An Alarming Elul Story

Maayanot Alum Michelle Zivari submits the following inspiring story:


Hello Why-aanot blogosphere!

My cousin told a story at his shevah brachot that is relevant for Chodesh Elul and I thought I should share.

In his Yeshiva ,for some reason that I am unaware of, it is very common for the fire alarm to go off.  One Friday night, when everybody was in bed,  the fire alarm went off. Some bochrim  went down to the lobby to wait until they were cleared to re-enter the building and some bochrim were tired and just stayed in bed. My cousin was in the latter group, he was tired so he decided to sit in bed and wait for the alarm to be turned off. The firefighters arrived at the building and started going room to room to see if there was a fire. When a firefightered entered my cousin's room he saw my cousin and was shocked. He looked him in the eye and said," Are you kidding me? There could have been a fire!".
My cousin was very shaken up by that experience and didn't know what to make of it. In the spirit of growing from life experiences he thought about what he could learn from teh exchange . Finally he came to the realization that this encounter could teach him something about valuable about chodesh Elul.

Chodesh Elul is like a fire alarm. Every year it comes around warning you to save yourself, to do teshuvah. We have the tendency to treat it like a fire alarm, we know there is  a possibility of danger but we don't believe there is  a fire. We have to try reprogram ourselves to realize the urgency of chodesh Elul and not wait for it to pass us by.