Breathing in the Shofar (Rosh Hashanah 5786)

I’m tired. I’m tired, and I suspect that many of you are too. Not the kind of tired that comes from having too much to do and not enough time, nor from going to sleep too late or waking up too early (though I’m sure that’s also true for many of us). I’m spiritually exhausted. I’m ethically exhausted. Ten years ago, everything seemed to matter to me. If an unjust law or executive order was promulgated, I was at a protest. If I knew a product was unethically sourced, I would boycott it. When someone said something that I knew was wrong, or hurtful, or misleading, I would jump into the rhetorical fray and argue with them.

Not anymore. There have been so many things to protest, to fight against, but these days, my response is simply to sigh, maybe to grumble, if I’m feeling especially open, to cry. But the sheer weight of the oppression and injustice and mistruths that we are currently living under has — I say to you with embarrassment, but also with honesty — taken the fight out of me. I know that this is not true for everyone here, some are still fighting the good fight; but I also imagine that I am not alone in this feeling.

I have never been less ready for, or more in need of, the shofar. In one of his more poetic moments, the Rambam tells us:

אף על פי שתקיעת שופר בראש השנה גזרת הכתוב

רמז יש בו

כלומר

עורו ישנים משנתכם ונרדמים הקיצו מתרדמתכם

וחפשו במעשיכם וחזרו בתשובה וזכרו בוראכם

We are not the first to be lulled into sluggish desperation, and indeed, though the dissociative tendency we all to some extent have — the inclination, when things are difficult, to tune out rather than fight back — though that tendency is more pronounced and more understandable some years than others, the eternal wisdom of Rosh Hashanah is that we always need a wakeup call, the shofar blast shocking us out of our slumber.

Sleep is a particularly apt metaphor for the state we have slipped into, and which the shofar calls us to step out of. Sleep is not moral decrepitude, it is not in and of itself a violation. It is simply the state in which we become unaware of what’s going on around us, a state in which we cannot respond.

Perhaps that is what the Rambam means when he continues:

אלו השוכחים את האמת בהבלי הזמן ושוגים כל שנתם בהבל וריק אשר לא יועיל ולא יציל…

The Rambam’s language of הבלי הזמן is often understood as referring to the tendency to get caught up in ethical fads, to lose sight of the eternal truths in favor of new ideas that, it will turn out, lack staying power. But there are clearer ways for the Rambam to say that. The word הבל famously appears throughout the book of Koheles, including at its very beginning:

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל

In JPS’s translation: Utter futility, says Koheles, utter futility, all is futile!

If that is the meaning the Rambam has in mind, then he means something like: The sleeping ones are the those who are lost in the [seeming] futility of the moment. It’s far easier to get lost in the sense of futility than in out-and-out depravity.

Consider the prophet Yonah, whose story we will read in 9 days — Yonah, who is a prophet; whose life and words are canonized; who receives a verbal message directly from God — and even so, while literally on a sinking ship, he is able to fall asleep:

וַיִּקְרַב אֵלָיו רַב הַחֹבֵל וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ מַה־לְּךָ נִרְדָּם קוּם!…

(יונה א:ו)

Now, we now that Yonah must have gotten up, because in the very next scene, he’s drawing the lot that will out him as the reason for the ship’s troubles. But the text does not tell us at this point that he got up — the ship captain says to him, “Get up! Kum!”, but there is no vayakom yonah, Yonah got up, that follows. Eventually, two chapters later, Yonah will finally get up, following yet another command from God to do so, but his wakefulness is short-lived. At the very end of the book, in our last image of him, Yonah is still asleep. Yonah is unable to see the suffering of others, unable to muster the moral energy to work for redemption, an ethical torpor that God criticizes:

וַאֲנִי לֹא אָחוּס עַל־נִינְוֵה הָעִיר הַגְּדוֹלָה אֲשֶׁר יֶשׁ־בָּהּ הַרְבֵּה מִשְׁתֵּים־עֶשְׂרֵה רִבּוֹ אָדָם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדַע בֵּין־יְמִינוֹ לִשְׂמֹאלוֹ וּבְהֵמָה רַבָּה׃ (יונה ד:יא)

After all the drama of his story, Yonah is still unable to grasp the enormity of what might have been, the destruction of an entire city, which God staves off solely because God cares even, or perhaps especially, for those who cannot take ethical care of themselves, אשר לא ידע בין ימינו לשמאלו. Yonah cannot see this; he is asleep.

If a prophet with direct access to the divine can fall victim to sleepful dissociation, surely so can we. So God gives us the gift of the shofar.

אִם־יִתָּקַע שׁוֹפָר בְּעִיר וְעָם לֹא יֶחֱרָדוּ

The prophet Amos says: If a shofar is blasted in the city, can it be that the people will not tremble?

But we know that the power of the shofar is not in fact automatic. A midrash in Pesikta deRav Kahana (24:1, Shuvah) turns Amos’s rhetorical question — can it be that the shofar will blast and the people will not tremble? — into a genuine one:

[א] אם יתקע שופר בעיר ועם לא יחרדו…(עמוס ג:ו).

למדינה שהיתה משובשת בגייסות

והיה בה זקן אחד והיה מזהיר לכל בני המדינה,

כל מי שהיה שומע לו היה ניצול,

וכל מי שלא היה שומע לו היו הגייסות באות והורגין אותו

I don’t need to tell you how distressingly familiar the imagery of military forces coming into a city is in 2025. And, the midrash tells us, even when the siege has begun, there are some who will not hear the call.

That’s actually not quite correct, though. To be sure, the midrash distinguishes between those who are שומע and those שלא היה שומע, which we might be tempted to translate as “those who hear” and “those who do not hear.” But that’s not right. Everyone hears the elder’s warning in the streets, everyone hears the shofar in synagogue. The distinction, rather is between those who heed the call and those who do not, those who tremble, and those who do not.

Speaking very personally: I’ve seen the images, I read the news every day, I’m fully aware of how stark this moment is, how clear the signs are. I’ve heard the shofar. But I have not heeded it. And that is our job today — to open ourselves up so that we not merely hear, not merely listen, but actually let the sound enter inside us, let it bring us to a place of trembling.

How do we do that, how do we make ourselves vulnerable, when the tough outer shells we’ve developed, out of a necessity for self-protection, when those shells make it nearly impossible to be startled anymore? When we’re exhausted from year after year, an onslaught of depressing news and fearful omens?

The prophet Yeshayahu tells us that on the day of salvation, of redemption,

…יִתָּקַע בְּשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל…

An early midrash, the Sifrei, takes note of the passive voice — a shofar will be blown — and asks:

אבלץ…מי תוקעו,?

It responds by quoting a verse from Zekharya:

תלמוד לומר וה’ אלוקים בשופר יתקע.

The Shem Mishmuel, the second Sochochover Rebbe (e.g. Shuvah 6.4), understands this to be not merely what will happen when moshiach comes, but a paradigm for every shofar blast that we blow on Rosh Hashanah.

We’re very fortunate here at Ohr Kodesh to have excellent ba’alei tekiyah, but the truth is, they are only intermediaries. The real source of the shofar blasts that we hear today is God Godself.

And once we realize that, once we have the image of God blowing God’s own breath through the shofar, we are reminded of another critical moment when God’s breath plays an essential role. When God creates the first human, after building the physical form, God breathes the breath of life into us — ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים. The creation of new life comes through God’s breath, which means that every Rosh Hashanah, the shofar blasts — which are nothing but God’s breath being sent once again into the world — the shofar blasts give us not merely an awakening, an alarm, but actual new life.

Therefore, writes the Shem Mishmuel,

…הוא מועיל אפי’ למי שכבר כלה ונאבדה חיותו ממנו לגמרי

אם עכ”פ הוא יודע ומבין על מצבו כי ברע הוא ומתאמץ להשיג חיים חדשים…

One cannot simply receive the breath (Shem Mishmuel RH 20). One cannot accept God’s mercy until you are aware that you need it. We must first become truly attuned to our gaps, to all that we lack. So before we can hear the tekiyah, we have a teruah, the broken, sobbing sound of the shofar, reminding us that we, like the teruah, are in fact broken. Our complacency is not a transgression, but a wound. We have been hurt, and so we need divine mercy, the new life that the tekiyah breathes into our souls.

But there is another obstacle. The yetzer hara, the part in each of us that tells us that we’re actually ok. In the words of the Shem Mishmuel, the yetzer hara

סותם עיניו

Shuts our eyes

ומחליק הדברים בפניו עד שאינו יכול לשבור לבו באמת

And smooths things out before us, such that we cannot truly break our own hearts.

The yetzer hara is that part of us that says — it’s ok, it’s not that bad, the media are exaggerating, our friends on social media are blowing things out of proportion. Everything will be fine.

It makes sense that we have such a part — when it does its work in moderation, it prevents us from shutting down, from getting overwhelmed by the work we have to do. But when times are truly critical, when our hostages are still held in Gaza, whe our democracy is legitimately at risk, when people are being grabbed off of the streets and sent to prisons without trials, when our leaders put their own personal well-being ahead of concern for the soldiers under their command, then this part of us, this yetzer hara, smooths things out so much that we can no longer break our hearts, and that’s what we need to do.

And so we have the first tekiyah, which is the alarm the Rambam spoke of. A tekiyah to break us out of our complacency, a siren.

Then a teruah, to show us how broken we are, how broken this moment is, how broken our world is.

And then, at last, the real blast, the one that gives us new life, the final tekiyah. In earlier kabbalistic texts, the tekiyah — one long, unbroken, expansive blast — embodies chesed and rahamim. The love and mercy to breathe new life into each of us, to give us a fresh start — not merely to relieve us of our suffering, but to give us the chance to recommit to serving God and not the false idols of the moment (Shem Mishmuel RH 15:7).

It is tempting to simply stand in awe of the shofar blasts, impressed with their clear tone or powerful articulation. But I want to ask each of us, today, to do more than hear them. For each set of blasts — a long blast, broken blasts, and another long blast — with each set, heed the alarm of that first blast. Listen with your ears. Let it break you out of your stupor, let it catch you each time, breaking the yetzer hara that wants you to think that everything is ok, with us and with the world.

Then, with the broken blasts, we can do more than heed, we can embody. Let the brokenness of the blast be one with the brokenness of each our own bodies and souls. Feel it in your heart and in your kishkes.

And then, when the final blast — the long tekiyah of unbroken mercy and love — when that final blast of each set comes, literally breathe it in. Feel it entering your nose, your throat, all the way down into your lungs, breathe it in and out. That’s God’s breath, and if we let it, it can fill us with new life, a new start, a new energy, a new sensitivity.

I know that I’m not ready, but God is calling us whether we’re ready or not, and giving us the tools to get ready. It’s time to wake up.