By Rabbi Shlomo Schachter

This week we entered the Hebrew month of Elul, a month characterized by new beginnings. It’s not just the beginning of football season, it’s also a new academic year, a new agricultural cycle and ‘training camp’ for the new Jewish Year.  Unlike football, in Judaism the Super Bowl comes at the very beginning of the Year – Rosh Hashanah. So how do we get ourselves into peak ‘spiritual shape’? With the practice of Teshuvah.

Teshuvah means returning, repenting, and reconciling – coming home to our most authentic selves, to our community and to God. As kids ‘go back to school’ we go back to Shul and prepare ourselves for the Days of Awe. Traditionally, our training regimen includes blowing the shofar, reciting Psalm 27 and adding special prayers for forgiveness. But none of these are actually Teshuvah, only outer forms which are meant to facilitate an inner process.

Often, when we first approach teshuvah, with our classical “Jewish guilt,” we fall immediately into a critical self-evaluation, looking back on our misdeeds. While examining our past actions can be part of the Teshuvah process, the Torah portion we read every year at the beginning this month paints a picture of Teshuvah which is a little more nuanced than self-reproachful interrogation.

This week we read Parashat Shoftim, the instructions for the Biblical system of governance. Judges, Officers, The King, The Prophet, The Sanhedrin, and the High Priesthood all hold certain powers that check-and-balance each other in a sort of ‘Constitutional-Monarchical-Democratic-Theocracy.’ All these systems must work together to (Deut. 16:20) “pursue a Just Justice,” or as sometimes translated “Justice, Justice you shall pursue.” In football the phrase is “Good-enough gets you beaten in the playoffs.”  We can never rest on our laurels and think of ourselves as a morally or spiritually finished product. We have to keep chasing an ever-higher ideal.

On a spiritual level, Parashat Shoftim is about updating and empowering our conscience, our system of self-governance. It’s not looking backward, but rather envisioning who we can become. If you could re-write your internal process of decision making, how would you like it to run? What are the internal voices that need to be balanced? The Judges and Sanhedrin are our core values and aspirations. The officers are our self-discipline. The ‘inner King’ is responsible for protecting us from negative energies and the malicious cultural vices all around us and The Priesthood represents the role of prayer and spiritual practice in regulating our emotional turbulence. And there is an inner voice of prophecy to which we must listen if we are to remain authentic to ourselves. If you could make all these voices work together harmoniously, what would that look like?

Now friends, let’s go out there and do it! Our Super Bowl is in 30 days!

Shlomo Schachter is the Rabbi at Kehillat Ohr Tzion and an educator with the Buffalo Jewish Federation.