A version of this shofar was offered at Rosh HaShanah morning 5785 at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.
The Community of the Shofar
As I began to speak about last night, and as
you will hear more about over the course of these holidays and this year, this
past summer, my sabbatical was, in part, a heritage tour. I went to go see where my family comes from,
specifically Lithuania and Germany. During
the month of making my way from Germany through Latvia and Lithuania, Finland,
Estonia, and Poland, I saw powerful memorials to Jewish communities of the
past. I stood in places of terrible atrocity, the kinds of actions that define
the oft-repeated “man’s inhumanity to man.”
I stood in places that my grandfather may have stood and looked upon
vistas that would have been familiar to him.
I walked through concentration camp gates, the same gates my
grandparents would have walked through. I
went to almost any Jewish museum I could
find to try to see the faces of my ancestors.
I prayed joyfully in synagogues with active, if small, communities, and
pensively in synagogues without communities, the refurbished buildings
monuments to a people present now only in memory. Each of these experiences stays with me and
could, and probably will, open up to a sermon on its own.
Of all the places I went, of all the
experiences I had, of all the beautiful and painful and surprising moments of
this long tour, of the many miles I walked inhaling the breath of these places,
if I had to say, probably the most powerful and spiritual experience for me was
getting to see Taylor Swift in concert in Warsaw…
It
was an impromptu opportunity that I hadn’t planned on. I landed in Warsaw, heard she was there, got
on my phone, and bought a ticket for that night. And my goodness am I glad that I did! Because I’m not kidding you about the
spiritual nature of the experience.
On
my way in to the massive stadium, I stood in line next to a couple from DC,
celebrating their first anniversary. We
chatted as we waited to walk through security.
And then on the way in, we were all handed a bracelet with light up LEDs.
Just before the concert begins, we all activate the bracelet, and suddenly, we are
no longer a disparate group of concertgoers from across the world. Everyone’s bracelet worked with everyone
else’s to turn the crowd into a part of the show, a luminous backdrop all
around. The lights changed color,
sometimes in unison, sometimes choreographed or in undulating patterns, always
tied to the beat, always setting a mood, from all of our wrists. I only made small talk with the two young women
who sat next to me, this strange, American man by himself at the Taylor Swift
Concert in Warsaw. And though no one
gave me a friendship bracelet, I felt the power of being a part of something
bigger. It was the power of community.
Maybe
it was because I had just toured a series of communities that used to be,
having already seen Vilnius and Kovno, that I needed a sense of belonging. Maybe it was touring the destroyed communities
in Israel last winter, and then seeing the playbook for what was done on
October 7 all across Europe, that demanded some kind of remedy to the isolation
that comes form being the only one at the Vilnius Holocaust museum, or the only
one at the Riga Jewish Museum, home to perhaps the most beautiful stained glass
Shma I’ve ever seen. Maybe one other
person saw it that day or that week.
For
almost three weeks I had been traveling by myself surrounded by the memory of
our people, and suddenly here I was surrounded by lots and lots of people,
living people, singing people, dancing people, people of all ages excited to be
there. The sense of joy was palpable
from all directions and from all present.
I was enthralled and transported, radically amazed, by the sense of
togetherness, and how restorative that was for me. Taylor really can do everything.
My
friends, we have been carrying so much this last year, as Jews and those who
love us. We have been carrying a year’s
worth of grief, a year’s worth of suspicion, a year’s worth of security bills,
a year’s worth of division and fighting for our existence and right to
self-determination, a year’s worth of images of suffering, a year’s worth of praying
for a war to end that won’t and for people to come back home that don’t, a
year’s worth of fighting, a year’s worth of mourning. 5784 will not be recalled as the best of
times for the Jewish people. And we’ve
just made it through.
This litany doesn’t of course factor in those
many of us who lost someone close to us, or suffered illness, or disappointment,
ruptures of relationships among families and friends. For many, grief is compounded. And while I cannot speak to whether 5785 will
be the good year that we pray for on these holiest of days, I do know that at
least for the short term, the images won’t be any easier to see and the news
won’t be any easier to watch. I pray with
complete faith that 5785 will be the year that our dreams and hopes for peace
may be realized. And in the same way
that I know that I won’t keep all my promises to God in the New Year, I know
that not all my prayers will be answered, and I fear that this will be one of
them. It can be overwhelming. Enough to give up.
What has given me, and I think many of us,
strength over the last year is our community. In the midst of war and death and
hatred and difficulty, in the midst of the isolation so many feel, we look
around and see life, friendship, learning, and connection to traditions that
have held us together for thousands of years. Community heals. Community supports. Community backs you up.
As we make our way into the new year, with
blessings of goodness and sweetness, let us feel the comfort in the community
that is around us. May the sense of
goodness and togetherness we feel right now call us all to deeper engagement
with our Judaism and our Synagogue community in the coming year, no matter what
it brings.
The Hebrew word for community is kahal, related to kehillah. This root appears
many times in the Torah. The root itself
is related to other ancient roots meaning assembly. The origins of the word, however, are up for
scholarly debate. Some say that it’s
related to a word for reproof, or rebuke.
Others however see in kahal
the weak middle hey, which historically was often interchangeable with the vav.
When replaced, we get kol, the word
for voice or sound. These scholars
believe that the word for community
derives from a word for the sound that would have been made to call the
community to assembly. In ancient days
it would have required a loud instrument to call folks together from distant
places. What was the instrument of
choice? A shofar.
The shofar is commanded in the Torah as this
day is defined with the words yom teruah. Usually translated this means a day of
blasting the horn. Most of us know this
word teruah as the third of the
shofar blasts, the nine short blasts.
Yet, as much as this word can be translated that way, it can also mean joyous celebration. The shofar calls us to celebrate our new
year, and the way that comes about is through the assembling of the
community.
The shofar was a call to community in our
past. Today, hear its voice and let it
call us to community again! Let it call
us to the healing that comes from togetherness and commonality. In a few moments, and I promise, just a few,
Cantor Timman will chant for us all the beautiful blessing for the sounding of
the shofar. The blessing is not on
blowing the shofar, but on hearing it.
In order to hear the shofar, you have to be present. Officially, you can’t hear it through a
speaker or hear its echo and consider your obligation fulfilled. You have to come to the place where the
shofar is being blown and hear the actual sound. The central commandment of Rosh HaShanah is
to come together to listen to an instrument that tells us to come
together. I don’t know if God could be
more obvious!
Because the sounding of the horn is a
commandment from the Torah, we have the blessing formula: Asher kidshanu bemitzvotav, vetzivanu lishmo’a kol shofar. We bless God who commands us to hear the
voice of the shofar. Kol shofar. Let the voice of the shofar also inspire us
to be a kahal shofar, a community of
the shofar. A community called by the
shofar to be together. A community
called by the shofar to experience all the ways that community can be a salve
to the many hurts we carry with us into this new year.
In her beautiful book The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous, explaining the role of showing
up, notes: “We experience, innately, joy at another’s joy, wonder at another’s
wonder. We have the natural capacity to
be energized and inspired by someone else’s dream fulfilled, even when our own
hearts are broken.”[1] As evidence of this, she cites studies from
the 1990s that resulted in the discover of mirror neurons. As Rabbi Brous tells it:
[R]esearchers in a neurophysiology lab in
Italy were studying neuron activity in monkeys.
At some point, one of the researchers took a break to grab a gelato, as
one does in Italy. As he began to eat,
sitting across from his monkey subjects, he was stunned to see that the neurons
in the pleasure center of the monkeys’ brains were firing…not because they were
eating something delicious, but because they were watching him eat something
delicious.[2]
We are a synagogue filled with joys, as young
people are called to Torah, as they are named on our bima, as our students
share their learning. We are a community
filled with joy as we celebrate our festivals and honor our members. Being a member of a shofar community means you
can come and experience that joy, too!
The shofar represents hopes for moving past
violence, for putting down the weapons we wield. In the Akeidah story we heard chanted so
beautifully earlier, it ends with Isaac being saved from death by his father,
and in his place the two sacrifice a ram.
The shofar, often a ram’s horn, reminds us of this story. The ram steps in, as Amichai calls him, as
the hero of the story, preventing the death of Isaac, an innocent child who
didn’t even know what was going on. I
pray that these calls of the shofar may elicit the same in the new year. May weapons be put down, may the instinct
toward violence be abated. May the
innocents be spared.
The calls of the shofar move from the tekiah to the shevarim and teruah, and
always back to the tekiah, from a
whole note, through a series of broken notes back to a whole note. No matter how broken things may feel, there
is hope for wholeness, for shleimut, for shalom.
Sadly, I can’t afford to take us all to hear
Taylor swift’s voice, and to feel the energy of that communal experience. But man, do we have awesome shofar blowers
here, ready to help you fulfill your obligation to hear the voice of the
shofar. And man, do we have an awesome
community here, worthy of sharing joys and leaning on each other when times are
tough. The blasts of the shofar are
next. Our sacred duty to proclaim the
new year will be fulfilled, that’s to be sure.
The sounds of the shofar will resonate through our ears and into our
souls. May the calls bring us only
goodness and sweetness in the new year.
May the calls inspire us all to seek out the blessings of being a community
of the shofar, called to goodness and justice and togetherness. May the calls bring us all back to wholeness
such that when we blow these horns one year from now, we may look back and
revel in a year of togetherness and a year of peace.
Amen.
Shanah Tovah!
