“Ican’t really pray,” an old friend wrote to me this week in an email. “My efforts to forgive and ask forgiveness, such as they are, have been less than heartfelt. This has not been a successful Elul.”
My friend’s sentiments struck a familiar chord. In these days leading up to Yom Kippur, my Elul, too, has produced the uneasy sense of inadequacy I associate with the season. It hardly bears mentioning that this is, of course, an intrinsic component of the annual experience. My myriad major and minor sins of the past year, the past five years, the past ten and 20 years—some of which are clearly discernible, but most of which are buried, inaccessible to meticulous scrutiny—lie in a vague heap … somewhere … at the bottom of…memory. Not that I would necessarily be so zealous, in any case, to scrutinize everything in the pile-up! A backward glance, ricocheting off this or that uncomfortable remembrance, is just about all I can stand before I’m outta there—out of those obscure inner regions where conscience reigns.
Some years, even when the fast is over and I’m on my way home and thinking about what I’m going to eat, a small inner voice (which I prefer to ignore) inquires in an undertone if anything’s actually changed. “Even if your sins be like scarlet,” the machzor assures us, “they shall be white as snow.”
Yet in those final moments before my first sip of coffee—which in a fraction of a moment restores everything in the world to mundane normality—it seems as if even Ten Days of Repentance, plus the symbolic emptying-out of my spiritual pockets during the ritual of Tashlich, and even 25 hours of hunger and thirst, have not sufficed to convince me of my promised status as an innocent in the eyes of G-d.
Here at my laptop in Jerusalem on Rosh Chodesh Elul, I just now realized what I was visualizing as I typed that last sentence: a brown hard-boiled egg, still in its shell, in my mother’s white china egg-cup.
The thought of it—a mental souvenir from her Los Angeles kitchen, October 2001—causes discomfort in my chest, as if I’d swallowed the memory whole and it got stuck going down. That imperishable, ridiculously eternal egg, which was supposed to be soft.
Fifteen years ago, my mother was three weeks away from death and I was visiting. My purpose, of course, wasn’t to take a vacation; it was to help her, in any way possible. Nonetheless, my mother’s selflessness was such that she didn’t begrudge me the hours I was spending on the galleys of an about-to-published book. Indeed, she was happy for my happiness, and I had a surprise in mind: unbeknownst to my mother, the book would be dedicated to her.
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