With the New Year beginning this week, we’ll take a deeper look at one of its most distinctive symbols and sounds: the shofar.
Since it is the season of such—I will start with a confession. Even as I wrote it, I knew that yesterday’s Daily Kavanah contained a mistruth—or at least a misstatement. When I wrote about the shofar sounding for the first time tomorrow night—that was not true. The tradition says that we are to sound—or hear—the shofar every day of the month of Elul (other than Shabbatot) except for tomorrow. Many mystical explanations are given for the extended period of shofar blowing, but the one that has always resonated with me is the one that originates with Maimonides—not a mystic!
Of the sounding of the shofar, Maimonides famously writes:
Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep! And slumberers, arise from your slumber! Search your ways and return in teshuvah and remember your Creator! Those who forget the Truth amidst the futility of the moment and are infatuated all their years with vanity and nothingness that will not help and will not save, examine your souls and improve your ways and your motivations! Let each of you abandon his wicked ways, and his thoughts which are no good.”
In other words, the shofar is not meant to be a one time experience, but rather an awakening to a longer process. My friend and colleague, Rabbi Micha’el Rosenberg of Hebrew College, contrasts this with the mitzvah of eating matzah for Passover. Unlike the shofar, which we are meant to hear for a month leading up to the day of Rosh Hashanah, the custom is actually to scrupulously avoid matzah until the seder itself. Of the difference, he writes:
It seems to me that these two different approaches to the holidays and their practices reflect the deep difference between experiencing redemption and doing teshuvah. Redemption is by its nature surprising, shocking even. To be sure, lots of work and effort goes into the act of redeeming—at least for human acts of redemption. But for the person freed of her shackles, taken out of Egypt, it will invariably feel as if in just one moment everything has changed. In that moment, there is no gradual transition from slave to free, from oppressed to redeemed. I was a slave, and now I’m not. That is the experience we’re trying to recall, to re-create and to create, when we eat matzah while telling and acting out the story of the Exodus on seder night.
But teshuvah is entirely different. When we do teshuvah, we’re not being redeemed; we’re trying to redeem ourselves through our own inner work. And that act of redemption takes serious effort and careful preparation. The shofar blast should not catch us off guard, and it should not be unexpected. Rather, it should be part of a longer process of calling ourselves to attention and thinking about the work we have to do to set ourselves free.
And so, whether you’ve heard it every day this month or are anxiously awaiting its sound tomorrow night—I encourage you to get ready. The work is about to begin.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer