I didn’t know what the month of Elul was when I was grow­ing up. In all fair­ness, I didn’t know the names of any of the Hebrew months, let alone what they sig­ni­fied. I knew about the High Hol­i­days them­selves, and I would miss school each fall in order to go to ser­vices on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kip­pur. But a month ded­i­cat­ed to reflect­ing on my actions over the course of the year, a month to seek for­give­ness, a month to work on mak­ing per­son­al amends; no, I didn’t know about that.

And so, instead, I approached the end of each sum­mer for what it was — sim­ply, an end. That was all. 

Until I had chil­dren. Then, I began to learn more about my Jew­ish her­itage and, frankly, to learn most of it for the first time. It was dur­ing a peri­od of study that I learned about Elul and its con­nec­tion to themes of repen­tance and for­give­ness. But I still didn’t think Elul was for me.

Until I began to notice the syn­chronic­i­ty of the mean­ing behind Elul and the prac­tices that I write about in both books. The same ideas, the same rumi­na­tions on for­give­ness, rit­u­al, self-reflec­tion, and more appear in both books: in the first they appear as I share my own sto­ry, and in the sec­ond, they appear as I share some of the sto­ries and the sci­ence behind the prac­tices that emerged after con­duct­ing so many chal­lah work­shops with oth­ers. I came to real­ize, as I con­duct­ed these work­shops around the coun­try, that small, mean­ing­ful acts — in this case, prepar­ing to make chal­lah, mak­ing chal­lah, and shar­ing that chal­lah with oth­ers — can and do in fact reduce our feel­ings of stress and lone­li­ness. I came to real­ize that stand­ing at a counter with my hands in a bowl of dough — often along­side oth­ers — is the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er my actions, past and present. I came to real­ize that through this rit­u­al, we can devel­op our own pos­i­tive traits and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly build con­nec­tions with oth­ers. Sounds like Elul, right?

In med­i­cine, we call this behav­ioral mod­i­fi­ca­tion; or some­times we call it neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty. No mat­ter the nomen­cla­ture, the under­ly­ing fact is that we can change. That is an incred­i­bly pro­found con­cept. Every year dur­ing the month of Elul, I have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to think about this past year and my behav­ior, where I will ask for for­give­ness, and with whom I will make amends. And each year is dif­fer­ent; some­times one Elul is eas­i­er than the next. As with most behav­iors and beliefs, the more I work on my self-improve­ment with intent and being present, the more suc­cess­ful are the results. 

I have my chal­lah mak­ing prac­tice to thank for this. 

I make chal­lah every week. (Well, almost every week!) And some­times it is a tri­umph. And some­times it is not. But with that said, I keep at it; I have made thou­sands of chal­lahs by this point. There is a beau­ty in the abil­i­ty to come back to the same rit­u­al again and again and again. And each time, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Each time, I am a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Elul is like that. Year in and year out. I have writ­ten before that ​“I knead for my needs.” So too, Elul always seems to occur just in time for me to do a lit­tle per­son­al ​“knead­ing,” a lit­tle work on myself.