In the month of preparation for the days of awe, I reflect more than usual on the past year and my blind spots in an effort to figure out where I still need to make amends, teshuva. I make sure to give a little more tzedakah (reallocation of resources to those in need) than my usual tzedaka budget, since this is one of the three mitzvot that is highlighted in preparation for and celebration of the Days of Awe. I go to the ritual mikvah waters and guide others to help them shed whatever needs shedding and to water what they hope for in the year to come. I also love returning to the sound of the shofar every year. I love its power and the rawness of the instrument. I blow the shofar every day of the month of Elul before the new year, whether at home or in my office. Each shofar makes a different sound to my ear. This year, one shofar in particular sounded to me like my own sob, a sob I haven’t actually been able to produce from my own vocal cords this beautiful and hard year.
There are so many reasons given throughout Jewish texts and time for why we blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah and the end of Yom Kippur. Here are three less commonly shared reasons that hold modern resonance for me:
Release: While this is not a traditional reason given for blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, a shofar was blown on Yom Kippur (Leviticus 25:8-55) to mark every Jubilee year, occurring once every 50 years. The Jubilee year is one of release: from loans, bondage, and loss of land (it returns to the original tribe and owner). In this vein, I like thinking of the shofar as calling us to release ourselves from what does not feel right. To take a deep breath and step into the recognition that the past does not hold us too tightly, that what we did and who we were isn’t immutable. It is also a time of tremendous faith: In an agrarian society, pausing to give the land some rest is ecologically wise but means during the year of rest, you’re living off what the land will spontaneously produce.
Preparation: The sirens in Brooklyn and Jerusalem announcing Shabbat’s arrival have their precursors in the Jewish tradition. From the times of the Mishnah (codified in Israel in the second to third centuries CE), there were shofar blasts to announce Shabbat was on its way (Shabbat 35b:4). I think about that weekly shofar ritual. Those weekly six blasts for Shabbat preparation expand to 100 blasts on Rosh Hashanah, calling Jews to be fully prepared for the unique and elevated holiness and intentionality of “Shabbat Shabbaton / Double Shabbat,” which is one of the names of Yom Kippur.
Change: In a collection of midrashim / exegesis called Pesikta DeRav Kahana (collected in Israel between 400 and 700 CE), we find the teaching that God can be found sitting on God’s throne of justice, but the shofar causes God to rise up and choose to move to God’s seat of compassion, just in time to begin judging human beings.
On a year where Rosh Hashanah falls on a Shabbat, like this year, my community follows the tradition not to blow the shofar. The precedent for this is as old as the Talmud and has been debated ever since. In such years Rosh Hashanah feels spiritually itchy to me, like something is off, unsettling.
And something is off: We’re missing 100 shofar blasts! I don’t think the rabbis would have instituted such an intense custom if it wasn’t necessary. And yet, with the calendar’s ebb and flow, suddenly we’re supposed to have one of our holiest days without one of its essential ingredients? If the shofar is meant to help God choose to have mercy, or help us remember and choose our better selves, how does this season “work” with the missing shofar blows?
I’d like to suggest that this year, when we don’t hear the shofar on the first day of Rosh Hashanah due to it falling on Shabbat, we should focus on one more of the meanings of the shofar, a traditional reason with a new spin.
Feeling: A number of traditional Jewish texts describe the sound of the shofar as the sound of weeping. For example, commentators on the Talmud from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries explained each sound of the shofar as different kinds of weeping. Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, from the seventh to eleventh centuries CE, says that each cry of the shofar mimics Sarah’s cries when she finds out that Abraham was about to sacrifice their son Isaac up on Mount Moriah.
Which leads me to my answer this year: Some of us, through learned behavior, culture, or trauma, have unlearned how to cry. The shofar is our voice. This year, in anticipation of the missing 100 Rosh Hashanah shofar blasts, the custom to blow shofar every day in the month leading up to the High Holidays takes on new meaning. I thought about my missing tears, which led me to the many missing tears in our tradition.
On this first day of Rosh Hashanah, for me, the silence will hold the missing cries from our biblical stories with echoes in the present: Dina, who is kidnapped and raped, but we never hear her voice or her cries before, during, or after. Hagar’s cries, as her son Yishmael is dying and she has nothing left to save him, are cries we read about on the first day of Rosh Hashanah; but I will include Yishmael’s cries, the ones he seems too spent to choke out. I hold Lot’s wife and daughter’s screams and sobs, absent from the text when he offers them to the mob at his door in place of the visitors the mob demands. I think of Jephtah’s daughter, whose tears are recorded along with those of her friends, but Judges 11:40 says that the maidens of Israel still bewail her loss every year. This is a lost tradition, so I choose this quiet Rosh Hashanah as my mourning day for her. I know that I will keep discovering more silent tears to hold in future silent Rosh Hashanahs.
The missing shofar this Rosh Hashanah reminds me that not all of us can weep our pain aloud, not all of our weeping is recognized, and the silence is and should be spiritually itchy. We can find meaning in the missing shofar sounds this year by seeing it as a call to listen more intently to the missing sobs in our texts, which might make us more sensitive to the missing sobs right in front of us.