A Key for Elul

Elul is here, and each of us is looking for some means of putting ourselves on an upward trajectory as we approach the Yamim Noraim. By now, most of us have learned from experience that the requisite change must be something relatively small in degree of difficulty in relation to our current spiritual level — and therefore likely to be acted upon. At the same time, it must be of sufficient significance to hold out the possibility of unlocking other changes in its wake.

I think I found one such key in a comment of the Magen Avraham (Orach Chayim 46). There the Magen Avraham writes in the name of the Arizal that prior to every tefillah, a person should take upon himself the positive mitzvah of “v’ahavta lerei’acha kamocha — love your friend as yourself,” and undertake to love every fellow Jew as himself.

Tefillah is a particularly opportune time to accept upon oneself the positive mitzvah of loving one’s fellow Jews. Davka in tefillah are negative thoughts about others prone to arise. I once heard Rav Reuven Leuchter define sinas chinam — the causeless hatred for which we remain in galus — in terms of its opposite ahavas chinam, causeless love.

The latter is the favorable judgment at which we arrive every time we look in the mirror. We have lots of negative information about the fellow in the mirror, and yet our overall judgment is usually a favorable one. For one and only one reason: that fellow is me. Accordingly, sinas chinam is any negative judgment that one forms about another because he is not me.