A man who calls himself “Serenity Sam” has been a fixture for decades in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings across southern California. He tells the story of how one time after driving in a drunken blackout, he and his brother awakened and realized that they were parked inside the city dump.

Serenity Sam turned to his brother lying in the back seat of their car and observed sadly, “They threw us away.”

We Jews don’t typically end up in the city dump, but we do recognize that a worse fate awaits us if we don’t dedicate ourselves to prayer, generosity and return to God during the period from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

We know that a “roa ha-gezaira”—a negative verdict for the coming year—may be pronounced for us and only our actions can put us back on the path toward a long, happy and healthy life. So Elul is a time of deep connection to God, a time when we turn from worldly pursuits and do everything we can to insure a good and successful year for ourselves and our loved ones.

For Serenity Sam and his fellow recovering alcoholics, however, it’s always Elul … whether they’re Jewish or not.

Alcoholism is a potentially fatal illness that takes the lives of more than 140,000 people each year and causes enormous misery to millions of loved ones of problem drinkers. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on the brilliant insight that alcoholism isn’t a moral issue but is a spiritual problem, and therefore can be solved with a spiritual solution. So the men and women of AA devote portions of every day to prayer, to service to others, and to widening the channel between themselves and their Higher Power, the AA term for God.

In short, for recovering alcoholics, no matter what the calendar says, it’s always Elul.

To live in recovery is to have the satisfaction and even the serenity that comes from knowing that one is on the right path, “trudging the road of happy destiny,” in AA parlance, connected to other former problem drinkers and connected to God. At the same time, the awareness is always present that returning to alcohol—even taking just one drink—could put them on a path toward insanity, institutions (hospitals and prison), and even death.

The difference is that recovering alcoholics have it in their own hands to dictate what decree they will live under, a life of happiness, joy, and freedom, or a life that causes great suffering for themselves and their loved ones, friends and co-workers. So the goal of AA is to stay sober—not just physically sober but emotionally sober as well—a day at a time. In so doing, recovering alcoholics create new and better lives for themselves and cease harming those closest to them.

What if we Jews took the same attitude toward our lives that recovering alcoholics take toward theirs?

What if we realized that the quality of our lives wasn’t just something to pray for once a year, but instead was something we needed to focus on, every day?

What if we took an Elul attitude … no matter what the calendar said?

It’s great that as summer ends and the world returns to work and to school, Judaism offers a mechanism for reviewing our lives, for reconnecting with our spirit, and for returning to our Creator in prayer. But why do we have to wait for Elul? What if we lived with the same sense of consequences for our behavior that recovering alcoholics develop in order to stay sober?

If we knew that there was a trapdoor underneath us, and that failure to develop our spiritual lives would open that trapdoor, would we really wait for Elul to get our lives right?

Couldn’t we take the AA attitude of gratitude for what we have, the need to make amends to those we hurt, and to perform the “cheshbon ha-nefesh” or spiritual self-examination (AA’s Steps Four and Five) into our lives every month of the year, indeed every day of the year? How different would our Elul experience be if we were living an Elul mentality all year long?

Serenity Sam sobered up and went on to touch the lives of tens of thousands of recovering alcoholics. He realized that there was no “they” who had “thrown us away.” Instead, he learned to take responsibility for the outcomes brought about by his actions, and adopted a code of love and service that kept him on the positive side of life’s ledger.

This Elul, may we all be inspired by the behavior of recovering alcoholics, for whom every month, indeed every day, is Elul, and who recognize that averting the “roa ha-gezaira”—the bad outcome—is in their own hands to a greater degree than they had ever previously imagined.

As a result, we can come to God on Yom Kippur with a sense of having done our best and made our amends, and with a commitment to living purposefully and thoughtfully, to benefit ourselves, our families, our communities, our workplaces, and our world.

Wishing you a happy and emotionally sober New Year!

New York Times bestselling author Michael Levin is the author of “Jews And Booze: Alcoholism, Addiction, and Denial in The Jewish World.”