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Rabbi Amalia shares this reflection on time, planting for the future, and the High Holiday season of spiritual renewal and return.
I’ve started growing tomatoes and peppers. At the end of August, I decided that my former ideas about sunlight and what could or couldn’t grow on my front stoop were all wrong, and impulsively purchased two little tomato starters and a little pepper starter.
But Rabbi Amalia! you say. Tomato season usually concludes by the end of August! To which I would reply: It stays so hot in the DMV for so long.
Surely I have time.
Surely there is time to coax some tomatoes and a pepper or two out of these little plants.
There’s time, there’s time, there is always time.
We were off to a good start. Every morning and every evening, as I left home and then returned, I anxiously checked my plants. My pepper plant grew multiple flowers, and a tiny green tomato was flourishing. I watched them grow, smug in my assurance that they soon would bear fruit.
And then, of course, we haven’t had temperatures this cool since 2014.
Of course, my plans withered on the vine, my dreams of home-grown tomatoes and peppers cooling as rapidly as the air.
As it turns out, there wasn’t time.
Elul is the month when we begin to take stock of where we are and where we’re going. What have we done in the past year? What kind of person have we been?
Elul is the month when I begin to notice time speeding up, rushing by, until suddenly we’re at Rosh Hashanah and a brand new year.
Every day, I think about how I have time. Surely, there is time to do teshuva, to return, to repair. Teshuva is when we reflect on our actions, mark where we’ve fallen short, and determine what we need to do to repair what has been broken.
There is time, I tell myself as I wrestle with the many ways I’ve fallen short in my relationships.
There is time, I tell myself, as I reflect on how I’ve let myself down this year.
There is time, there is time, there is always time. I desperately try to hold onto this notion – this aspiration, this affirmation, this comfort – as I realize there are so many people to apologize to, so many ways I have harmed and hurt.
As I watch my tiny tomatoes expire on the vine, I wonder if I will always be too late. I wonder if I will ever see the fruits of my labor.
R’ Sharon Cohen Anisfeld writes about the process of Teshuva:
Teshuva entails a different kind of return—arduous, uncertain, unpredictable, and alive. It is a return not to what was, but to what is and what might be. It is a return not to who we were, but to who we long to be. It is a return not to an irretrievable past, but to each other and to God.
R’ Cohen Anisfeld captures the process of trying to grow (peppers and personally), perfectly. Right now, I have fallen short so many times, often intentionally. I might want to grow and be a better person, but when it comes down to it…I sometimes choose the easier direction.
I haven’t always been my best self but, like my peppers and tomatoes, I am still growing and reaching towards the light. I don’t have to stay this way forever.
I may have been too late to plant peppers and tomatoes this year, but I am not too late for the process of teshuva. I might have fallen short this year, made mistake after mistake, lost my patience with my toddler, acted without kindness towards my spouse, missed moments when I could have shown up for dear friends, forgotten to respond to text message after text message after text message, or refused to give tzedakah (charity) when asked, but it’s not too late.
I can be better. I know who I long to be. She is who I return to every year.
Fall is when we plant spring bulbs, knowing that – even as the ground freezes and the idea of blossoms is laughable – spring still comes.
Teshuva is still possible. There is time.
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