The Toy Torah a Soldier Found in Gaza
There are a number of allusions to the month of Elul, the most famous being the verse in The Song of Songs: “Ani L’Dodi V’dodi li” – “I am my Beloved and my Beloved is mine”.1 The Mishnah Berurah writes that the initial letters of the four words in this verse spell Ellul, and that the final letter of each word is a yud. The four yuds combine to make 40, representing the 40 days from the first day of Ellul until Yom Kippur. One question that arises is that God in this verse is referred to as ‘Dodi’ – ‘my Beloved’. This is a very uncommon term used to describe God – why only in reference to Ellul is God called ‘my Beloved’?
In order to understand this, Rabbi Daniel Glatstein cites the Talmud.2 The Talmud cites two seemingly contradictory statements of Reish Lakish about the power of repentance. In the first, he states that repentance is great because it can change intentional sins into unintentional sins. However, in his second comment, he says that repentance is great because it actually converts one’s sin into a Mitzva. The Talmud explains that the first statement was referring to one who repents out of fear (teshuvah m’yirah) whereas the second is discussing repentance out of love (teshuvah m’ahavah). One who repents out of fear merits that his deliberate sins be transformed to inadvertent sins which are treated less severely.
However, one who repents out of love of God merits that his sins actually become Mitzvot! A possible reason for this is that his love of God causes him to feel such distress at his previous actions that it propels him to greater devotion to God. In this way, the sin now serves as a catalyst to improve his relationship with God.
Rabbi Glatstein points out that the unique power of repentance from love can also help explain another piece of Talmud. The Talmud3 teaches that perfectly righteous people cannot stand in the place of people who sinned and repented (baalei teshuvah). The Chida4 explains that a person who never sins certainly has many merits, but he has never had the opportunity to convert his sins into Mitzvot. In contrast, by repenting out of love, the repenter’s previous numerous sins now become transformed into Mitzvot. Thus, on a quantitative level, the genuine repenter may well have more merits than the perfectly righteous person.
The Dubno Maggid takes this idea even further.5 He notes that even the Mitzvot performed by a perfectly righteous person likely have imperfections due to normal human limitations. Perhaps he did not have perfect intention while performing the Mitzvot, or perhaps they may have been tainted by an ulterior motive.
However, when a person genuinely repents from his sins, God converts them into Mitzvot. And into what type of Mitzvot does God transform these sins? He does so in the way that He, so to speak would have done the Mitzvot. That is with perfect intention and totally pure motives. This, says the Dubno Maggid, is why perfectly righteous people cannot compare to genuine repenters. A righteous person has many Mitzvot, but they are human Mitzvot affected by a certain level of human weakness. But when the genuine repenter does repents out of love, he acquires Mitzvot of a much loftier, Divine nature.
We have seen some examples of the incredible power of repentance from love. However, one may ask that love of God and the repentance that flows from that requires a very high level, well beyond the reach of ‘regular’ individuals. It is true that the highest levels of love of God are beyond most of us, yet Rabbi Glatstein argues that there are more realistic levels of love of God and the resultant repentance from love that are perfectly attainable for all of us.
Rebbe Akiva Eiger offers a simple suggestion as to how one can increase his love of God. He addresses the fundamental question of how can God command us to love Him? If one has a dislike for another person, one cannot choose to love him just because he is told to. So too, how can God expect us to love Him simply because we are told that we must do so. He answers that there is a basic rule in relationships taught by King Solomon: “As water reflects a face back to a face, so one’s heart is reflected back to him by another.”6 This teaches that love is reciprocated - if someone loves you, then you will love him back. If we focus on the fact that God loves us more than we can imagine, then we will come to love him back. This is why immediately before we state in Shema, “and you will love God” we end the blessing before Shema stating that God is “the one who chooses Yisrael with love.” By focusing on His love for us, we can come to love Him back. This love can motivate us to repent not just out of fear but out of regret that we ‘wronged’ our beloved God, and that we strive to come back to Him.
We can now answer the initial question of why God is referred to as ‘my Beloved’ in Ellul in particular. The answer is that this term reflects our love for God, and this love is the catalyst for us to hopefully attain the level of repentance from love which can take us to very lofty levels – may we all merit to return to God with love.
