Ki Seitzei: Internalizing 2 voices of the shofar
We have been hearing the shofar every morning through the month of Elul, and I always find that it creates this looming feeling that the Yamim Noraim are coming.
Uru yesheinim mishinaschem, the Rambam writes, describing the wordless message of the shofar. Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep (Hilchos Teshuvah 3:4). There is something about that sound that does exactly that. It wakes me up. It makes me think about what matters, what I have been spending my time on, and what I want the coming year to look like.
But whenever I feel that pull, I also remember standing in a shul once on Rosh Hashanah and watching the makri. He seemed completely unmoved by what was happening. He was staring at his watch, carefully tracking the length of every blast to make sure it met the halachic requirements, and when enough seconds had passed, he motioned to the baal tokeah to stop.
I am not, chas veshalom, minimizing the importance of getting the halachah exactly right. A mitzvah performed sloppily is not somehow more meaningful because it is heartfelt. But I remember watching him and wondering if getting the sound exactly right is the entirety of what this mitzvah asks of us.
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Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik raises almost the same question through a story about his father, Rav Moshe Soloveitchik, recorded in “Halakhic Man.”
Rav Moshe was once standing on the bimah on Rosh Hashana, guiding the sounding of the shofar, when the baal tokeah, a deeply religious man, began to cry. Rav Moshe turned to him and asked quite simply why he was crying. Do you cry when you take the lulav? Why cry when you blow the shofar? Aren’t they both mitzvos of Hashem?
It sounds like a surprisingly cold question, but I think that is exactly what makes it so powerful. Why do we expect the shofar to move us? If Hashem commanded us to hear a certain series of sounds, then perhaps our job is simply to make sure we hear them correctly. Why should there be tears?
The Rav found something remarkable in the language of the Rambam. In his introduction to “Hilchos Shofar, Sukkah VeLulav,” the Rambam describes the mitzvah as lishmoa kol shofar be’echad beTishrei (to hear the sound of the shofar on the first of Tishrei). But when the Rambam actually begins the halachos, his language changes.
Mitzvas asei shel Torah lishmoa teruas hashofar beRosh Hashana (there is a Torah commandment to hear the teruah of the shofar on Rosh Hashana) (Hilchos Shofar 1:1). There is kol shofar, the actual sound that must be heard on a particular date. That sound has rules. It has measurements. It needs to be long enough and shaped correctly. Sometimes it needs someone standing there with a watch.
But there is also teruas shofar. There is something inside the sound, a cry that is supposed to awaken something inside the person hearing it. The mitzvah begins with the ear, but it is not supposed to end there. The shofar can awaken us to realities if we allow it. It can shatter illusions and awaken tefillos that words cannot express.
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The Rav once described what it means to suddenly wake up from an illusion in one of the most painful passages he ever wrote. Shortly after his wife Tonya died, he awoke during a thunderstorm on the seventh day of Pesach in 1967. Half asleep, he remembered that a window had been left open downstairs near where his wife slept.
Worried that the cold air could harm her in her weakened condition, he rushed downstairs and closed it. Then he turned around. The bed was empty. The couch was neatly covered. His wife had died the previous month. For a brief moment, he had forgotten. He had been living in the world as it used to be, the world in which his wife was still downstairs sleeping.
Then he turned around, and everything came rushing back. In some sense, that is the sound of the shofar itself. Tekiah, shevarim, teruah. A simple sound becomes broken and piercing. The shofar forces us to confront realities we may know intellectually but spend much of our lives avoiding.
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For a few seconds, if we let it, something breaks through. Maybe that is what the Rambam means when he hears the shofar saying, Wake up. Not learn something new. Wake up to what you already know. Remember what matters.
Remember how quickly a year passes. Remember the people you love. Remember the person you wanted to become. Remember that you are standing before G-d. The shofar does not give us a speech because sometimes words actually get in the way. It gives us a cry.
And maybe that means I misunderstood the makri with his stopwatch all those years ago. The stopwatch and the emotion were never competing with each other. We need the stopwatch. Halachah gives the shofar its form and tells us exactly what Hashem asks us to do. But once the sound is right, another question begins. Did we actually listen?
We can hear the kol shofar and fulfill a mitzvah on the first of Tishrei, and that itself is precious. But we can also allow that same sound to become teruas shofar, a wordless tefillah, a moment when everything else becomes quiet enough for us to remember what we knew all along.
The shofar, in other words, has two voices. One is the sound that reaches our ears. The other is the cry that is meant to reach our hearts.
This Rosh Hashana, the question is not only whether we will hear the shofar. The question is whether, even for a few seconds, we will truly listen.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
