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Elul Term |
In the month of Elul, two weeks before Yom Kippur, when Jewish tradition maintains that God judges man for his sins, Nahman undertakes a regime of penance. He vows himself to silence and later gives up eating and sleeping, devoting himself to sacred study and thoughts of repentance. Physical and mental suffering are augmented by social isolation, for his friends avoid him.
Far from breaking down, Nahman emerges stronger from the confrontation with his natural urges, or perhaps merely imagines he has subdued them. The purification he longs for confronts a repulsive reality, suffocating, fanatical and fraught with superstition. Purity is far, far away. The reality that surrounds him is full of Ashkenazi racism against Sephardim, of misogyny and of homophobia, and of deep ignorance that compounds the contempt for the secular world. In this setting, Nahman is a deviant who arouses our sympathy.
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