Elul

I went to a shiur tonight (woohoo! yay for me!!!) and it was by far the best shiur I’ve heard in a very long time. At the end, the woman who spoke told over something that her husband heard a while ago from R’ Yaakov Moshe Katz while learning in the Mir. I wasn’t taking notes, so this absolutely does NOT do justice to what she said, but I really liked it, and thought I would share.

People who think that now that it’s elul, they should work on saying asher yatzar slowly, or bentch looking inside the bentcher...they are wrong. This is NOT what elul is about! This is NOT what we should be working on. But one might say- what?! Why not?! These are very good things to work on! These things are important! But that is not the ikur of our lives. We are not in this world to say a better asher yatzar, or a better birkat hamazon. We are here to improve our character. The middos behind these actions are what we should be working on. The action is because of the middah. If there’s an action we are doing that we don’t like, we need to find the middah behind it.

For example: Saying asher yatzar slowly- the middah behind that can be patience. If we're in traffic and we have a whole list of things that we need to do, and we're on the phone to our friend venting- don’t say- "I’ll work on not venting to my friend when I’m stuck in traffic while I have a million things to do". Work on emunah. Hashem knows what He’s doing. Maybe He doesn’t want you to do those things today. When we're screaming at our sister for borrowing a skirt without asking- don’t work on "I won’t yell at my sister when she takes things without asking". Work on patience, or anger.

Throughout the day while we do things, we can identify what middah is behind each action. This goes for good or bad. If we go help a mother out on an afternoon- this can be because of ahavas chessed, or maybe ahavas yisroel. When we give tzedakah, this is because we are a generous, giving person. There is a middah behind everything.

When we see we're doing something bad- we need to work on the MIDDAH. Not the action. And working on the middah will consequently bring us to changing the action.

And by changing out middos to emulate Hashem, this will bring us to our ultimate goal- becoming closer to Hashem.