Most of the time, saying a month’s name, we don’t think about what it carries inside it, we just say it and move on. This year, saying Elul, I stopped. And stopping, I saw that the word itself, like us, had made a journey.

It isn’t Hebrew, this name. Its root sits in Babylon, elūlu, meaning harvest. In the Torah’s own pages, months carry no name at all, only a number, the first month, the sixth month, bare, silent. When the Israelites fell into exile, they carried a foreign land’s month names back with them, without noticing. Elul is one of them, a relic of exile, like something left in a suitcase and only found later. Even the place it first appears under this name in scripture says as much, in Nehemiah, written after the exile, while the walls of Jerusalem were being rebuilt.

But a word, once it falls into exile, doesn’t just stay there. In Aramaic, the same root began saying something else too, to search, to investigate. The verb used for the spies searching the land of Canaan comes from this same root. As though the word, stepping out of the harvest field, went looking for something too, searching for its own meaning.

Then the rabbis came. Centuries later, in the fourteenth century, they wanted to bring this foreign sound back home. They looked at the four letters, aleph lamed vav........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)