The books are open. Unfortunately, so is my medical file

Rosh Hashanah, an unfinished spiritual audit, and a body with spectacularly bad timing

I spent Elul trying to become a better person. This was already ambitious.

My plan, as outlined in my recent piece, was reasonably adult: work out what needs to change, what needs to be repaired, what needs to be accommodated and what simply needs to be accepted. Four sensible questions. Four neat little compartments in the spiritual suitcase. After 57 years, several countries, 52 house moves and enough personal reinvention to qualify as a multinational corporation, I had finally developed a system.

Then my body apparently read the itinerary and decided to develop an infection.

So, with Rosh Hashanah approaching, I have an infection, my bipolar disorder is doing something between “perhaps we should stay in bed until 5788” and “I have seventeen excellent ideas and should probably reorganize Western civilization before breakfast”, and the Jewish calendar has calmly announced that it is time for my annual performance review before the Creator of the Universe.

Nothing says prepare to stand in judgement quite like a body in revolt while your neurotransmitters conduct a hostile takeover.

They are my ailments and I reserve the right to mock them. If I have to inhabit a body that occasionally behaves like a badly managed Israeli coalition government, I am at least claiming parliamentary privilege to heckle it. At present, my body has opened an unnecessary second front while my brain has formed three competing governments and none appears capable of passing a budget.

There is, however, a point somewhere beneath the antibiotics and collapsing executive governance.

Elul is a month of reckoning. We take inventory. We look at what we have done, what we have failed to do, whom we have hurt, where we have been cowardly, selfish, dishonest, lazy or simply spectacularly stupid. Then, ideally, we do teshuvah. I like the concept of teshuvah enormously. I am less enthusiastic about its administrative requirements.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the notion that spiritual preparation meant arriving at Rosh Hashanah improved. Not perfect, obviously. I am Jewish, not delusional. But improved enough to present a respectable set of accounts.

Unfortunately, the accounts are a dog’s breakfast.

There are things I need to change and have not yet changed. Things I need to repair that remain stubbornly cracked. Things I have finally understood must be accommodated rather than conquered. And there are things I am still learning to accept without confusing acceptance with lying face-down on the carpet and declaring insolvency.

Which means my tidy four-question Elul framework has developed an inconvenient fifth question: What happens when the Day of Judgement arrives before you are finished?

This year, the answer is strangely beautiful.

Rosh Hashanah begins on Friday night. The first day falls on Shabbat, and because the shofar is not blown on Shabbat, the defining sound of Rosh Hashanah will not be heard until the second day.

Even the shofar is late.

I cannot adequately express how reassuring I find this.

All through Elul, the shofar has been telling us to wake up. Wake up spiritually. Wake up morally. Stop sleepwalking through your own life. Examine your deeds. Return to G-D. Consider the consequences of behaving like an idiot for another twelve months.

Then Rosh Hashanah itself arrives and the alarm clock doesn’t go off.

For an entire day, the King remains King, the Books are opened, judgement proceeds and nobody declares the festival invalid because the principal sound effect has been rescheduled.

Apparently Heaven can cope with an incomplete program.

Humans are considerably worse at it.

We adore completion. Before-and-after photographs. Transformations. Recovery stories in which somebody “does the work”, emerges from adversity radiant and hydrated, and starts a podcast. We like our broken people repaired by the final paragraph. Preferably with excellent skin.

Real life is less cooperative.

Sometimes we are halfway through grief, halfway through forgiveness, halfway through learning to be kinder, halfway through relinquishing a resentment we have become embarrassingly fond of. Sometimes we are learning how to inhabit a body or brain that did not arrive with the promised operating manual and occasionally decides to install updates during working hours.

Perhaps Rosh Hashanah is not an awards ceremony for the successfully transformed.

Perhaps it is where unfinished people stand before a G-D who knows exactly how unfinished they are.

There is something terrifying about being judged by One who knows everything. There is also something profoundly merciful about it, because there is no missing evidence. No selective screenshots. No opportunity to explain that if He had read the entire WhatsApp exchange in context, He would realize that I was practically a tzadekes.

G-D has the full thread.

He knows when I was cruel and when I was merely exhausted. He knows which wounds I have used as excuses and which limitations were real. He knows when I genuinely could not do more and when I absolutely could have, but Netflix had released something involving a murder in an attractive village and clearly somebody needed to establish who killed the vicar.

He also knows the difference between sin and illness, weakness and unwillingness, avoidance and incapacity. This is helpful because I am not always nearly as skilled at making those distinctions myself.

Perhaps that is what Elul was actually preparing me for. Not to arrive polished, but to arrive without falsifying the books.

This needs changing. This needs repairing. This I must learn to accommodate. This I must finally accept. And this, despite an entire month of introspection and several aggressively meaningful essays, remains a complete bloody mess.

Here it is.

The year 5787 will begin whether I have achieved closure or not. My unresolved issues will apparently be admitted without tickets, and the infection may also be attending, although I sincerely pray that its inscription is for considerably less than a year.

On the first day, the shofar will remain silent. Perhaps that silence is not an absence at all, but G-D making room for those of us who have reached the deadline without becoming the people we intended to be.

Then, on the second day, the shofar will sound.

Not because we are finished.

Because, finished or not, it is time to begin again.