Sounds of the Shofar

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5765
September 16, 2004

Sometimes when we hear the shofar, it is a sound of triumph, particularly when one of our shofar blowers succeeds in holding that last tekiah gedolah, for an extraordinarily long time ( as was the case Saturday night at Selichot). The shofar is a penetrating sound, it catches the attention of even the most distracted shul goer, child or adult. I once saw the sound of the shofar pierce through the fog of alzheimer’s disease, so that for just a moment, an older person who no longer recognized me, clearly remembered the holiday. I remember one year when I spent the high holidays in a classical reform congregation and they brought in trumpets for the shofar calls, so that they might be more musical. I remember thinking how the harshness of the sound, its lack of musicality, its almost painful qualities, are part of its essence.

Everyone knows why we blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah- to remember the ram that was caught in the thicket, the ram that took Isaac’s place, and fulfilled Abraham’s words to his son on their climb up the mountain, “God will provide the ram for the offering my son”. Without the ram, there is no teaching. Without the ram, nothing special happens here, just a father leading his son to slaughter, a common occurrence in the ancient world, and in its own way, not unknown today.

But what about the calls of the shofar, the special patterns of sounds that our shofar blowers practice during the month of Elul?

Our tradition teaches that the sound of the shofar is a yevava, a cry, meant to remind us of tears. And whose tears are we calling up on this sacred day on our Jewish calendar? The Talmud answers, Em Sisera, the mother of Sisera. We have three different cries on the shofar, because we are not quite sure how she cried and we want to get it right. Further, the tradition of blowing 100 blasts on the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, comes also from a tradition that says that Sisera’s mother cried one hundred times.

Who was Sisera then? And why his mother’s tears? After all the Torah tells us that Rachel cried when she had no children, and Jacob wept when confronted with Joseph’s coat, torn and blood soaked. The Israelites cried out from the burden of slavery, and also shed tears at the deaths of Aaron and Miriam. Why Sisera’s mother’s tears and not these?

Sisera, in case you don’t recall, was an enemy of the ancient Israelites; not merely an enemy, but a villain, a brute, a general guilty of every atrocity imaginable. His story is told in the book of Judges. In the years following Joshua’s conquest of the land, the Israelites are unsuccessful in fighting off their attackers. At one point, Sisera, general of the Canaanites, heads out of his fortress city of Hazor, with 900 iron chariots. It is expected by everyone, including several of the Israelite tribes who try to sit out this battle, that he will succeed in massacring the Israelites. To everyone’s surprise, the prophet Deborah and her general Barak lead the Israelites to victory and Sisera falls at the hand of a woman. Still his mother and her serving women wait at the window, sure that their hero will come home with plunder to share. The book of Judges touchingly paints the scene, which incidentally has been found depicted in ivories from Phoenicia from the 8th century BCE:

“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother,
behind the lattice she cried,
Why is his chariot, so long in coming,
why so late the clatter of his wheels?”

What poignant words, what a strong lesson in the recognition of the humanity of our enemies. Do we ever allow ourselves to imagine the tears on the faces of the mother’s of our enemies? Judaism is not a pacifist religion; there are times when we must fight. But our tradition goes out of its way to remind us that going to war does not excuse the dehumanization of our enemies.

The Bible places limitations on our actions in wartime, limitations on the physical destruction we can cause and strict rules about the treatment of female captives lest rape become the norm in times of war. The rabbis explain that this is because, war by its very nature releases us from some inhibitions, and thus the yetzer hara, the impulse to do evil, needs to be carefully bounded. The law is to be a watchdog, preventing trespass.

This is an important lesson, important in earlier generations and important to us this year as Americans who have viewed the degradation that took place in the Abbu Graib prison. Since my tv wasn’t working, I was spared the full impact, but even the photographs in the newspapers were enough to know that we were shamed as a nation and our cause in the Arab world set back.

Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, in an article entitled, “A Hundred Blasts Shatter the Somber Silence,” argues that while the political lesson of the shofar, that we can never erase the enemy’s face, is important, there is also a more personal lesson to be drawn from the rabbi’s identification of the shofar calls with Sisera’s mother. Sisera’s mother is evoked, Rabbi Gafni argues, because she is nameless. Her cry is bitter, not only because she loves her son and he is lost, but also because Mother of Sisera is who she is, and now, that he is gone, she is nothing, she has lost all her moorings in this world.

All summer, our bar and bat mitzvah students have been chanting the seven special Haftarot that deal with the return from Exile. They have told us that these Haftarot follow the commemoration of Tisha B’av, the destruction of the Temple, and therefore are taken from the prophecies of consolation. But I have to believe that just as the rabbis were aware that these seven Sabbaths follow Tisha B’av, they were aware that these seven Sabbaths culminate in Rosh Hashanah. The Exile that was to come to an end with the reading of the 7th Haftarah was not just the exile of the Jewish people from its homeland. Our prophets are talking about a personal exile as well, the exile of the individual from him or herself.

Ezekiel says, “I am in the midst of exile,” because he stands in Babylonia, but when Rabbi Kook, who lived in the land of Israel, says, “I am in the midst of exile,” he is saying something else. He is saying: “ I’m alienated from myself, from my best self. I’m playing all sorts of roles and many assorted games but I haven’t found myself.”

Rabbi Kook interprets the story of the Garden of Eden as a story of Exile not because Adam was thrown out of the Garden but because he became alienated from himself. God asks Adam, “Ayeka, where are you?” And he cannot answer. Before he listened to the snake, he knew who he was, but now, having adopted the opinions of another, he has lost himself. He can’t answer God’s question, where are you, because he no longer knows himself.

Mordecha Gafni argues that we lose ourselves in this world, in our roles and responsibilities. Our fathers often defined themselves by the company they worked for, a Westinghouse man, a General Electric man, but we more often see ourselves as our professions. Think of any social situation in which you meet new people. How long is it before someone, somehow, raises the issue of profession, and you end up saying, I’m in high tech, I’m a teacher, I’m a rabbi. Being a parent is also a role, and for some number of years it becomes a large part of our identities. But there comes a time when that last child steps out of the door, and you can’t call each other mom and dad around the house anymore.

We also lose ourselves in adopting the opinions of others. Adam originally had the power to name everything that he saw in his world, but with regard to the fruit of the tree, he let others decide that it was good to eat and desirable to the eye. It is not just teens who are influenced by their peers. Do we like the color we chose for the outside of our house- or is it just the color of the year? Where do all those should’s in our lives come from- I should own a house by the time I am thirty, I should have furniture that matches, I should have new clothes for the holidays, I should not look a day over 30 or 40 or 50 as the case may be. How do we know what we need to buy, to own, to be? Does it come from inside, or is it prompted by what we see around us?

The shofar is like the call, alialioutandfree. It wants us to think about who we really are, not just our occupations or standing in the neighborhood, not just our roles in the family, or the face we put on in public. It wants us to consider what is enduring, and what we really want, and to remember that there was a time before we became an engineer, and if, due to downsizing or retirement, there is a time after which we are no longer an engineer, we are still whole and of value.

How do we lose touch with who we really are? The rabbis say the ways are so numerous that the wondrous thing is when we remember. We are each of us, like a child, sent out from the castle of our parents, the king and queen. As the years pass, that earlier part of our existence fades from our memory. Only, if we are lucky, if the king and queen pass through the remote part of the land to which we have been exiled, and we hear the royal bugler play, will we remember who we really are.

That’s what the shofar is really about- that call to remember who we really are. Once we remember, everything else can fall into place, and we can move on into a good new year.