With the New Year beginning this week, we’ll take a deeper look at one of its most distinctive symbols and sounds: the shofar.
In just a few hours, we will stand together as the shofar is sounded throughout what is known as the Shofar Service. As we turn to the themes of shofarot (the sounds), malchuyot (God’s sovereignty), and zichronot (memory), we repeat one phrase: HaYom Harat Olam. Today, we proclaim, the world is born. On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the very moment of creation; it is a moment of birth, of bursting, of pain and joy. In fact, there is a teaching that likens the sound of the shofar on this day to the cries of a woman in labor. Birth is joyous, usually, but it is also messy and painful and profoundly difficult. So too is life, so too is this world.
My colleague and the campus rabbi at my alma mater Northwestern University, Rabbi Jessica Lott, wrote a beautiful piece about remembrance and renewal. She wrote about the declaration of Hayom Harat Olam in this year. What is it, we wonder, to talk about birth and possibility in the shadow of so much pain and destruction and grief? She writes:
On this Rosh Hashanah 5785, we celebrate the birthday of the world, and we acknowledge that we are living in a changed world. We experience the rituals with different spirits. We hear the words of the liturgy (the prayers we say) and the lectionary (the Torah and prophetic readings) with changed ears. When we read about Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, we think of the senseless killings of parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, and of people sending their loved ones off to war. When we pray “who shall live and who shall die?” we feel it too acutely. When we hear shevarim, the shofar’s broken cry, we sob along with it, and when we hear tekiah gedolah, the longest blast of the shofar, its plaintive cry reminds us that we have within ourselves the strength, resilience, determination, and, yes the simple breath, that will carry us further and longer than we would have ever thought possible.
What is it to talk about birth and possibility in the shadow of so much pain and destruction and grief? What is it to proclaim the birth of the world in 5785? It is no less than our sacred obligation, and the very essence of the Jewish spirit: Hope.
Shanah Tovah.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer