The Meaning of Shofar This Year, Rosh Hashanah 2020

Living is a contact sport. We are social animals and we crave interaction. Yet for six months we have been more isolated than at any time in our life’s experience. However, through this time we have been jostled and prodded in a sense, by forces which have contacted us, mostly non-physically: rather intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. From Black Lives Matter to the environment to economic injustice and to immigration, these have all touched us. We know we are experiencing a shift – a major shift. What meaning people in the future will assign to this shift, we do not know. It is happening to us and because of that, what it means to us and what we are learning from it is much more important than what historians will say about it in the future. Rosh Hashanah is the holiday when we come together to eat well with family and friends. But no one knows what it’s really about. There is only one commandment in Torah concerning Rosh Hashanah, other than we are to do no work on our holiday. Rosh Hashana’s only commandment is to hear the sound of the shofar. That’s it. And no one knows what that’s about either. Perhaps we can explore what Rosh Hashanah and what the sound of the shofar can mean to us this year. Maimonides famously taught that the sound of the shofar means, Sleepers Awake! Scrutinize your deeds and return to God in repentance. However, this year is different. We have become different. We need a different meaning. The word T’ruah actually comes from the root R-UT, which means affection. It means friendship, neighbor, and even wife. This year God is calling to us – through events and through our gathering together to hear the sound of the Shofar. It’s sound says, I am calling to you in love. I am calling to you insistently: through events and through your seclusion, like the time of your wandering in the empty wilderness when you received the Torah, away from civilization, in a place of less distraction, a quiet, wild, and uncertain place. I am calling to you on an inner level to remember who you really are. You are me – me on earth, and I am you. Who you really are can be recalled from my intimate encounter with Moses which you call the 13 Attributes of God – a description of my personality – when I said, I am all Being. I am compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness an truth, forgiving and cleansing. Further, I am justice, I am caring – Eyl Kana - A God who cares passionately, I am loving, as I loved you into life, sustain, guide you, and teach you with my love, and I am within each of you – in your heart and in your mouth, as it says in Deuteronomy. God has come during these six months, to heal us and we are being called to grow. What’s interesting about the Holy Days is that we are commanded, not only to participate in our growth, by simply showing up for the holiday, but also to lead it: to lead and direct our own growth. The prophet Jeremiah taught that the wound is the cure. God said, “For I will restore health to you and heal your wounds. (Jer 30:17) and the midrash explains: The ways of God are unlike those of humans. For a person inflicts a wound with a knife and heals with a bandage, but God heals with the very things with which God wounds. (Ex Rabba 50:3) WE have come to life and to this time in our lives to HEAL – to heal ourselves and our society. In the midrash, a commentary on the Torah there is a classic teaching that each blade of grass has its very own angel urging it to Grow, grow! (Midrash Rabba, Bereshit 10:6) If every blade of grass has an angel, we certainly have angels, or energies from the Divine, urging us to grow. And during this time the angels, like the sound of the Shofar, are even more insistent. A quote from Norman Mailer echoes in my mind: There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. (Barbary Shore Chapter 26) Something is being asked of us. But exactly what is it? Albert Einstein famously said “We cannot solve the problems with the same thinking that created them.” We are being taken to an entirely new level of human functioning: much more interior - centered and much less exterior centered – more virtual and less physical, more energetic and less physically tangible. These urgent demands on us are changing us quickly. We think that the events of our lives are uncharted territory; however it’s really WE who are the uncharted territory. The Torah laid out the ethical bare minimum of moral deeds and integrity of speech and action. It is a floor and not a ceiling. The gems of Torah: Love your neighbor as yourself, and the very love-centered later book of Deuteronomy, asks us to love Being, Love life, Love Existence, Love goodness and love God with all our heart and all our souls and all our might. These gems of Torah point the way toward which we actually find ourselves now travelling. It is prophecy, not only commandment. You Shall love our neighbor as yourself! It will happen. You shall love Being, Life, Existence, Goodness, and God with all your heart, soul, and might. These teachings foretell the shift of the moment and point the way toward a manner of thinking: believing that it’s all possible, which can enlarge our metaphoric tent to include everyone, help us care for and care about each other, preserve and care for the earth, and even know energetically and perceptually when another is hurting – when there is a world situation that needs our attention, and even when someone is thinking of us and is about to call our cellphone. Moses achieved this. Abraham Joshua Heschl said, When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. Once Moses merged with the mind and being of God, Moses could merge with and have empathy for everyone. I think there is a reason why we are called the Children of Israel. To God we are all still children, still a long way from the growth that being human hurries us to attain. As Moses merged with God, we can merge with the heart of God, becoming God on earth; not just God’s hands and feet, but God’s love, compassion, healing, blessing and generosity. One way to do a spiritual check is to ask yourself how big your tent really is. Who would you let into your circle of caring? Who would you let into your country? Into your community? Into your circle of friends, into your apartment, into your family, into your place of employment? Into your heart? Where do you stop? Each of us has a place where we pause or stop. Perhaps we can make our tent just a little bit larger, and perhaps events of these past six months have helped us to do that. All the spiritual teachers of today and many of the past speak about raising our energy or vibrating on a higher level. The Chassidic masters achieved this through joy, love, and ecstasy. With a change in energy comes not only expanded spiritual gifts but also reassurance, safety, protection, lack of fear, more love for ourselves and for others, more happiness, and much more joy. We can only find these gifts through seclusion, as we did in the ancient wilderness when we were so close to God. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.” The shofar this year calls us to remember the possibilities that live within us, just waiting for us to realize them. The shofar calls to us, I love you! I respect you. Remember the magnificence within you and bring it forth. There is within you a fierce love and a passionate caring - I know because I put it there. You are about to manifest a greatness only before achieved by the few: by prophets and great teachers. It is now available to you, to ordinary people, and it is your birthright. Sleepers, awake! Awake to a new reality of a deeper healing, a deeper love, a deeper caring than you have ever known. Become inspired to a greater expression of your own humanity, a level of holiness you are only now capable of. The events of this year have nudged us in this direction. Rosh Hashanah is our opportunity to celebrate our ability to become, to be drawn to our yet unimagined growth, and to realize that we are truly on the path of our becoming.