A reading, found in our machzor :
Dwell on each sound of the shofar; contemplate its meaning.
T’kiah – (BLOW)
One whole note
Sh’varim-T’ruah – (BLOW)
Three broken notes; nine staccato notes
T’kiah – (BLOW)
One whole note . . .
T’kiah –
Once I was whole
Sh’varim-T’ruah
In the wear and tear of living, I became broken and shattered.
T’kiah –
My t’shuvah has the power to make me whole again.
This poem references a common teaching about the shofar, which is that it reminds us of our own brokenness.
Rabbi Laura Metzger notes, that, “the sounds of the shofar are odd, squawky, uneven. . . We (have) made technological advances,” she writes, “to improve virtually every area of human life. Yet we still use shofarot made as they always have been, from sheep or goat [or rams, or kudu], minimally cleaned up, hollowed out, with a roughly cut mouthpiece.
Why hasn’t someone made a better shofar?” she asks. “One that would tekiyah with a pure and clear blast like a trumpet. That would shevarim to break your heart like a blues saxophone. . . Why not a better shofar? We could do it.
The bleating, blasting, burping shofar gives a most haunting sound. It’s not pretty, no. But it stirs us, perhaps because it is imperfect, as are we.”
The Rabbis of the Talmud compared the sounds of the shofar to the sounds of moaning and whimpering. We hear in the Shofar
our own imperfections and regret, our own suffering, loss and fear.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaches that, “with the blowing of (the shofar), there is the real sense of a cry. . . “ He explains that psychologists used to talk about the “primal scream” – that unless you get to the place that evokes the “primal scream,” you haven’t gotten to the true source of the broken heart.
“In other words”, he writes, “ego will not let us reach our “primal scream,” and so the shofar tries to get us to that place.”
As if hearing our own pain calling back to us weren’t enough, we hear in the shofar’s blast as well, warnings of impending doom. The prophet Jeremiah cries out to us from the pages of his text:
Oh, my suffering, my suffering!
How I writhe!
Oh the walls of my heart!
My heart moans within me,
I cannot be silent;
For I hear the blare of the shofar,
Alarms of war.
Disaster overtakes disaster,
For all the land has been ravaged. . .
How long must I see banners (of war)
And hear the blare of the shofar?
Jeremiah’s suffering, perhaps more than ever this year, echos our own. This year our hearts have been extra heavy.
It would be easy, under these circumstances, to allow the shofar to take us into the depths of despair.
But when the shofar wails, it does not only echo sadness.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg hears the shofar’s cry differently. When, “Abraham bound Isaac to the altar,” he teaches, “prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in faithfulness to God,” a ram was substituted at the very last moment.
“In this interpretation,” Rabbi Greenberg writes, “the shofar sound is a cry for mercy and forgiveness”; A cry not for ourselves, but for the suffering of others; A plea for the salvation and relief for all those who are bound as Isaac was bound – physically or metaphorically; Bound by family strife, bound by spiritual anguish,
bound by poverty, bound by fear, grief, ignorance, war. . . The shofar cries out for God to have mercy upon us all.
In the Babylonian Talmud, the Rabbis comment on the verse in Numbers, which sets this day as a sacred occasion, stating, “It is a day of the shofar blast for you”. (Numbers 29:1)
The Rabbis, taking the Aramaic translation of the verse, where yom t’ruah, in the Hebrew, meaning “a day of the shofar’s blast”, becomes, in the Aramaic, yom y’vava.
Like t’ruah in Hebrew, y’vava in Aramaic has several possible translations. Here, the Sages do something unexpected. To explain what y’vava means, they connect this word to another word, in a text about a mother’s cries for her son.
In the book of Judges, in the story of Deborah, the mother of Israel’s enemy, the General Sisera, waits for her son to come home. In Deborah’s lyrical description, Sisera’s mother does not know that he has been slain by the unlikely heroine Yael, but the reader does know.
The text describes how Sisera’s mother “peered out of the window and vateyabev” – weeps and wails. The rabbis draw a linguistic connection between vateyabev and y’vava – the weeping and wailing of this woman is like the moaning and whimpering of the shofar’s cry.
For the Rabbis, the point of referencing Sisera’s mother may simply have been to help make the technical connection between the sounds of the shofar and the sounds of wailing.
Then again, as Rabbi Jill Hammer points out, the Talmud is using (Sisera’s mother) as an example, “of a certain type of wail. . . the strongest example of loss” – the “expression of a mother fearing her child (is) dead.”
In the Torah, Sisera’s mother turns out to be the best example of this, and so the rabbis use her in their teaching about the shofar,
instead of using an Israelite mother – a more obvious example.
But for us, this teaching has deeper implications. Rabbi Hammer writes that, “this fear of a mother losing a child is something universally recognized as an image of grief. It may be that the sound of the shofar is meant to draw out from (us) similar expressions and feelings of grief on Rosh HaShanah. And it might even be the intent for these feelings of grief to be extended to empathize with the grief of the enemies of the Jewish people.”
Similarly, Rabbi Shai Held, who has just written a beautiful book called “Judaism is About Love”, teaches that while, “there was never any love lost between the Israelites and [Sisera], and (while) the Bible never doubts that Yael’s killing him was just, (still), his mother’s anguish registers so deeply that we hear her sobs year after year after year, every time we hear the shofar blast.”
“No matter our political persuasion,” he writes, “no matter our sense of what military response is necessary at any given time, one thing ought to remain clear: It is never a crime, never an act of treachery, to hear the cries of the mother of one of our enemies.”
This beautiful teaching, written prior to October 7th, calls us to hear in the shofar’s cries, not only our own suffering, and the suffering of those for whom we wish to find relief, but also, for the tragedies embedded in war – even if we feel the war is justified – for the deaths of children and the heartbreak of mothers, no matter who or where they might be.
It would be easy, under these circumstances, to allow the shofar to take us into the depths of uncomfortable empathy.
But when the shofar wails, it does not only echo suffering.
Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla writes that, “during the High Holidays, the mitzvah (connected) to the shofar is not to blow it as we might have expected, but “lishmoa kol shofar” – (the mitzvah is to) listen to its voice. The pattern of shofar blasts that we sound is designed to mimic human tears.
Deep moans…tekiah.
Broken cries…shevarim.
Staccato sobs…teruah.
…(Yet) If we stop and listen,” he continues, “we might hear surprising things. On one level, the shofar sounds like tears, but it also sounds like laughter.
Whole chuckles…tekiah.
Broken giggles…shevarim.
Sharp shrieks of merriment…teruah.”
The Psalmist wrote:
Happy is the people who know the T’ruah;
O Eternal, they walk in the light of your presence.
As I mentioned earlier, the Hebrew word t’ruah can have many possible translations. Here, it does not mean a warning cry, or a blast of sound to call us to attention, but rather a shout for joy.
T’ruah!
On Shabbat when we sing the familiar lines, Hariu l’adonai kol ha’aretz, most of us probably don’t realize that it is a psalm about raising joyful noise to God with ancient instruments, including the shofar.
Raise a shout to Adonai, all the earth,
break into joyous songs of praise!
Sing praise to Adonai with the lyre,
with the lyre and melodious song.
With trumpets and the blast of the shofar
raise a shout before the ruler, Adonai.
In addition to joy, midrash teaches that the shofar signifies freedom.
In our machzor, we read that, “In ancient Israel, (the shofar) was sounded to announce the coming of the jubilee in the fiftieth year – a time of liberation for servants and restoration of land for the poor (Lev. 25).
In the Jewish imagination,” our machzor comments, “the shofar blast remains a symbol of the here-and-now redemption . . .”
What does the machzor mean by “a symbol of the here-and-now redemption”?
Here-and-now redemption is different from a redemption we are still waiting for. It is the idea that we are empowered by the shofar’s blast to redeem ourselves and one another right now.
How can we do this?
A teaching from the Zohar may point us in the right direction.
The first three sounds of the shofar, it explains, correspond to the Patriarchs: The tekiah is Abraham, who represents chesed – love
Shevarim is Isaac, who represents gevurah, – severity. Teruah is Jacob, who represents tiferet, compassion.
“The first and last blasts – of love and compassion,” says the Zohar, “refine, sublimate and sweeten the gevurah of shevarim.”
Can you hear the love and compassion
surrounding the severity?
(T’kiah)
(Sh’varim)
(T’ruah)
The shofar doesn’t only evoke our sorrow and suffering. It also reminds us that even when there is brokenness, there is also joy – there must also be joy.
But this joy can only be achieved when we find ways to praise with awe and gratitude, even in a year such as this one we have just left behind.
This joy can only be achieved, when we find ways to temper severity with love and compassion.
This joy can only be achieved when we see beyond our own suffering to the suffering of others – even to the suffering of our enemies, yes, even now.
Rabbi Abbahu taught: “The shofar is a symbol of hope that what was once broken can become whole again.”
Centuries later, Rabbi Yeshayah HaLevi Hurwitz wrote: “Each group of (shofar) sounds begins with a tekiah, whole note, proceeds to shevarim, a “broken” note divided into three parts, or even to a teruah, an entirely fragmented sound. But each broken note is followed by a whole note, another tekiah.”
“This is the message of Rosh HaShanah,” he explains. ‘(We) started off whole, (we) became broken, even splintered into fragments, but (we) shall become whole again! (We) shall become whole again!’”
May we hear this teaching, more than anything else, in the shofar’s noise this year: A call to hope. A call to wholeness.
We can survive despair and find our way back to joy.
We can overcome hatred if we deepen into love and compassion.
The shofar calls us out of the darkness of 5784,
that we may begin the New Year with lighter hearts and minds.
T’kiah –
Once I was whole
Sh’varim-T’ruah
In the wear and tear of living, I became broken and shattered.
T’kiah –
My t’shuvah has the power to make me whole again.
We shall become whole again.
T’kiah!
