Hebrew Calendar
Elul 5787

Elul is the twelfth and final month of the Hebrew year, twenty-nine days that end on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. It is the only month in the calendar with neither a festival nor a fast, and yet almost nothing about it is ordinary: preparation is its entire content. In modern Hebrew “Elul” has stopped being only the name of a month and become the name of a mood, late summer, stocktaking, and a shofar sounding in the morning.

A month born after a break

The Hebrew month names came back from Babylon with the returning exiles, Elul among them. But the character that stuck to this particular month rests on an older story: after the golden calf and the shattering of the first tablets, Moses climbed Sinai one last time. By tradition that third ascent began exactly on Rosh Chodesh Elul and lasted forty days, ending on Yom Kippur when he came down with the second set of tablets.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer says that as Moses went up, a shofar was sounded through the camp so the people would not go astray again, and concludes: “therefore the sages instituted that the shofar should be sounded on Rosh Chodesh Elul every year” ¹. The Tur took that and stretched it across the whole month: the shofar is blown each morning “to warn Israel to repent, and to confound the Satan” ².

Which is to say: the month does not commemorate the break. It commemorates what happened afterwards: that it could be repaired.

“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”

The Torah contains no commandment about Elul at all. Everything the month rests on is a single verse read as a hint. It comes from the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, who browses among the lilies” ³.

The Mishnah Berurah spells out the reading: in Hebrew, the initial letters of the verse’s first four words spell *Elul*, and their final letters (four instances of the letter *yod*, worth ten apiece) add up to forty, matching the forty days from Rosh Chodesh Elul to Yom Kippur ⁴. He adds a second hint from an entirely different verse, “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring”, whose initial letters also spell Elul ⁵.

None of this is proof, and it was never meant to be. It is a compact way of saying two things about the month: that it is about closeness, and that it assumes a closed heart can still be opened.

What people actually do in Elul

The shofar, every morning. From Rosh Chodesh Elul the shofar is sounded on every weekday morning after prayers. Unlike the blasts of Rosh Hashanah this is not a commandment being fulfilled but a warning bell: a sound that says the month has started ².

Selichot. These are penitential prayers said before dawn, and there are two customs. Sephardi and Mizrachi communities begin on Rosh Chodesh Elul and continue all month ⁶; Ashkenazi communities begin on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, or a week earlier if Rosh Hashanah falls early in the week, so that there are always at least four days of Selichot ⁷. The Mishnah Berurah gives those four days a lovely reason: a sacrifice was inspected for blemishes four days before it was offered, and a person approaching Rosh Hashanah does the same for himself ⁸.

Psalm 27. From Rosh Chodesh Elul until the end of Sukkot it is customary to add to the daily prayers, twice a day, the psalm that opens “The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?” ⁹, a verse that answers the fear of judgment with confidence rather than dread.

Small preparations. Tefillin and mezuzot are taken in to be checked during this month, charity is increased, and letters and greetings are opened with *ketiva vachatima tova* (“may you be written and sealed for good”), a custom that survives intact in late-August emails and text messages.

The eve of Rosh Hashanah. On the last day of Elul, the 29th, the shofar stops: “the shofar is not blown on the eve of Rosh Hashanah” ¹⁰. The stated reason is to separate the optional blasts from the obligatory ones ¹¹, and perhaps so that tomorrow’s blast is heard fresh. Some fast that day ¹², and many bathe and cut their hair, visit family graves and give charity there ¹³.

The good point

There is a familiar moment in Elul when taking stock turns against itself: a person begins examining his own year and finds nothing but failures.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov opens one of his best-known teachings with what sounds like ordinary social advice: “Know that one must judge every person favourably.” Then he pushes it somewhere extreme, even in someone completely wicked, he says, you must search out “some modicum of good, that in that little bit he is not wicked”, and the moment you find that point and judge him by it you genuinely lift him. And then he turns the rule inward: “likewise, a person must find this within himself.” Even when he looks and sees no good in himself at all, he is forbidden to fall; he must keep searching for some small good, “for how is it possible that throughout his life he never once did some mitzvah or good deed?” ¹⁴

That is Elul’s answer to the fear of judgment: not to compile a list of what broke, but to find the one thing that still works, and start there.

The King in the field

The best-known image of Elul was written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, in a commentary on that same verse. He asks a simple question: if the thirteen attributes of mercy are revealed during Elul, why are these ordinary weekdays rather than a festival? His answer is a parable: “a king who, before he enters the city, is met by the people of the city in the field, and there anyone who wishes may go out to greet him; he receives them all graciously and shows a smiling face to all” ¹⁵. At the palace you need an appointment, clearance and the right clothes. In a field you simply walk up.

Centuries earlier the Tur had already brought a similar parable, in the name of Midrash Rabbi Tanchuma: a province owes the king taxes and he rides out with an army to collect. Ten leagues off, the notables come out to meet him and he forgives a third; closer in, the middling townspeople come out and he forgives another third; and when the whole city comes out, he forgives it all ¹⁶.

The two parables say one thing in two languages: judgment is approaching, but it is approaching slowly, and that gap is precisely what Elul is for. It is also why “Elul” became a word in its own right: in the yeshiva world *zman Elul* is the shortest and most crowded term of the year, and in everyday Hebrew “an Elul mood” simply means the feeling of summing up.

Common questions about the month of Elul

When is Rosh Chodesh Elul?
Rosh Chodesh Elul runs for two days (2-3/9/27), because Av always has thirty. The first of the two is still the 30th of Av; the second is the 1st of Elul. Both count as the new moon.

What month is Elul in 2027?
Late August into September (this year 3/9/27-1/10/27). Elul 5787 is the month that ends on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, so it sits across the end of the summer: the grid above gives the exact civil dates.

When does Elul start?
On the 1st of Elul, the second day of Rosh Chodesh (2-3/9/27). The civil date shifts every year, because the Hebrew year is about eleven days shorter than the civil one.

How many days are in Elul?
Twenty-nine, always. Elul is one of the fixed-length months of the Hebrew calendar: it does not vary between a full and a deficient year, and it is never doubled in a leap year.

When does Elul end?
On the 29th of Elul (1/10/27), the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The next day is the 1st of Tishrei and a new Hebrew year. Elul is also the only month of the year with no festival and no fast in it.

A Hebrew calendar for the month of Elul

The grid at the top of this page shows Elul as the Hebrew calendar sees it: the large numerals are the days of the Hebrew month, with the corresponding civil date printed beneath each one. You can see the two days of Rosh Chodesh Elul at the start, the Sabbaths and Torah portions read during the month, and the 29th of Elul closing it on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

The button above the grid prints it to a single page, portrait or landscape, without the navigation or this text.

• Every festival and fast of the year in one table: Jewish holidays 2026
• The full printable calendar: printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays
• For a civil-month view, in which August and September appear separately: Gregorian month calendar

Related pages

• September 2027
• October 2027
• The Hebrew month of Elul 5787
• All the Jewish holidays of 2027