Recycling: a thought for Elul

When I was a child, we knew nothing of recycling. Almost everything we finished with and had no further use for would go straight into the bin. Plastics, cardboard, metal cans—we disposed of them without a thought. How different is life today. We have special containers for all these unwanted items, which the local council collects and sends for recycling. I think it’s a great idea, even though a little voice inside me reminds me that recycling also has its environmental cost and I do sometimes get a little frustrated when I can’t easily tell whether a particular carton is made of paper or plastic. I do love the notion that the things I recycle might be coming straight back to me in other forms, without me even realising it.

Today marks the start of the month of Elul, when we begin ramp up our thoughts about the forthcoming Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and turn our thoughts to teshuvah, repentance. Pirkei Avot has plenty to say about teshuvah: we should repent our wrongs daily rather than save them up for the Day of Atonement because we might be dead by then (Avot 2:15), by which time it’s too late (Avot 4:22); it also serves as a shield against Divine retribution (Avot 4:15).

It struck me this morning that, just as we jettison our unwanted trash, we also jettison our unbecoming behaviour, casting off our bad behaviour and throwing away the tendency to justify what we know to be wrong because we won’t admit it.

Sometimes we do actually manage to throw away our patterns of misconduct. But, it seems to me, we more often seem to recycle them. We think we have seen the last of them and we feel good when we pop them into the bin. But they come back to us again, we bring them back into our lives—and we don’t even recognise them.