When contemplating the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, I think of my four grandchildren now serving in our army.
Two of them, the boys, are in tanks, while the girls are in intelligence units.
Whenever I speak to them, I get goosebumps. It is the same experience I get when I listen to the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah. The experience confounds my intelligence and reason.
It throws me into something that is best described by the Protestant thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). In his famous book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy), Otto describes certain human experiences as sui generis, not to be understood in terms of any other experience, nor even in terms of the rational.
This happens, for example, when we see art or listen to music. One cannot adequately explain why they are aesthetically satisfying. They represent something beyond words. Otto calls this the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
The ultimate prayer of the shofar
That is what happens on Rosh Hashanah and when I speak to my grandchildren. On Rosh Hashanah, we spend hours declaring God’s majesty, using poetic and unique phrases. We refer to Him as the “Ultimate King” and “Mover of the World.” We ask Him to strengthen and reinforce His relationship with us and to show us His omnipotence.
But the ultimate prayer of this day is a sound that carries no words, and it is the only biblical commandment of the day: the blowing of the shofar. It creates feelings of an inexplicable magnitude.
What the shofar tells us is that we can surpass ourselves. On our own, using only our vocal cords, we cannot produce this sound – a terrifying, awesome, penetrating resonance. We can scream, howl, and wail, but nothing more. Our reach is limited.
Alone, we cannot produce any sound that comes close to the piercing and penetrating heavenly voice of the shofar. This is a sound that can cause us to break down, pick ourselves up again, and transform ourselves into new individuals.
And that is what I hear when I speak to my grandchildren. What I hear is not what they tell me but what is hidden behind their words. A fascinating and miraculous sound of courage, of pride in being Jewish, and in defending our people.
While I know that they are exhausted, not getting enough sleep, they sound like people who belong to a world beyond – as if they transcend their humanity.
Like the shofar, they carry me to places unreachable by the human word. Their dedication ignores walls and other obstacles, simply forging ahead long after the human sound would have come to an end.
Like the shofar, I hear something that tears my heart open – just as when the Children of Israel encountered the original shofar sound at Sinai before God introduced the Torah to them.
In terms of the shofar, the only way to create this sound is by blowing a not too strong puff of breath into a small hole at one end of the shofar, which widens to a larger opening at the other end. This small act produces a sound of overwhelming power that pierces the heavens.
Suddenly, we are able to reach unreachable heights, but only when we are humble enough to admit that we cannot do it on our own and that we need help.
But it is we who must activate this help. The shofar will not blow itself. It needs the human breath – our participation and our effort – before it can move mountains. Whether or not the shofar will blow is up to us, but whether we can reach our own potential will be up to the shofar. Our humility, combined with our capacity to move beyond ourselves, is what makes us exceptional.
AND THAT seems to happen with my grandchildren and all these other soldiers. It is as if they have activated their Jewish pride and their commitment to the Torah to levels that outdo ordinary human capacity.
Instead of complaining, they tell me that they are fine and that I should not worry, that to be Jewish is to live the impossible. They are fully convinced that the future of all mankind depends on us Jews. To be Jewish is to live in a holy dimension. They refuse to surrender to normalcy and the mundane.
Instead, they and their fellow soldiers are on a spiritual mission. We are God’s stake in human history, and we could not make a greater mistake than to believe that we could ever be a nation like other nations. To believe that is to commit spiritual suicide.
This is our great challenge. Will we remain complacent and stagnant, letting the shofar sit in the cupboard and never daring to go beyond ourselves? Or will we, like our soldiers, have the nerve to blow the shofar and produce something that surpasses our selves?
The moment in which we live now is more than crucial. We must make sure that we are united, to fight the enemy. But to accomplish this, we cannot rely on just our fighting power. No nation can live on borrowed identity.
We cannot predicate our survival on remaining a culture of fading memories of bygone times. We must come together under the flag of an eternal mission.
Human beings can starve from lack of identity as much as they can starve from lack of food. If we become messengers who have forgotten the message, we will not win this war. Hence, we must make sure that we do not lose the script of the great Jewish story. It was our belief in Judaism that kept us alive for thousands of years. And so it will be in the here and the now.
On Rosh Hashanah, when we recall the greatness of God and the creation, the shofar challenges us to dare to go beyond, creating ourselves and Judaism anew. If we don’t respond to the challenge at this crucial hour, the sound will fall flat and die before it reaches its destination.
But the shofar holds all the possibilities of the future, and if we blow it properly it will usher us into a new area of infinite opportunities, through which the mitzvot of the Torah will come alive as never before.
The mitzvot will enrich our lives in ways that we cannot even imagine! Oh, yes, it will be arduous work with its ups and its downs, but the reward will be infinite.
Our soldiers seem to know something which the rest of us have not yet grasped. They seem to be aware of a kind of awe and intimation of the divine that has entered our space but has not yet landed fully. It is like a perpetual murmur from waves that are slowly reaching our shores from a world beyond.
We are living in biblical times. The clock is ticking, the alarm is ringing. Who does not hear the sound of the “great Lion”?
Tizku le’shanim rabot! May we merit long life.
The writer is author of many books, such as the bestseller Jewish Law as Rebellion. Find his weekly essays at cardozoacademy.org.