Holiday

Looking for some insights or new rituals for an upcoming holiday? Here we post practical, easy to use guidelines for the holy days, both Jewish and American, that mark the way stations along the circle of the year.

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Hearing the Shofar

The sound the shofar makes is singularly primal; the shofar itself is the most visceral item in the panoply of Jewish ritual objects, made as it is from the horn of a ram, deliberately untreated, empty, raw. The very act calls across the centuries and asks us momentarily, and through an act of the imagination, to bridge the enormous divide separating us from the desert people who stood by as the ‘blare of the horn grew louder and louder" at Sinai. Part music, part siren, part animal cry, the shofar blasts focus us as no other part of the service does. Children are lifted onto shoulders to watch the climax of this drama. The shofar shakes, awakens, stirs. It directs attention: yanking us out of our individual prayer, coaxing even the Jew most distant from tradition. Hearing the sounds of the shofar together, we are one.

Meditation

May each sound of the shofar awaken me to the sacred presence.

Ritual

As you hear the shofar being blown, focus on the different sound combinations.

Tekiah! What does the single long blast evoke?

Shevarim! What about the succession of three short broken blasts? Do they sound like a code, suggesting a plan of action?

Teruah! What do the nine short broken notes whose sound wavers?

Tekiah gedolah! What spell is cast as you hear this longest deep note?

Allow all the sounds of the shofar to stir you, linking you to the past and the future, to individuals and community, to the place where you are now and to your commitments to the future.

Blessing

(Before the shofar is blown)

Barukh atah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu lishmo’s kol shofar.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, who makes us holy with mitzvot and gives us the mitzvah of hearing the sound of the shofar.

Teaching

Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land. (Leviticus 25:9)

Shall the shofar be blown in the city and the people not tremble? (Amos 3:6)

Said Rabbi Abahu: Why do we sound the ram’s horn? The Holy one declared, "Sound the horn of a ram before me, that I may recall in your favor the binding of Isaac, and consider you as having bound yourselves, in faith, on the sacrificial altar. (Babylonian Talmud: Rosh Hashanah 16 a-b)

Blessed are the people who understand the shofar sounds; they walk in God’s light. (Machzor)

Tekiah! Shevarim-Teruah! Tekiah!

 (CLAL Faculty)

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