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Sermons

October 3, 2024

Hearing The Cry of the Shofar in the New Year (Rosh HaShanah 5785)

Hilly Haber

Hearing The Cry of the Shofar in the New Year
Rabbi Hilly Haber, Rosh HaShanah 5785

Shofar blast, Teruah

The sound of the shofar takes us back to Sinai—to the moment when Torah was given. It takes us forward into the future, when the prophet Isaiah imagined that its blast will summon us from exile to gather again in the land of Israel.1This sound reverberates across the centuries. It is a call to war and to worship, to freedom and deliverance; a warning cry, an alarm to rouse us from spiritual and ethical slumber. One shattering note holds history and hope, the beauty and pain of the entire Jewish story, “a prayer without words.”2

Echoing across years, across continents, stories of the shofar’s blast carry us from the joy of the biblical jubilee year3, to the battle of Jericho4, to the coronation of King Solomon5. On Rosh HaShanah in 1945, Chaskel Tydor stood on the deck of a boat, the Carmel mountain range behind him, and blew a shofar for an assembly of young Holocaust survivors like him on their way to Palestine. This shofar was given to him on a death march by a man who said, "Take it… I'm too sick to survive. Maybe you will make it. Take the shofar. Show them that we had a shofar in Auschwitz."6

Even today, when the air raid sirens threaten to drown out the call of the shofar, our brothers and sisters in Israel, at home and on the battlefield, are sounding out that ancient cry which has accompanied our people through history.

The shofar’s broken shvarim and the staccato of its teruah break through our defenses, reminding us of the ways we have been hurt and brought low over this past year. It is the voice of our despair, of all that feels broken or unfinished in our lives. But its prolonged blast of tekiah g’dolah lifts us up, opening our hearts to renewal and our hopes for the new year.

One midrash, from Pirke D’Rav Eliezer, likens the shofar’s sound to the cries of Sarah, Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother. Noting that Sarah’s death in the book of Genesis takes place right after the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, the text imagines that an evil spirit followed Abraham and Isaac up the mountain, watching gleefully as Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son. When God relieved Abraham of this terrible task and provided a ram in Isaac’s place, the midrash imagines that this evil spirit is enraged that Isaac is still alive. Bent on death, he rushes to find Sarah and tells her that Abraham has sacrificed Isaac and that her son is in fact dead. The moment Sarah hears this, she cries out, three times, her voice like three sustained blasts, and then cries again, like the three broken blasts of the shofar. Then her soul leaves her body and she dies.7 Our sages heard in the shofar the unbearable pain of Sarah, our mother, crying for her son.

Our most sacred texts attach special significance to the tears of grieving mothers. In the Bible, King David alters his previous decree because Saul’s concubine, a woman called Rizpah, grieves for her slain children.8 When Hannah weeps for her childlessness, she finally conceives a child.9 The prophet Jeremiah imagines Rachel, the wife of Jacob, standing on the road outside of a destroyed Jerusalem, crying as her people are marched into exile. Her mourning ushers in a message of expectation from the Prophet: “Restrain your voice from weeping,

Your eyes from shedding tears;

…there is hope for your future

—declares GOD:

Your children shall return to their country.”10

In our tradition, the tears of mothers are not only expressions of anguish. They are powerful forces for change. They open the hearts of kings and even move God to act; remarkably, such tears open up new possibilities for our future.

The cries of mothers echo through the generations of our people’s story.

But this year there is something different: a massive collective outpouring of anguish, as countless mothers in Israel are grieving for their children.

The Israeli poet Osnat Eldar wrote this:

Mothers Osnat Eldar
Translated by Heather Silverman, Michael Bohnen, Rachel Korazim

They are gathering at night
One by one
She whose daughter was abducted and her bloodstained picture doesn’t allow her any peace
She whose son fell in battle
She whose children will remain forever in the little safe room in the corner of the house on the kibbutz
She who remained mute on the other end of the line scratching the horrors onto her skin
She who whispered from time to time to him. Or to her
“I love you”
‘I am with you’
I am here
Hello?!
She who wasn’t able to say goodbye
She who is holding onto a fragment of a film clip showing him alive
She who woke up on Shabbat with the knowledge of death germinating within her.
At night, in my darkened room, they are wandering in circles
Drooped shoulders, restless, sleep crazed.
Mothers
If only they could change places with the boy or the girl
Ready for captivity or death
Mothers.
Not yet used to wandering.
They come to me at night
One by one
I am hugging them with compassion, with longing
Absorbing into my body the feelings of guilt, the helplessness, the abyss And caressing in silence the new maternal title
That was forced on them.

All year we have heard the voices of these mothers, and the voices of fathers and families consumed by overwhelming emotion. Grieving parents living in a nightmare imploring the world not to forget their children. This year I hear Ricarda Louk asking the world to help her find Shanni; Liora Argamani praying to see Noah before her death; I hear Rachel Goldberg-Polin lifting up her voice like a shofar, like a prophet of old, on behalf of her beloved son Hirsh, and all those in captivity.

Our mothers are crying out, and their cries shatter our souls. And too often, those cries have been met with silence; too often hearts are unmoved by their suffering. I have witnessed this as a PhD student in seminary classrooms; there the student council last year attempted to bar anyone who identifies as a zionist from speaking on campus; and at my own family dinners, when my sister and I just can’t seem to find common ground.

In the midst of our grief and the increasingly polarized world in which we live, I find one unusual midrash especially challenging this year. Our Sages are discussing how exactly the shofar should sound. Remarkably, they turn to a verse in the biblical book of Judges, describing the death of Sisera, a Canaanite general who has been slain by the Israelite heroine Yael. The verse says that Sisera’s mother does not know that he is already dead. Instead, she waits by the window, wailing and lamenting as she wonders whether her son will come home from battle.11 And the Sages of the Talmud say, “That is how the shofar should sound.” It should sound like the weeping of Sisera’s mother.12

Think about this: Our Sages hear the pain and longing of a non-Israelite woman, a woman on the other side of the conflict in the sound of the shofar. They hear her broken sighs in the shevarim; her prolonged cries in the tekiah; her breathless gasping for air in the staccato notes of the teruah.13 And they ask us to put ourselves inside that pain and longing, to hear it in our shofar calls at the turning of the year. Somehow they are able to see beyond the rubble and smoke of the battlefield and perceive the suffering of others—even their enemy.

In the sound of the shofar, our rabbis hear and hold the pain and humanity of both Sarah and Sisera’s mother, two women grieving for their children.

It is so easy for me to look at my beautiful one-year-old redhead and see Kfir Bibas, to look at my four-year-old wearing a superhero costume and see Kfir’s older brother Ariel in his Batman t-shirt. But it has not been so easy for me to meet the challenge posed by our Sages. Maybe it’s because the pain is too much to bear. This year I am atoning for my own inability to hear the cries of both peoples in the sound of the shofar; to hold the dignity, humanity, and hopes of all the innocents caught up in this terrible conflict.

Here is a voice that is hard, but important to hear: a poem called “Between Birth and Dust,” by the Gazan poet Huda Skaik:14

In Gaza, Mohammad sought to register
the birth of his twins Asser and Ayssel,
only three days old, their names full of light.

Jumana, their mother, held them close
dreaming of a life yet to unfold.
Her hands had imagined their futures

but the sky exploded in a rage of missiles.
In an instant the house was a tomb.
The dreams she had nurtured became dust,

her twins, tiny flickers, extinguished.
Mohammad survived, his world shattered.
He walked from one form to another,

from birth certificate to death certificate,
less than ten minutes apart. Three days of life
shouldn’t end so abruptly. But war consumes,

it doesn’t wait for moments to ripen,
for dreams to bloom. In that stark space
between the birth certificate and the death

lies

the shattered pulse of a father

and the silenced songs of a new mother.

On the two sacred days of Rosh Hashanah, our Sages chose two stories for the Jewish people to hear, from chapters 21 and 22 of Genesis. Each chapter tells the story of a son of Abraham who is placed in mortal danger and then saved at the last minute. One son is Isaac, born to Sarah, who carries the line of the covenant of the Jewish people; the other son is Ishmael, born to Hagar, who will become the ancestor of the Arab people. On Rosh Hashanah, we are asked to hold the pain of both stories, and also to witness the hope that blossoms from both stories—hope for a better future.

When Hagar is cast out of Abraham and Sarah’s house, we wander with her in the wilderness; we sit with her as she lays Ishmael down and begins mourning his short life. Hagar is the first mother depicted in the Torah as weeping for a child. As she begins to cry, she hears the call of God’s messenger, who lifts her downcast eyes to the nearby well, and reaffirms the promise that a great nation will come from her son, Ishmael.

On the precipice of a new year, our tradition asks us to do something extraordinary, something that seems nearly impossible in today’s world. They ask us to hold the pain and the promise of two peoples. They ask us to try, as best we can, to cultivate our ability to hear, and to hold another people’s pain and their future alongside our own.

One more short poem to lead us into the new year, by Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha.

“They ask him, do you have plans in Gaza?”

He says, “the bombs have contaminated the soil there.”

They say, no we asked you if you have plans, not plants, for the future in Gaza.

He says, Plans are plants.

A future ripe with blessing, the poet tells us, is ours to imagine, but only if nurture it into being.

God, in this new year, please bring our brothers and sisters, who have been held hostage for 364 days in Gaza, out of captivity. Deliver them to their families. Help our voices cry out like the shofar until they are home, until all of our brothers and sisters in Israel are safe. As you did for Abraham and Hagar, point our eyes toward a new way forward. And because plans are like plants, seed within each of us, the hope and the promise of a better future for all people.

Shofar blast, Teruah

 
1Isaiah 27:13
2
Rabbi Saul Lieberman in: Philip Goodman. The Rosh Hashanah Anthology. The Jewish Publication Society, 2018.
3
Lev. 25: 9-10
4
Joshua 6:20
5
1 Kings 1:34
6
www.proquest.com
7Pirke D’Rav Eliezer 32
8
2 Samuel 21:1-14
9
1 Samuel 1:9-28
10Jeremiah 31:16-17
11
Judges 5:28
12Rosh HaShana 33b
13Rashi on RH 33b
14
https://wearenotnumbers.org/between-birth-and-dust/


Watch our sermon above or on Youtube, listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or read the transcript above.


 
Sermons
Sermons

October 3, 2024

Hearing The Cry of the Shofar in the New Year (Rosh HaShanah 5785)

Hilly Haber

Hearing The Cry of the Shofar in the New Year
Rabbi Hilly Haber, Rosh HaShanah 5785

Shofar blast, Teruah

The sound of the shofar takes us back to Sinai—to the moment when Torah was given. It takes us forward into the future, when the prophet Isaiah imagined that its blast will summon us from exile to gather again in the land of Israel.1This sound reverberates across the centuries. It is a call to war and to worship, to freedom and deliverance; a warning cry, an alarm to rouse us from spiritual and ethical slumber. One shattering note holds history and hope, the beauty and pain of the entire Jewish story, “a prayer without words.”2

Echoing across years, across continents, stories of the shofar’s blast carry us from the joy of the biblical jubilee year3, to the battle of Jericho4, to the coronation of King Solomon5. On Rosh HaShanah in 1945, Chaskel Tydor stood on the deck of a boat, the Carmel mountain range behind him, and blew a shofar for an assembly of young Holocaust survivors like him on their way to Palestine. This shofar was given to him on a death march by a man who said, "Take it… I'm too sick to survive. Maybe you will make it. Take the shofar. Show them that we had a shofar in Auschwitz."6

Even today, when the air raid sirens threaten to drown out the call of the shofar, our brothers and sisters in Israel, at home and on the battlefield, are sounding out that ancient cry which has accompanied our people through history.

The shofar’s broken shvarim and the staccato of its teruah break through our defenses, reminding us of the ways we have been hurt and brought low over this past year. It is the voice of our despair, of all that feels broken or unfinished in our lives. But its prolonged blast of tekiah g’dolah lifts us up, opening our hearts to renewal and our hopes for the new year.

One midrash, from Pirke D’Rav Eliezer, likens the shofar’s sound to the cries of Sarah, Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother. Noting that Sarah’s death in the book of Genesis takes place right after the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, the text imagines that an evil spirit followed Abraham and Isaac up the mountain, watching gleefully as Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son. When God relieved Abraham of this terrible task and provided a ram in Isaac’s place, the midrash imagines that this evil spirit is enraged that Isaac is still alive. Bent on death, he rushes to find Sarah and tells her that Abraham has sacrificed Isaac and that her son is in fact dead. The moment Sarah hears this, she cries out, three times, her voice like three sustained blasts, and then cries again, like the three broken blasts of the shofar. Then her soul leaves her body and she dies.7 Our sages heard in the shofar the unbearable pain of Sarah, our mother, crying for her son.

Our most sacred texts attach special significance to the tears of grieving mothers. In the Bible, King David alters his previous decree because Saul’s concubine, a woman called Rizpah, grieves for her slain children.8 When Hannah weeps for her childlessness, she finally conceives a child.9 The prophet Jeremiah imagines Rachel, the wife of Jacob, standing on the road outside of a destroyed Jerusalem, crying as her people are marched into exile. Her mourning ushers in a message of expectation from the Prophet: “Restrain your voice from weeping,

Your eyes from shedding tears;

…there is hope for your future

—declares GOD:

Your children shall return to their country.”10

In our tradition, the tears of mothers are not only expressions of anguish. They are powerful forces for change. They open the hearts of kings and even move God to act; remarkably, such tears open up new possibilities for our future.

The cries of mothers echo through the generations of our people’s story.

But this year there is something different: a massive collective outpouring of anguish, as countless mothers in Israel are grieving for their children.

The Israeli poet Osnat Eldar wrote this:

Mothers Osnat Eldar
Translated by Heather Silverman, Michael Bohnen, Rachel Korazim

They are gathering at night
One by one
She whose daughter was abducted and her bloodstained picture doesn’t allow her any peace
She whose son fell in battle
She whose children will remain forever in the little safe room in the corner of the house on the kibbutz
She who remained mute on the other end of the line scratching the horrors onto her skin
She who whispered from time to time to him. Or to her
“I love you”
‘I am with you’
I am here
Hello?!
She who wasn’t able to say goodbye
She who is holding onto a fragment of a film clip showing him alive
She who woke up on Shabbat with the knowledge of death germinating within her.
At night, in my darkened room, they are wandering in circles
Drooped shoulders, restless, sleep crazed.
Mothers
If only they could change places with the boy or the girl
Ready for captivity or death
Mothers.
Not yet used to wandering.
They come to me at night
One by one
I am hugging them with compassion, with longing
Absorbing into my body the feelings of guilt, the helplessness, the abyss And caressing in silence the new maternal title
That was forced on them.

All year we have heard the voices of these mothers, and the voices of fathers and families consumed by overwhelming emotion. Grieving parents living in a nightmare imploring the world not to forget their children. This year I hear Ricarda Louk asking the world to help her find Shanni; Liora Argamani praying to see Noah before her death; I hear Rachel Goldberg-Polin lifting up her voice like a shofar, like a prophet of old, on behalf of her beloved son Hirsh, and all those in captivity.

Our mothers are crying out, and their cries shatter our souls. And too often, those cries have been met with silence; too often hearts are unmoved by their suffering. I have witnessed this as a PhD student in seminary classrooms; there the student council last year attempted to bar anyone who identifies as a zionist from speaking on campus; and at my own family dinners, when my sister and I just can’t seem to find common ground.

In the midst of our grief and the increasingly polarized world in which we live, I find one unusual midrash especially challenging this year. Our Sages are discussing how exactly the shofar should sound. Remarkably, they turn to a verse in the biblical book of Judges, describing the death of Sisera, a Canaanite general who has been slain by the Israelite heroine Yael. The verse says that Sisera’s mother does not know that he is already dead. Instead, she waits by the window, wailing and lamenting as she wonders whether her son will come home from battle.11 And the Sages of the Talmud say, “That is how the shofar should sound.” It should sound like the weeping of Sisera’s mother.12

Think about this: Our Sages hear the pain and longing of a non-Israelite woman, a woman on the other side of the conflict in the sound of the shofar. They hear her broken sighs in the shevarim; her prolonged cries in the tekiah; her breathless gasping for air in the staccato notes of the teruah.13 And they ask us to put ourselves inside that pain and longing, to hear it in our shofar calls at the turning of the year. Somehow they are able to see beyond the rubble and smoke of the battlefield and perceive the suffering of others—even their enemy.

In the sound of the shofar, our rabbis hear and hold the pain and humanity of both Sarah and Sisera’s mother, two women grieving for their children.

It is so easy for me to look at my beautiful one-year-old redhead and see Kfir Bibas, to look at my four-year-old wearing a superhero costume and see Kfir’s older brother Ariel in his Batman t-shirt. But it has not been so easy for me to meet the challenge posed by our Sages. Maybe it’s because the pain is too much to bear. This year I am atoning for my own inability to hear the cries of both peoples in the sound of the shofar; to hold the dignity, humanity, and hopes of all the innocents caught up in this terrible conflict.

Here is a voice that is hard, but important to hear: a poem called “Between Birth and Dust,” by the Gazan poet Huda Skaik:14

In Gaza, Mohammad sought to register
the birth of his twins Asser and Ayssel,
only three days old, their names full of light.

Jumana, their mother, held them close
dreaming of a life yet to unfold.
Her hands had imagined their futures

but the sky exploded in a rage of missiles.
In an instant the house was a tomb.
The dreams she had nurtured became dust,

her twins, tiny flickers, extinguished.
Mohammad survived, his world shattered.
He walked from one form to another,

from birth certificate to death certificate,
less than ten minutes apart. Three days of life
shouldn’t end so abruptly. But war consumes,

it doesn’t wait for moments to ripen,
for dreams to bloom. In that stark space
between the birth certificate and the death

lies

the shattered pulse of a father

and the silenced songs of a new mother.

On the two sacred days of Rosh Hashanah, our Sages chose two stories for the Jewish people to hear, from chapters 21 and 22 of Genesis. Each chapter tells the story of a son of Abraham who is placed in mortal danger and then saved at the last minute. One son is Isaac, born to Sarah, who carries the line of the covenant of the Jewish people; the other son is Ishmael, born to Hagar, who will become the ancestor of the Arab people. On Rosh Hashanah, we are asked to hold the pain of both stories, and also to witness the hope that blossoms from both stories—hope for a better future.

When Hagar is cast out of Abraham and Sarah’s house, we wander with her in the wilderness; we sit with her as she lays Ishmael down and begins mourning his short life. Hagar is the first mother depicted in the Torah as weeping for a child. As she begins to cry, she hears the call of God’s messenger, who lifts her downcast eyes to the nearby well, and reaffirms the promise that a great nation will come from her son, Ishmael.

On the precipice of a new year, our tradition asks us to do something extraordinary, something that seems nearly impossible in today’s world. They ask us to hold the pain and the promise of two peoples. They ask us to try, as best we can, to cultivate our ability to hear, and to hold another people’s pain and their future alongside our own.

One more short poem to lead us into the new year, by Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha.

“They ask him, do you have plans in Gaza?”

He says, “the bombs have contaminated the soil there.”

They say, no we asked you if you have plans, not plants, for the future in Gaza.

He says, Plans are plants.

A future ripe with blessing, the poet tells us, is ours to imagine, but only if nurture it into being.

God, in this new year, please bring our brothers and sisters, who have been held hostage for 364 days in Gaza, out of captivity. Deliver them to their families. Help our voices cry out like the shofar until they are home, until all of our brothers and sisters in Israel are safe. As you did for Abraham and Hagar, point our eyes toward a new way forward. And because plans are like plants, seed within each of us, the hope and the promise of a better future for all people.

Shofar blast, Teruah

 
1Isaiah 27:13
2
Rabbi Saul Lieberman in: Philip Goodman. The Rosh Hashanah Anthology. The Jewish Publication Society, 2018.
3
Lev. 25: 9-10
4
Joshua 6:20
5
1 Kings 1:34
6
www.proquest.com
7Pirke D’Rav Eliezer 32
8
2 Samuel 21:1-14
9
1 Samuel 1:9-28
10Jeremiah 31:16-17
11
Judges 5:28
12Rosh HaShana 33b
13Rashi on RH 33b
14
https://wearenotnumbers.org/between-birth-and-dust/


Watch our sermon above or on Youtube, listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or read the transcript above.