is a refusal to rename exile as the final Jewish destination.

For me, making aliyah was not merely a change of address. It placed my private life inside the geography of Jewish prayer. “Gather us from the four corners of the earth” is no longer only a sentence in the Amidah. It is also a family biography.

Herzl saw the danger, Ben-Gurion built the vessel, and Rav Kook revealed the soul

Theodor Herzl did not invent Jewish longing for Zion. Long before Basel, Jews faced Jerusalem in prayer, mourned her destruction at weddings, rose at midnight to weep for her, and ended Pesach with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Political Zionism did something different: it translated an ancient covenantal longing into the political grammar of the modern world.

Herzl looked at emancipated Europe and understood what comfortable Jews desperately wanted not to understand. Antisemitism was not an embarrassing medieval rash that education would inevitably cure. It was politically adaptable. It could survive salons, universities, newspapers, parliaments, and declarations of universal brotherhood. In Der Judenstaat in 1896, he wrote: “The Jews who wish for a State will have it.” He ended with another astonishing sentence: “The Maccabeans will rise again.”

They did.

David Ben-Gurion converted political will into institutions, immigration, defense, and sovereignty. Testifying before the British Peel Commission on January 7, 1937, he declared: “The Bible is our Mandate… written by us, in our language, in Hebrew, in this very country.” Eleven years later, he read Israel’s Declaration of Independence and announced that Jewish history would no longer require the permission of those who had repeatedly failed to protect Jewish life.

An Orthodox Jew does not need to pretend that Herzl was a prophet or that Ben-Gurion was a rav. Providence has never limited itself to people whose religious opinions would pass our entrance examination. Tanakh is filled with flawed human beings, foreign kings, soldiers, builders, and reluctant leaders moved into positions they did not fully understand. Human beings act for mixed motives. God is not confused by the mixture.

Herzl grasped the political disease of exile. Ben-Gurion built the national vessel. Rav Kook saw that beneath even secular Zionism ran a current of national teshuvah. Together, their very different lives teach one truth: God’s plan does not erase human agency. It recruits it.

We must also remember the Torah’s warning once the work succeeds: “You may say in your heart: My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth. But you shall remember Hashem your God, for it is He who gives you the power to create strength.” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18)

The IDF, Hebrew agriculture, medical innovation, intelligence, diplomacy, and economic strength are not arguments against faith. They are the instruments through which responsibility operates. Trusting God never meant leaving the border undefended and calling the negligence emunah.

The Jewish world outside Israel is hearing an old sound

Diaspora Jewish life today is not a wasteland. It contains magnificent Torah communities, acts of chesed, serious learning, creativity, wealth, influence, and courage. America remains a remarkable home for Jewish achievement and Israel’s indispensable democratic ally. But gratitude must not become anesthesia. Exile is showing its teeth again.

The measurements differ—incident audits, victim surveys, and attitude studies do not count the same thing—but every serious dataset points toward a dangerous normalization of Jew-hatred.

The ADL’s most recent Global 100 survey questioned more than 58,000 adults across 103 countries and territories. It classified a respondent as holding elevated antisemitic attitudes only when that person endorsed at least six of eleven longstanding anti-Jewish stereotypes. Forty-six percent met that threshold—an estimated 2.2 billion adults. When the index began a decade earlier, the figure was 26 percent, or about 1.09 billion adults. The percentage has risen by twenty points; the estimated number of people has more than doubled.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights surveyed nearly 8,000 Jews in thirteen EU countries in the first half of 2023—before the October 7 massacre and the explosion that followed. Even then, 96 percent said they had encountered antisemitism during the previous year, 80 percent believed it had worsened over five years, and 84 percent considered it a major problem in their country.

In the United States, the ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025—an average of seventeen every day and the third-highest annual total since tracking began in 1979. The overall number fell from the record levels of 2024, but physical assaults rose to a record 203; attacks involving deadly weapons rose by 39 percent; and three people were murdered. A lower total is thin comfort when the violence becomes deadlier.

The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 survey found that 93 percent of American Jews considered antisemitism a problem, 78 percent felt less safe because of the post–October 7 reality, and 66 percent believed Jews were less secure than one year earlier. Among current and recent Jewish college students, 34 percent had avoided displaying something that identified them as Jewish, while 38 percent had withheld their views about Israel out of fear of antisemitism. A campus that welcomes a Jew only after he publicly divorces himself from half the Jewish people is not practicing inclusion. It is conducting a political conversion ceremony.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026, 21 percent more than in the same period of 2025. The monthly average was almost exactly double the rate in the six months before October 7, 2023. Physical attacks reached the highest six-month total CST had ever recorded. Thirty-five percent of all incidents combined explicit anti-Zionist motivation with anti-Jewish language or targeting. The old hatred has learned new vocabulary, but the target remains remarkably familiar.

Tel Aviv University’s Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2025 found that twenty Jews were murdered in four antisemitic attacks during that year—the highest number of victims in more than three decades. The danger now comes in several uniforms: white supremacism, Islamist extremism, conspiratorial populism, and an anti-Zionism that stops pretending to distinguish Israelis from Jews whenever a synagogue, schoolchild, kosher shop, or Jewish student enters the frame. Jews owe no political camp the comforting lie that only the other side is dangerous.

This is not 1938—and that is precisely why we must learn from 1938

Historical comparison requires discipline. The year 2026 is not 1938. Today’s Western democracies are not Nazi Germany. Antisemitic incident counts did not exist then in forms comparable to modern audits. On Kristallnacht, the Nazi state coordinated a nationwide pogrom, more than 1,400 synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized, and about 26,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps. To call every ugly demonstration a new Kristallnacht does not honor history; it blurs it.

But refusing every comparison is equally foolish. We compare not because the scale is already identical, but because the mechanisms are recognizable: collective blame, conspiracy, loyalty tests, social exclusion, the celebration or “contextualization” of violence, the transformation of Jews into the one minority whose fear must first survive a political cross-examination.

The demographic comparison is devastating. In 1933, about 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe—more than 60 percent of world Jewry. Europe today is home to roughly 1.3 million Jews, about 9 percent of the Jewish world. The global Jewish population, approximately 15.8 million in the latest estimates, still has not clearly recovered to the roughly 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939. Eight decades later, the missing millions remain visible in the mathematics.

There is another warning from 1939. A United States opinion poll asked whether 10,000 refugee children, most of them Jewish, should be admitted and cared for in American homes. Sixty-seven percent opposed the proposal; only 26 percent supported it. America would go on to help destroy the Nazi regime and later become Israel’s greatest ally. The lesson is not that democracies are worthless. The lesson is that sympathy in a free society can coexist with a locked door—and that Jews cannot base their survival on the assumption that moral people will always act in time.

The greatest difference between then and now is not that the antisemites have become kinder. It is that the Jewish people are no longer entirely powerless.

In 1939, a Jewish refugee ship could cross an ocean and still find every harbor closed. Today there is Haifa. There is a Law of Return. There is an army made up of Jewish children who grew into Jewish soldiers, operating under a Jewish government in the Jewish homeland. Israel is not a consolation prize handed to us because Europe felt guilty; our historical, legal, and biblical claim is far older than the Holocaust. But the Holocaust demonstrated, in blood, what Jewish statelessness could cost.

Prophecy is a summons, not a spectator sport

From an Orthodox Jewish perspective, it is impossible to read the Torah and the Prophets honestly and dismiss the ingathering of exiles as an incidental political event. Deuteronomy promised return after dispersion. Ezekiel described Jews gathered from many countries to their own soil and then called toward spiritual purification. Jeremiah heard Rachel’s weeping answered with the promise that her children would return to their border. Amos envisioned ruined cities rebuilt and vineyards replanted.

The Talmud goes further. Rabbi Abba says there is no more revealed sign of redemption than Ezekiel’s words to the mountains of Israel: “You shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit for My people Israel, for they are soon to come.” (Sanhedrin 98a; Ezekiel 36:8). It is difficult to stand among the vineyards and fruit trees of these hills and treat that sentence as dead literature.

The same Talmudic tradition says, “Great is teshuvah, for it brings the redemption near.” (Yoma 86b). Sanhedrin 97b records the debate over whether redemption depends upon repentance and includes Rabbi Yehoshua’s frightening teaching that, if necessary, pressure like the decrees of Haman can drive Israel to return.

That passage does not make antisemites holy, excuse their crimes, or permit us to sit passively while Jews are threatened. Evil remains evil, and perpetrators remain accountable. The Torah commands us not to stand idly by our neighbor’s blood. But Jewish faith insists that evil does not possess final control of history. God can bend even the hatred of our enemies toward an outcome they never intended. The villains are guilty; they are simply not sovereign.

Nor are we authorized to announce dates or decode every headline as a secret timetable. The Talmud condemns those who calculate the end, and the Rambam warns that no one knows the precise order of messianic events (Sanhedrin 97b; Hilchot Melachim 12:2). Emunah is not clairvoyance. We can recognize a pattern without pretending to possess God’s calendar.

I believe we are witnessing parts of that pattern now: a dispersed people gathering, an ancient language restored to daily speech, barren hills producing fruit, Torah flourishing in its native land, and a sovereign Jewish nation able to defend Jewish life. To call all of that random may sound sophisticated, but it requires a faith in coincidence far greater than my faith in God.

Still, the Rambam adds a necessary correction. The Sages did not long for redemption so Jews could dominate other peoples, enjoy luxury, or receive applause. They longed for freedom from oppression so that Israel could devote itself to Torah and wisdom (Hilchot Melachim 12:4). Jewish strength is not the final purpose. It is the protection that allows the purpose to be lived.

What Elul demands now

First, personal teshuvah. Not vague spirituality—specific repair. Apologize to the person we injured. Return what is not ours. Stop the habit we keep renaming. Increase Torah, tefillah, and tzedakah. The Rambam’s verbs are mercilessly concrete because a changed life is built from changed acts.

Second, national teshuvah. Israel must defend itself without apology, but sovereignty cannot become a substitute for holiness. A Jewish state must be Jewish not only in its flag, calendar, army, and anthem, but in its honesty, justice, care for the vulnerable, reverence for life, and responsibility toward every Jew. The Land is not a trophy confirming our perfection. It is the arena in which God demands more of us.

Third, Jewish unity without Jewish cowardice. We can argue—Jews appear to have retained professional-level certification in that field—but we cannot allow political hatred to dissolve peoplehood. October 7 reminded us with unbearable cruelty that our enemies do not inspect voting records, synagogue affiliations, or preferred rabbis before deciding who is a Jew.

Fourth, a serious Diaspora reckoning. Not every Jew can make aliyah tomorrow, and no thoughtful person should speak casually about family, health, livelihood, or communal obligations. But every Jew should ask the question honestly. Learn Hebrew. Strengthen Torah identity. Visit Israel. Invest in it. Defend it publicly. Prepare children to see it not as a foreign policy hobby but as home. Aliyah should not belong only to moments of panic. It is not flight from history; it is return to it.

Fifth, fight antisemitism with the full force of democratic law and Jewish self-respect. Secure synagogues and schools. Prosecute violence. Expose propaganda whether it comes from the right, the left, or religious extremism. Refuse the obscene demand that Jews earn protection by denouncing Israel. A shul surrounded by armed guards may be necessary, but it must never be rebranded as normal.

And finally, build. Haggai did not tell the returnees to admire prophecy. He told them to carry wood. Build families, schools, yeshivot, farms, businesses, laboratories, communities, and institutions worthy of the Jewish future. Divine providence is not permission to outsource our duty to Heaven.

The shofar has reached the hills

I keep returning to Rabbi Goldfein’s description of Telz. The people felt judgment approaching, and that knowledge changed the atmosphere of a town. His teaching itself traveled through the furnace of Jewish history: from Lithuania to Cleveland, from Cleveland to Johannesburg, and from Johannesburg to a student who would one day stand in the Judean Hills on the first day of Elul.

That is not proof that I understand every detail of God’s plan. I do not. It is proof that the plan is larger than the intentions of those who tried to end us.

This will be my third Rosh Hashanah in Israel. The magnitude of that fact is not that I have arrived and can congratulate myself. It is that I have been given a place to answer the call. The privilege of coming home carries the obligation to help make the home worthy of its name.

We may be standing at one of the great hinges of Jewish history. Antisemitism is again exposing the fragility of exile. Israel, wounded and magnificent, is being forced to rediscover the depth of its purpose. Jews everywhere are being asked whether Judaism is merely an identity they possess or a covenant they are prepared to live.

God has a plan. Jewish history is not drifting toward nowhere, and the promises of the Torah were not poetic decorations for a people sentenced to eternal weakness. But the plan is not a theater performance for us to watch from comfortable seats. It moves through choices, courage, repentance, aliyah, defense, Torah, and building.

On the first of Elul, Haggai’s words return: Set your hearts upon your ways. Go up to the hills. Build the House.

The shofar is already sounding in the hills. The question of Elul is not whether God remembers His covenant. The question is whether we remember ours.