From the time I was a child, I thought of the month of September also as the month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish calendar, leading to the High Holy Days. Elul is meant to be a period of reckoning with oneself in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, when God opens the Book of Life and judges each one of us. How have we sinned? How might we repent? Following Elul are the Days of Awe, the ten-day stretch between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a period of intense transformation fraught with meaning and dread. On Erev Yom Kippur, God gathers the great court to determine our fate, and on Yom
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