As we prepare to enter the New Year tonight, we enter with renewed prayers of peace and safety for our friends and family in Israel, as well as those defending the country.
With the New Year beginning this week, we’ll take a deeper look at one of its most distinctive symbols and sounds: the shofar.
Like so much in our tradition, ancient teachings about the shofar are timeless—and feel particularly relevant for this moment. Turning again to Maimonides, I want to offer this teaching as we prepare to welcome the New Year tonight. In his Mishneh Torah, he reflects on what, exactly, the Torah is describing when it talks about the teruah the sounds of the shofar.
This Teruah that the Torah discusses… we are unsure what it is. It may be the wail that women wail amongst themselves while crying. It may be the sigh that one does, one after the other, whilst they are worried about a great stress. It may also be both together, the sigh followed by the cry, as it usually comes afterwards. This may be called teruah, as this is the way of a worrier, to first sigh, and then cry. We therefore do all options.
Written at the end of the 12th century, those sounds—and the feelings behind them—seem to have traveled across the centuries and the miles to land here in 2024 in Los Angeles and across the Jewish world.
I am so excited to gather with many of you tonight and tomorrow and Friday. With sounds of joy and hope, we will welcome a New Year. And, I cannot ignore—for even a second—that just days later we will be gathering again to mark the one year anniversary of October 7. We welcome the New Year, as we always do, with a sense of potential and possibility; this year, though, we also cannot leave behind the fear and the worry and the anger of the past year.
Later tonight, a dear friend and colleague of mine is going to offer her congregation a gorgeous sermon reflecting on the pain of the shofar sounds. And maybe, then, this is the answer to that tension of the shofar. Does it proclaim freedom or battle? Is it a joyous sound or a cry? Maybe—the answer is yes. Maybe this week, this year, we hear in its sounds the brokenness of our hearts… and the strength of our spirits. Maybe we hear in it the tears of 5784, and the hopes of 5785. Maybe we hear the sighs and the cries—and after, the silence of a new breath and a new beginning.
Whatever you hear in the shofar this year, may it open for you a year of growth and change, of community and connection.
Shanah Tovah.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer