Lost and Found - An Elul Practice

By Rabbi David Jaffe

Image Description: Blog image with a photo of a sunrise over an ocean beach. Text on top says, Elul 5786, by Rabbi David Jaffe.

The one summer I spent at a sleep-away camp as a child, I wrote six-page letters to my parents almost every day. Thankfully, my mother saved these letters, and I’ve been reading them daily over the past six weeks. What is striking to me, and why I am starting a blog about Elul with this story, is how I recognize the contours of my current life in this 11-year-old boy's interests, likes, concerns, and passions, some of which were lost to me for many years. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (d. 1810 Ukraine) relates Teshuva to the process of finding a lost object. Based on the Talmudic teaching that all of us learned the entire Torah while in the womb and then forgot it, our lives are a constant process of remembering, recovering, and finding what was lost along the way in our journey towards living a whole, full life. Who we were at age 10 or 11, on the cusp of adolescence just before the world and its pressures get much bigger for many people, is like a signpost calling out, “Look here to find what you’ve lost!”

A prominent theme in these letters is the daily violence among the boys in my bunk. There were physical fights and harassment every day. I had just become aware, in the past year, of the history of slavery in the U.S. and of more details about the Holocaust, and was particularly attuned to the impact of people mistreating each other. I really hated the way we, a group of young boys, hurt each other, but couldn’t figure out how to change it. Neither could the camp, beyond assigning ever more oppressive counselors to “control” the bunk. While the letters contain lots of upbeat and funny descriptions of plays, music, sports, and even an enjoyment of Friday night prayer services, they are shot through with grief and anger about the pervasive mistreatment of one boy to the other. 

Erin Huang-Schaffer, a leader of young adults, teaches that one of the ways we forget essential things about ourselves as we get older is the need to “be cool” and not show how much we care or are enthusiastic about things. Upon returning from camp and entering Junior High School I learned quickly that showing how much I cared about people would make me a target for humiliation. I slowly numbed this part of myself, first by ignoring things and later with drugs and alcohol. This numbing reached its peak when I joined a fraternity that had a tradition of mistreatment in my first year at university. Thankfully, I eventually escaped that culture and began searching for the healthy, supportive male relationships and communities of social justice that now feature central in my life. 

I share all this because I see it as a story of Teshuva. Not the typical way we think of Teshuva as repentance for wrongdoing, but as remembering what is essential about ourselves. So many things contribute to forgetting - from shame to discrimination to economic pressure and more. I invite you, as part of your Teshuva this year, to think back to who you were as a young person of 9,10,11 and remember what was important to you then; what did you like doing? Who were your close friends, and what did you play? What got you angry or sad? These passions and interests could contain clues to something important you lost along the way and is just waiting there to be noticed, remembered, and reclaimed. For me, my commitment to creating communities and a world that works for everyone was back there in that bunk and is reinforced by knowing this is a lifelong commitment. Did you have a passion for justice and fairness that was suppressed by needing to show that you didn’t care so much? Reclaiming these early passions can power our work for liberation. I invite you to take a look at this season of Teshuvah - What might be there for you? 

Chodesh Tov,

David