Rosh Hashanah 2022

This coming week is Rosh Hashanah, the “birthday of the world,” as it is called in the Musaf liturgy.   But Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Tishrei, is not the first day of creation but the sixth day of creation, on which, according to the story in Bereshit, the human being was created.   

On that day God blew into the human being, “nishmat chaim,” “a  living soul”.  The Targum Onkelos, a second century Arameic translation of the Torah, renders the phrase, “living soul” as “ruach mimalila” , “a speaking soul”.   The Divine element within us, according to this translation, is our ability to speak.  Something no other creature can do, at least in the way we do it.  

Language is a gift which has enabled humans to create sophisticated socicities, to write books, to learn from each other, to have long lasting relationships, to communicate our feelings and selves, and to share our intellectual lives with others.   But language is also a cage which holds us.  Language is not only a list of words which signifies things, but itself has texture, and cultural and historical assuptions which, as far as language defines how we think, we can not step outside of.   How are we then to do teshuvah, to become someone new, to truly change, if we can not see the world, ourselves, and our potential for change in a truly new way?   Sure, we can tweak what we do, how often we do it, we can try to change how we act, but this is limited by the structure of our thinking, which, being at the center of all of our experiences, is a mirrored room outside of which we can not see.  How can we pierce these walls of language to prime the pump of self-transformation?

The mystics write that the shofar is the sound of our soul.  The pre-verbal sigh of our authenticity.   The small hole the size of a needle, which then can be expanded through t'shuvah.  The shofar pierces our reality, our assumptions about who we are and about the limits of our potential.  As the midrash says about teshuvah in Shir HaShirim Rabbah, “Open for me a hole the size of the tip of a needle, says God, and I will expand it to the size of a great hall.”

The mitzvah is not to blow the shofar, but to hear it, “lishmoa kol shofar.”  This is because the shofar is not an act to be done like shaking a lulav, or just a mitzvah to be fulfilled, but a reality to be embraced.   To hear is the first step, only then can change begin.  

May we as individuals and as a community change for the better in ways we could not have imagined before hearing the shofar- more loving, more kind, more spiritual, more loyal, more thoughtful, more merciful, and more holy.   

Shanah Tovah!