This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

And when we’ve located it, all we have to do is look at it. We don’t have to kill it, and we certainly don’t have to act on it either. We can just let it arise in the fullness of its being, unromantically stripped down to the naked impulse that it is, without the finery of romance, without hair, nails, or dress, just the bare impulse itself. We can watch this impulse as it arises for the entire month of Elul, and if after a month it still seems to be something that we want, something that continues to arouse strong feeling in us, then we’ve learned something useful about ourselves. But if this desire stripped of its romantic trappings simply fades away, then we’ve learned something even more useful. We’ve learned that there is more to heaven and earth than those things on the surface of the world that provoke desire in our hearts. We’ve learned that if we always act on our desires, on those unmitigated impulses that constantly rise up in our hearts and our minds, then we are doomed to a living death, doomed to be always palely loitering after a lock of hair, and a bit of nail and cloth, the ghostly phantoms of desire.