As we draw closer to the month of Elul אלול, all of us are asked to stop and reflect. Elul is a month of introspection, of looking inward, of doing חשבון נפש – literally an accounting of the soul – taking stock of who we are and who we want to be before the High Holidays. Elul is also nicknamed the month of forgiveness, חודש הסליחות, when we not only take inventory of ourselves but also perform selichot: reading our prayers and poems, asking for mercy, repenting for our sins.

And so every August, as we move closer to September, I find myself reflecting on repentance, on Yom Kippur, and on what the concept of kaparah כפרה actually means to me – besides waving a chicken around or giving money to charity. What does making amends mean, concretely?

This is the question the month of Elul אלול asks every year. Before Yom Kippur, we are asked to reflect on what we have done, whom we have hurt, and where we have fallen short – and how we can make amends accordingly. Amends, it seems, sometimes end with a “hey, I’m sorry”, uttered offhandedly in the days before Yom Kippur. We all do it; we all take the time to apologize to friends, family, loved ones. And yet I believe the concept of amends runs deeper than that.

Living amends is a different thing entirely. It isn’t a sentence you say once and consider closed. It’s a way of living differently going forward, so that the way you show up each day becomes the apology. In doing things a little differently this time around. It’s close to what Judaism calls tikkun: repair, not as in a single moment or event, but as an ongoing practice. Tikkun olam is repairing the world; but before I can repair anything out there, I’ve come to believe I owe a tikkun – closer to home. 

Following October 7th, my belief in g-d and in the concept of tikkun olam seemed to go down the drain. If the world could break this completely, what had I even been mending? There was shock, and a lot of it. Then sadness and grief, which curdled into anger. Then came self-righteousness: “It isn’t fair. Can’t you see the harm done?” I found myself muttering at Instagram reels and nasty comment threads. “When my grandfather was alive in 1930s Germany, that’s how it started.” Underneath the self-righteousness, if I’m honest, there was hubris too, a certainty that my grief made me right, and that being right excused whatever I let myself feel or become. 

From self-righteousness I went to resentment: at strangers online, at whole nations and religions, at G-d. And resentment, I came to understand, is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to suffer the consequences. So I let it go. Not in one brilliant moment, but through work: crying about it, talking about it, writing, looking honestly at where I had been unfair or too quick to judge.

This is where the living amends actually started. Not with an apology to anyone in particular, but with the slow, repeated work of choosing to come back to my own again. Because underneath the resentment, when I finally cleared it away, I found something worse waiting: apathy. Indifference. A lack of feeling for my fellow humans. And I realized I am not allowed to lose my empathy because I am in pain; I don’t have that privilege. Apathy doesn’t protect you from anything, it just leaves you stranded in victimhood.

So the amends I owed were living ones: not “I’m sorry I was consumed by anger,” said once and filed away, but a daily tikkun. Catching the hubris before it becomes a knowing, unquestionable certainty, catching the resentment before it turns into apathy, choosing empathy again on the days it would be easier not to. It’s the realization that perhaps to be forgiven this Yom Kippur, I must first forgive.

Etty Hillesum, the young Jewish student murdered in Auschwitz, understood this better than us all. She wrote about suffering and about refusing to let hatred consume her, about how our humanity cannot depend on whether the person in front of us is someone we agree with, or even like. She prayed for the German soldier standing guard as sincerely as she prayed for the Jews beside her in the camp. Not because he deserved it, but because she refused to let him decide or change her faith, her love of life. That, I think, is tikkun at its most extreme. Understanding that peace won’t come until we make peace and accept what is within ourselves. 

I surely know I can’t reach what Hillesum had reached, but maybe it doesn’t have to be grandiose things like forgiving the unthinkable, or praying for those who seek to destroy us. It can be realizing that the friend who pissed me off yesterday is human too, to extend the same grace and courtesy we wish were given to us. To do the hard work of finding gratitude and light in your life – even when the world seems to be filled with darkness. It’s a smile extended to a stranger, and a little more patience in this moment with the little ones. It’s by trying, honestly, to repair my little circle, and believing that by doing so it will expand to goodness and light beyond what is imaginable. 

But I still think the example of Hillsuem is the clearest proof I have that living amends is possible even at the most extreme edge of the unforgivable, that the practice doesn’t require excusing what happened, or even ending the grief. I still walk through college campuses and hear slogans screamed in the background. When I introduce myself and say where I’m from, I am sometimes afraid. Or worse, when I’m not afraid, when I’m not inclined to lie and name some random country instead, I watch a person’s eyes change as I say it. Something shuts off in the back of them. That is one of the worst feelings I know, and no amount of living amends makes it disappear. The practice was never about making the fear go away. It was about refusing to let the fear and pain decide who I become in response to it. 

So I think our task this Elul is to look for our own tikkun – not the apology we can say once and be done with, but the living amends. Where we can choose empathy again, where we’ve let resentment take up more space than they deserve, where we can keep repairing, day by day, the thing our pain tried to take from us. The world will keep throwing curveballs at us; it has, from the pogroms of the Middle Ages to the Nova festival, and it likely always will. We cannot control all of it. We cannot make sense of all of it. We certainly cannot forget all of it. All I can hope for is not to lose my humanity along the way.