Last week, I received an envelope. On it, the word URGENT was stamped in red block letters, which is generally how I know that there is nothing URGENT inside.

Despite my better judgement, I opened it. Inside was a card. “Time is running out,” it warned me. “Your voice matters. Everything you care about is on the line. Do not assume somebody else will take care of this.”

And across the top, in big bold letters, it read: “THIS IS THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME.”

It was interesting to me that I received this mailing in late August, quite early for an election season. Perhaps it was for the primaries, or maybe an over-eager candidate was jump-starting their campaign a tad early. But to me, it didn’t matter. Because I did something with that card that I have never done with any campaign mail. I did not throw it out. It is sitting on my desk as I write, because somewhere in a campaign headquarters, a copywriter who has almost certainly never heard of Elul wrote the finest pre-Rosh Hashanah drosha I have seen all season.

The phrase returns each year like the seasons. I have now voted in more “Most-Consequential-Elections-of-My-lifetime” than I can count. And I have received these notices in both red and blue. And in fairness to everyone involved, this is not one side’s failing. I have received the identical envelope, in the identical letters, warning me of contrary catastrophes, from two different perspectives that agree on nothing in this world except the font.

Don’t get me wrong. Elections matter. They matter a great deal. They affect our mosdos, our tuitions, our taxes, our communities and our security. Most recently, we feel it, and we know that they affect whether our children can walk to shul without looking over their shoulder.

They use the words “Most Consequential.” However, a consequence that can be reversed in two years is a serious thing. It is not a permanent thing. Almost everything decided in November can be undone by some later November, by a different room of people who will send me the same envelope in the same red letters.

But there is another consequential decision looming. And that is not dependent upon merely an electorate. It depends on each of us. Individually and collectively. The verdict written on Rosh Hashanah is not subject to midterm correction. Exactly one Authority is empowered to amend it, and He is the same One who wrote it. Depending entirely on how we spend the next few weeks, that is either the most frightening sentence in the world or the most hopeful one. Indeed, the most consequential. The true “Most Consequential.”

Every campaign produces the same weary slogan about how every single vote counts, and nobody believes it. We know what we are. We are one ballot in a box, one drop in a bucket, one man in a booth with a curtain, pulling a lever that will be swallowed by a number on a screen before we get home. (Or, in today’s vernacular, one man touching a touch-screen, filling a circle that will instantly transition to a Geico ad as we submit our vote.)

The Rambam, however, believed it. In Hilchos Teshuvah (3:4), he writes that a person is obligated to see himself, and to see the entire world along with him, as perfectly balanced, half zechuyos and half chovos. One mitzvah, a single one, tips him and tips the world with him. The Gemara in Kiddushin says it in almost those words. This is not offered as poetry, and it is not offered as encouragement. The Gemara is teaching us exactly how a Yid lives, thinks and breathes during Elul and the Yomim Noraim.

No pollster on earth would tell you what the Rambam tells you. You are not living in a swing state. You are the swing state.

I know how that can be heard, and I want to be careful with it, because I am not writing any of this from a mountaintop. I am writing it as a man who has made roughly the same Elul kabbalos for a great many years now with decidedly mixed results. We do our best and focus on realizing that we truly are the deciding factor. The Rambam is charging us with a global responsibility. He is not merely informing you that each individual is important. Instead, he is informing you that you are decisive, which is a far heavier package to carry home.

Elections are decided by turnout. So is Elul. The difference is that during Elul, nobody is permitted to vote in your place. There is no absentee ballot and no proxy. Your rov cannot daven your Shemoneh Esrei, your father cannot say your Tehillim, your chavrusa cannot do your teshuvah, and no matter which kever you trek out to during the summer, no deceased or living gadol can beg Hashem for mechilah on your personal aveiros. It is a private booth, and the curtain is real.

Now notice how our season ends. Every campaign ends with a remorseful concession speech. Ours ends with a remorseful confession speech. We stand on the holiest day of the year and recite aloud, in alphabetical order, every last reason that we deserve to lose. There is no communications team to spin our blunders and there is no liberal press to cover up our foibles. We simply say it, bang our chests, and bashfully regret it. Openly. And that, in the strangest formula in the world, is precisely how we win.

Politicians come and politicians go. Elul comes and Elul goes. The difference is in what is left behind afterward. A campaign leaves signs on the lawn that somebody has to pull out of the frozen ground in December. Elul, if we let it, transforms a person.

So take the mail seriously. Read the card. Then read it again, slowly, and notice that every single line on it is true, and that not one of them belongs to the fellow who paid for the postage.

Time is running out. Your voice matters. Everything you care about is on the line. Do not assume that somebody else will take care of this.

This is the most consequential election of our lifetime. It is just not the one on the card.

Just Saying.