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Chavurat Lamdeinu

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Shofar

Shacharit, RH 2007, 5768
Chavurat Lamdeinu
September 13, 2007
Rabbi Ruth Gais                        Shofar

I have a terrible suspicion that every year I’ve given a sermon that in some way or
another was about the Shofar. I haven’t had the guts to go back and reread what I’ve
written because I don’t want to know if this is true or not. This year, I really wasn’t
going to talk about the Shofar but- guess what? I am and I can pin the blame for this
latest Shofar sermon on two recent deaths: the deaths last week of Luciano
Pavarotti and of Madeleine L’Engle. I think everyone knows who Luciano Pavarotti
was and what his great gift to the world was, but unless you’ve read her children’s
books, the best known being A Wrinkle in Time, you may not know of Madeleine L’
Engle. I am a devoted reader of great children’s books, the best of which are simply
great books, period. Madeleine L’Engle was not a great writer at all, but she and I
were interested in many of the same things: God, the mysteries of the universe, and
love, both of us understanding that in fact all of these three things are really only just
one. . So too, Pavarotti’s voice, at its best, and here, if you are not a Pavarotti fan, you
can substitute any great singer or musical moment in your life, but that music,
however it happened and whenever you heard it, took you away from yourself, and
united you with something bigger, the magnum mysterium, the great mystery, that
underlies all experience. And so, kicking and screaming, as I remember how these
two people in different ways helped me transcend my ordinary life, I find myself
compelled once again, to talk about the shofar.
But how does the Shofar connect to an opera singer and an author, and, in fact, to
me and you? You probably know, especially if you’ve listened to me for years now,
some of the reasons why we sound the shofar, some are mentioned in our machzor
too, on pages 246-47: Some of the reasons given are about us. When we hear the
shofar, Maimonides tells us, it is quite literally a wake –up call- an alarm to remind
us to look deeply inside ourselves and vow to change, to undergo teshuvah. The
plaintive braying, the urgent staccatos, are telling each and every one of us: pay
attention: now’s your chance, look inside yourself, realize that it’s not someone else’
s fault, you’ve done wrong. Acknowledge your wrongdoing, feel pangs of remorse,
commit to changing your behavior, and really do it. The shofar blast is the auditory
equivalent of a really cold shower, painful, cleansing, eye-opening, consciousness
expanding. The shofar reminds us that we have the short period between Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur to do some serious Heshbon HaNefesh, examination or
accounting of our souls.
Sometimes the explanation for the shofar sounding is about God. God hears the
shofar too. When God hears the shofar, God also sits up a little straighter on God’s
throne and pays attention. Depending on who we are, what we’ve done, this could be
a good or a bad thing. God remembers everything we’ve done but also, hearing the
noise coming from a ram’s horn, God remembers the ram sacrificed instead of
Isaac. God remembers the intricate and complicated relationship between God and
Israel that the binding of Isaac and his subsequent redemption symbolize. As we
read in the Talmud, just as Isaac was bound to God, so too are we bound to God. The
shofar’s wail reminds God to be merciful, as the midrash on p. 247 says, “When
Israel take their rams’ horns and sound them on this Day of Judgment, God rises
from the Throne of Justice and sits upon the Throne of Mercy.” And, of course, we
all want to be judged mercifully for our sins.
The shofar then is a device, a hearing aid, for us and for God. The Shofar blast
makes everyone, us and God, take notice and begin to look inside ourselves. Arise,
you sleepers, the liturgy goes – stop avoiding coming to terms with who you are and
who you want to be. It was at Sinai, I believe, at the moment of revelation and the
giving of Torah, that we first heard the shofar. That was a noisy moment, to say the
least, thunder lightening, shofar blasts, all ways to wake us up. And, as we
remember, it was there, amidst all that noise that we agreed to become God’s
covenantal partners, even if we didn’t quite know what we were agreeing to. That’s
when we said, “Na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will listen.” We usually offer
this as our explanation about why we can act as a good Jew and human being
should without necessarily believing or understanding. Na’aseh v’nishma gets us
going, helps us do righteous deeds, but often we stop there and never really get to
the deeper meaning of “nishma,” This is why we are so often stuck in the parent-
child mode of thinking about God. In a sense, this sentence lets us off the hook – like
good children, we do, naaseh, what we are told, we listen to our parent, nishma, and
then we scamper off, perhaps having internalized what is right and what is wrong,
but also perhaps lacking the sense of a committed relationship that goes beyond the
Avinu malkeinu parent-child dynamic.
It seems to me that what happened at Sinai was stage one for us. We needed all that
noise to jumpstart our obligation to be righteous. That’s our “na’aseh” agreement.
Our first stage in being God’s covenantal partner. But after the shofar wakes us up
and gets us going, we have to work on the “nishma” part, the understanding part.
This is where honesty creeps in and this is the tough part of the Yamim Noraim.
When bad things happen to us, the old proverb, “man’s importunity is God’s
opportunity,” is true. When we are in despair, when we are broken hearted, that’s
when we most long for God. That’s when we’re willing to argue with God, curse God
even, whatever. This is good because regardless of the emotion, we are involving
ourselves deeper and deeper in a relationship with our creator. When the prophet
Elijah fled for his life from his enemy and ended up at hiding in a cave at the foot of
Mt. Sinai, he called out to God. We learn: “And lo, Adonai passed by. There was a
great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of
Adonai; but Adonai was not in the wind. After the wind- an earthquake; but Adonai
was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake – fire; but Adonai was not in the fire.
And after the fire, kol d’mamah dakah, a still small voice.”
And this is what Elijah hears. Not a voice of thunder, not a shofar blast, but a sound
so quiet it is almost no-sound. This is what the shofar is not. But this is the voice we
are seeking. This is how God talks to us. It requires careful listening, especially at
this time of year when, broken hearted or not, and I hope not, we are obliged to make
ourselves squirm a little, feel not quite right in our skins, when we need to access
that still, small voice, and listen to what it’s saying. How do we access this voice?
We don’t need to hide in a cave, but we do need to have a relationship with God. Like
all relationships, this one requires time and trust and honest intimacy. We need to
allow ourselves some time for the conversation to begin. Often the conversation is
called prayer.When God really talks, it’s not with the noise of a shofar. It is with the
still, small voice. Therefore, when we talk to God, it should be as if we are talking to
our dearest, most intimate person. to our beloved. My colleague, Maggid Yitzhak
Buxbaum, tells this story about the Jerusalem kabbalist Rabbi Baruch Shalom
Ashlag:
"Everyone has seen that when someone talks about something very dear to him, he
naturally lowers his voice so that not everyone can hear. So such people speak, in a
special manner, communicating a fiery secret, full of love, which is intended just for
the one who understands this matter. That is the way Rabbi Baruch Shalom Ashlag
talked about God!"
So talk to God and listen for God’s voice. Our prayers, which we have been saying for
thousands of years, pretty much say it all, and that’s what they’re here for. But we
can talk to God in whatever words we want, in whatever tone we want, sometimes
soft and loving, sometimes angry, sometimes joyful, with tears, or shouts, too, and
but we need to commit to the relationship. Give it some time, and then allow some
quiet time to listen for the answer. This time of year, Rosh Hashanah, is a crucial
time of year for this process. Arthur Green reminds us that “Rosh Hashanah should
take us to a place of absolute simplicity and purity, to that inner rosh, that place of
new beginnings, before the shanah, meaning both year and change, begins on its
inevitable, complicated course.” The sound of the shofar helps take us to that place.
The Sefas Emes says, “The shofar blasts are sounds without speech. Speech
represents the division of sound into varied and separate movements of the mouth.
But sound itself is one, united, cleaving to its source. On Rosh Hashanah the life
force, too, cleaves to its source, as it was before differentiation or division. And we
too, see to attach ourselves to that inner flow of life”
But, even when we’ve reached this place, we will to return to our complicated lives.
It is then that we must become shofars ourselves. We must thunder and cry out like
the shofars at Sinai. That is our job. This is when we act. This is what our prophets
command us to do. When we see what is wrong in our world, war, global warming,
poverty, injustice, sickness, disease, lack of education, lack of clean water, hunger,
then we all must become shofars so that all our sounds come together as one
triumphant cry.. Then we must obey Isaiah, who orders us in the Haftarah reading
for Yom Kippur morning, “Cry aloud! Hold nothing back! Raise your voice like a
shofar: proclaim to My people their crimes, to the house of Jacob their sins.” (Isaiah
58:1).
`         If we make this great noise and bring about change, then and only then, Isaiah
tells us, “Then your light shall burst forth like the dawn; your healing shall speedily
take root… Then you shall call and God will answer, you shall cry out and God will
say, “Here I am.” (Is. 58:8.9)
k.y.r..