Elul: The Beginning of the End - Rabbi Ephy Greene

it's those words in previous generations would inspire trembling tears there are stories of great rashi shiva mashichim who would faint at shabbos and varchamele because of the pacha the fear of the yemen that are coming many of us today are not at that level we do not uh tremble and uh we are often kind of like pushing off our true process uh until until we get into rosh hashanah serious matua sometimes even only until yom kippur so how do we get into ll now i think we have a sometimes a false perception that if we just fix it up a little bit it'll help us very very much many of us associate ello with the beginning of the year and that it's a fresh start because i think that's because we associate ello with the beginning of the new school year we're all coming off the summer vacation now we're we're starting a new uh a new academic year either we or our children are starting a new year we're buying new folders new notebooks things like that and and it feels like it's a new stage and it is a new stage however the truth is that that's based on the secular calendar ello is not a fresh start hello is a combination ello is the last month of the year tishrei is going to be the beginning of the new year ello is that final last crunch week a crunch month of chuva of making sure that whatever we wrote into our maxorium last year whatever we decided we're going to do last year however we're going to improve it's an opportunity to look back open up our maxorum and say did i do this i said i was going to say brachus more carefully i said i was going to dab with more kavanaugh i said i was going to stop my lash in hara i said i was learn more torah did i accomplish my goals and if i didn't so then there's still right now three and a half weeks left of elo that we can try to get our goals in before heading into rosh hashanah that fresh start is going to be another cycle however right now i have an opportunity to make sure that the cycle that i'm in finishes off strong for many people setting big grandiose goals starting fresh becoming a new person those types of uh that type of mentality is just so broad and so big it's hard for them to accomplish but many times when we set small goals we have to accomplish something for just two three weeks so it's much more attainable and then we can feel so much better about ourselves so in these two and a half three weeks of ello that we have left it is now our opportunity to look back into that maxwell look at our goals and finish off this year with the commitment and the achievement that we were dreaming of a year ago with that we're going to roshana and yom kippur with greater zhuyoz with greater fervor in our voters hashem shanatar [Music]