RH 1 - The Silence of the Shofar
There’s something missing from our services today. Our davening, Torah, and Haftarah have been skillfully led and read, with melody and meaning. So it’s not that. Our community is also similarly present. We’re contributing our voices, our prayers, our hugs and greetings in the hallways as we renew the bonds of our community. It’s not that either. What’s missing, as we know, is the Shofar. Today, we won’t hear its piercing sound, it will not shock us into awareness as it is meant to do.
The lack of Shofar on Shabbat comes from our observance of Shabbat. The Talmud (BT Rosh Hashanah 29b) explains that someone might carry a Shofar from one domain to another, something prohibited on Shabbat in the absence of an eruv. There are very few practices that override Shabbat – and Shofar is not one of them. In order to prevent people from inadvertently infringing on the laws of Shabbat, we don’t sound the Shofar on years when Rosh Hashanah coincides with Shabbat.
Another section of the Talmud (PT Rosh Hashanah 4:1:2) provides textual explanation support, pointing to the two places in the Torah that mention Shofar in conjunction with the new year. In the list of holidays and their sacrifices appearing in the book of B’midbar (29:1), this day is called Yom Teruah, a day of blasts (of the Shofar). In the list of holidays from the book of Vayikra (23:24), this day is called Shabbaton Zikhron Teruah, a sacred day commemorated with blasts (of the Shofar). These slightly different wordings make short work of differentiating between a weekday Rosh Hashanah and a Shabbat Rosh Hashanah. The Sages explain that on weekdays, it is Yom Teruah, when we sound the Shofar. In contrast, on Shabbat, it’s zikhron teruah, a day when we remember the sound of the Shofar without actually using it.
There are, of course, more complex interpretations of the silence we meet instead of the Shofar’s cry. The Shem MiShmuel, Rabbi Shmuel Bornsztain, a hasidic master of the 20th century from Poland, explains today’s missing Shofar as a function of the needs the Shofar is supposed to fulfill. The Shofar is curved, he says (Rosh Hashanah 15), reflecting our crooked, complicated, human selves. The sound of the Shofar is meant to straighten us out, doing the hard work of taming our baser impulses, bringing us more closely in line with our pure, upright desire to be close to God. Shabbat is a day of spiritual harmony and unity, he explains (Rosh Hashanah 2). On Shabbat, we have no need of the Shofar, as the holiness of the day accomplishes on its own what the Shofar pushes us to do by force.
Regardless of any explanation or interpretation of the Shofar’s absence today, the fact remains that Shabbat makes us pause and hear the silence.
It feels appropriate today to let that silence penetrate, to pay attention to the absence of the Shofar, as our community is feeling the absence of our long-time Shofar blower and coordinator, Ida Zakin z”l, who passed away this summer after a valiant battle against cancer. It’s almost like the Jewish calendar arranged itself to allow us a day without Shofar, so that we could honor her memory together.
Ida brought her whole self to the mitzvah of tekiat hashofar. When we reached the Shofar service, she would come to the front of the room with purpose in each step she took. One could see on her face and in her body language that she took the responsibility of sounding the Shofar seriously.
At the same time, Ida also came forward with palpable joy coming off of her in waves. During her illness, she remarkably maintained a relentlessly positive attitude, expressing gratitude at every turn for the blessings in her life and continuing to make opportunities for humor and laughter. Even when things got harder for her, she prioritized making meaningful experiences for and with her loved ones. This was just part of who she was, off the bimah and on it.
What’s more, Ida sounded the shofar with humility. When she came to stand behind the reading table for the Shofar service, she would take off her shoes. This lesser-known custom evokes God’s instruction to Moshe at the burning bush “שַׁל־נְעָלֶיךָ מֵעַל רַגְלֶיךָ,” “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground!” (Exodus 3:5) She approached her task with the understanding that this space, our community, is a holy one, and that it was her job to elevate us even more with the Shofar.
And elevate us she did. Ida’s shofar was like listening to great music. It had a clear, powerful tone, but it was more than just something beautiful. In her shofar, we could hear our lives reflected – our struggles, our celebrations, our grief, our hopes. Her Shofar penetrated straight to the soul.
Ida’s Shofar had duende.
~~~~~~~
The term duende doesn’t have a precise definition in English. As explored by the Spanish poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, we begin to get a feel for what duende is. In a lecture he gave in 1933, “Theory and Play of Duende,” Lorca explains duende as a feeling we can most clearly experience through artistic expression, whether as creators or as the audience. We feel its presence in great works of art, song, and dance.
He says: “And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the duende is followed by…human, tender cries of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real, poetic escape from this world. It almost sounds like ecstasy, but there’s more to duende than unfettered joy.
Duende also imbues us with an awareness of our own mortality. In Lorca’s words, “The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation. With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit.
Something with duende has depth and authenticity. It penetrates the soul because it comes from the soul. It has faced mortality and from that awareness grows to root itself firmly in the world of the living.
The Shofar itself is a conveyor of duende. It is not a finely crafted instrument designed to bring forth sweet melodies. It is a roughly hewn piece of bone that cries out in brokenness. In discussing the various sounds we make with the Shofar, the Talmud describes it as wailing, sobbing. Shevarim, the word we use to describe our blast of three tones, even means broken. The Shofar is meant to speak to our shattered hearts, shatter them a little more, and then make them whole again.
That last part, making our hearts whole again, is the entire point.
~~~~~~~
Over the summer, I read The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig. I picked it up for fun, but soon realized it held much more depth than I expected. In the novel, we meet Grace Winters, a depressed, retired math teacher from England. She receives a surprise bequest from an old friend – a house in Ibiza – and she impulsively picks up and moves there.
Grace comes to the island utterly broken, describing herself as suffering from “anhedonia,” the inability to find pleasure or joy in her life. Her entire self is etched with a mixture of grief and guilt, stemming from losses both recent and long ago in the past. Her days are dull, filled with silence, just as they were in England. Her life remains on pause.
She soon encounters La Presencia, a strange and supernatural phenomenon that serves as a spiritual catalyst, unlocking the minds and hearts of those who come in contact with it. It bestows those it chooses, as Haig says, with duende.
Her experience with La Presencia gives Grace the push she needs to begin engaging with life again. She builds connections with other people, experiences beauty and awe in the world, and becomes passionate about helping others.
Her ability to feel duende doesn’t erase or cause her to forget the darker parts of her life. It’s not the opposite of her struggles; it’s fueled by them. It is because she has known death and deep sadness that her duende is so potent. And once she allows the pain of her past to exist within her and stops trying to suppress it, she becomes open to experiencing the “sublime essence of life, both its tragedy and beauty.”
~~~~~~~
Rosh Hashanah asks us to do something similar. We come to this season fully cognizant of the ways we missed the mark this past year, deeply aware of our mortality. We know that we have these ten days ahead of us to make certain that our teshuvah, our process of repentance and repair, is as thorough as possible.
So many of the words in our maḥzor only serve to underscore the gravity of these days. On the High Holidays, we say the quiet part out loud, wondering who will be granted continued life this coming year and who will not. We ask to remain in God’s good graces, keenly aware that we are not worthy.
Despite these darker themes, we don’t spend the holiday mired in sadness and regret. Instead, we’re meant to enter this new year with sweetness and sincere aspirations. We dip our apples in honey and offer a prayer that this year will be a shanah tovah u’metukah, a good and sweet new year.
On Rosh Hashanah, we hold all of these feelings at the same time. Grief and hope, fear and anticipation coexist, creating the rich emotional landscape of this holiday. Experiencing this emotional roller coaster can be destabilizing; giving voice to all of its ups and downs is even more so. We need to keep all of these competing feelings front of mind in order to do the work that Rosh Hashanah demands of us.
Truthfully, it’s a lot. And we need all the help we can get.
Normally it is the sound of the Shofar that helps us find our footing in that cognitive dissonance. Its powerful notes resonate with both ends of our yuntif emotional spectrum; it hits both the exultation and the remorse, both the outward expression and the turn inward. It serves as our spiritual north star, helping us orient ourselves to where we are and showing the direction we need to go.
When it works its magic in this way, the Shofar generously transfers some of its duende to us.
Today, the Shofar is silent; it cannot provide what we seek. The responsibility for locating duende within ourselves, then, falls entirely to us. How we go about that is an individual pursuit: the way I find my duende might be radically different from how you find yours. But I’ll leave us with two suggestions, guided by what makes this day unique from other Rosh Hashanah days.
My first suggestion for finding duende today is remembrance: As I mentioned a little while ago, the Talmud explains that when Rosh Hashanah coincides with Shabbat, it becomes a day of zikhron teruah, remembering the Shofar. We can sample a taste of duende by holding space for our memories.
Embrace the silence we hear today instead of the Shofar and remember what it has sounded like in the past, how it made you feel, how your response to the Shofar has shifted and changed with time and with the circumstances of your life. Listen for its echoes, recalling those who once stood up on Rosh Hashanah to sound the Shofar and who no longer are here to do so. Borrow from your bank of experiences of the Shofar to prepare yourself for hearing it tomorrow. The Shofar’s duende can also be felt in silence, in our memories.
And my second suggestion: To state the obvious, today is Shabbat. Shabbat is our day of rest, a day to pause, to refrain from doing. When all of our normal occupations and busy-ness are stripped away, we’re left with ourselves and we’re left with our community. One way to move toward duende is to lean into the Shabbat experience. Be fully present, cultivate an awareness of what you bring into the room with you and, if necessary, leave it aside, if just for a little while.
Then notice the incredible community we have here surrounding us. For some of us, Chevrei Tzedek is our most significant experience of the warmth and embrace of community. Others of us are blessed to have multiple communities to participate in and feel at home in many different places. Still others of us are newer to Chevrei Tzedek or are still in the process of finding a way to engage in community that feels just right.
Wherever you are on that journey, community can be a place of encountering duende. When done right, community celebrates with us in our moments of joy and mourns with us in our moments of loss. Community encourages us, stands with us in support and solidarity, walks with us through moments both significant and less so, both public and personal.
Tomorrow, when we finally hear the Shofar’s voice, we won’t just be listening to an ancient ritual instrument. In its teki’ot, the sounds of the Shofar, we will hear the voices of those who came before us; we will feel the complex and sometimes contradictory emotional pulls of this day; we will taste the sweetness of a new beginning. We will enter this New Year with duende.
May we all be inscribed for a good, sweet, year. Shanah tovah.
There’s something missing from our services today. Our davening, Torah, and Haftarah have been skillfully led and read, with melody and meaning. So it’s not that. Our community is also similarly present. We’re contributing our voices, our prayers, our hugs and greetings in the hallways as we renew the bonds of our community. It’s not that either. What’s missing, as we know, is the Shofar. Today, we won’t hear its piercing sound, it will not shock us into awareness as it is meant to do.
The lack of Shofar on Shabbat comes from our observance of Shabbat. The Talmud (BT Rosh Hashanah 29b) explains that someone might carry a Shofar from one domain to another, something prohibited on Shabbat in the absence of an eruv. There are very few practices that override Shabbat – and Shofar is not one of them. In order to prevent people from inadvertently infringing on the laws of Shabbat, we don’t sound the Shofar on years when Rosh Hashanah coincides with Shabbat.
Another section of the Talmud (PT Rosh Hashanah 4:1:2) provides textual explanation support, pointing to the two places in the Torah that mention Shofar in conjunction with the new year. In the list of holidays and their sacrifices appearing in the book of B’midbar (29:1), this day is called Yom Teruah, a day of blasts (of the Shofar). In the list of holidays from the book of Vayikra (23:24), this day is called Shabbaton Zikhron Teruah, a sacred day commemorated with blasts (of the Shofar). These slightly different wordings make short work of differentiating between a weekday Rosh Hashanah and a Shabbat Rosh Hashanah. The Sages explain that on weekdays, it is Yom Teruah, when we sound the Shofar. In contrast, on Shabbat, it’s zikhron teruah, a day when we remember the sound of the Shofar without actually using it.
There are, of course, more complex interpretations of the silence we meet instead of the Shofar’s cry. The Shem MiShmuel, Rabbi Shmuel Bornsztain, a hasidic master of the 20th century from Poland, explains today’s missing Shofar as a function of the needs the Shofar is supposed to fulfill. The Shofar is curved, he says (Rosh Hashanah 15), reflecting our crooked, complicated, human selves. The sound of the Shofar is meant to straighten us out, doing the hard work of taming our baser impulses, bringing us more closely in line with our pure, upright desire to be close to God. Shabbat is a day of spiritual harmony and unity, he explains (Rosh Hashanah 2). On Shabbat, we have no need of the Shofar, as the holiness of the day accomplishes on its own what the Shofar pushes us to do by force.
Regardless of any explanation or interpretation of the Shofar’s absence today, the fact remains that Shabbat makes us pause and hear the silence.
It feels appropriate today to let that silence penetrate, to pay attention to the absence of the Shofar, as our community is feeling the absence of our long-time Shofar blower and coordinator, Ida Zakin z”l, who passed away this summer after a valiant battle against cancer. It’s almost like the Jewish calendar arranged itself to allow us a day without Shofar, so that we could honor her memory together.
Ida brought her whole self to the mitzvah of tekiat hashofar. When we reached the Shofar service, she would come to the front of the room with purpose in each step she took. One could see on her face and in her body language that she took the responsibility of sounding the Shofar seriously.
At the same time, Ida also came forward with palpable joy coming off of her in waves. During her illness, she remarkably maintained a relentlessly positive attitude, expressing gratitude at every turn for the blessings in her life and continuing to make opportunities for humor and laughter. Even when things got harder for her, she prioritized making meaningful experiences for and with her loved ones. This was just part of who she was, off the bimah and on it.
What’s more, Ida sounded the shofar with humility. When she came to stand behind the reading table for the Shofar service, she would take off her shoes. This lesser-known custom evokes God’s instruction to Moshe at the burning bush “שַׁל־נְעָלֶיךָ מֵעַל רַגְלֶיךָ,” “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground!” (Exodus 3:5) She approached her task with the understanding that this space, our community, is a holy one, and that it was her job to elevate us even more with the Shofar.
And elevate us she did. Ida’s shofar was like listening to great music. It had a clear, powerful tone, but it was more than just something beautiful. In her shofar, we could hear our lives reflected – our struggles, our celebrations, our grief, our hopes. Her Shofar penetrated straight to the soul.
Ida’s Shofar had duende.
~~~~~~~
The term duende doesn’t have a precise definition in English. As explored by the Spanish poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, we begin to get a feel for what duende is. In a lecture he gave in 1933, “Theory and Play of Duende,” Lorca explains duende as a feeling we can most clearly experience through artistic expression, whether as creators or as the audience. We feel its presence in great works of art, song, and dance.
He says: “And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the duende is followed by…human, tender cries of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real, poetic escape from this world. It almost sounds like ecstasy, but there’s more to duende than unfettered joy.
Duende also imbues us with an awareness of our own mortality. In Lorca’s words, “The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation. With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit.
Something with duende has depth and authenticity. It penetrates the soul because it comes from the soul. It has faced mortality and from that awareness grows to root itself firmly in the world of the living.
The Shofar itself is a conveyor of duende. It is not a finely crafted instrument designed to bring forth sweet melodies. It is a roughly hewn piece of bone that cries out in brokenness. In discussing the various sounds we make with the Shofar, the Talmud describes it as wailing, sobbing. Shevarim, the word we use to describe our blast of three tones, even means broken. The Shofar is meant to speak to our shattered hearts, shatter them a little more, and then make them whole again.
That last part, making our hearts whole again, is the entire point.
~~~~~~~
Over the summer, I read The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig. I picked it up for fun, but soon realized it held much more depth than I expected. In the novel, we meet Grace Winters, a depressed, retired math teacher from England. She receives a surprise bequest from an old friend – a house in Ibiza – and she impulsively picks up and moves there.
Grace comes to the island utterly broken, describing herself as suffering from “anhedonia,” the inability to find pleasure or joy in her life. Her entire self is etched with a mixture of grief and guilt, stemming from losses both recent and long ago in the past. Her days are dull, filled with silence, just as they were in England. Her life remains on pause.
She soon encounters La Presencia, a strange and supernatural phenomenon that serves as a spiritual catalyst, unlocking the minds and hearts of those who come in contact with it. It bestows those it chooses, as Haig says, with duende.
Her experience with La Presencia gives Grace the push she needs to begin engaging with life again. She builds connections with other people, experiences beauty and awe in the world, and becomes passionate about helping others.
Her ability to feel duende doesn’t erase or cause her to forget the darker parts of her life. It’s not the opposite of her struggles; it’s fueled by them. It is because she has known death and deep sadness that her duende is so potent. And once she allows the pain of her past to exist within her and stops trying to suppress it, she becomes open to experiencing the “sublime essence of life, both its tragedy and beauty.”
~~~~~~~
Rosh Hashanah asks us to do something similar. We come to this season fully cognizant of the ways we missed the mark this past year, deeply aware of our mortality. We know that we have these ten days ahead of us to make certain that our teshuvah, our process of repentance and repair, is as thorough as possible.
So many of the words in our maḥzor only serve to underscore the gravity of these days. On the High Holidays, we say the quiet part out loud, wondering who will be granted continued life this coming year and who will not. We ask to remain in God’s good graces, keenly aware that we are not worthy.
Despite these darker themes, we don’t spend the holiday mired in sadness and regret. Instead, we’re meant to enter this new year with sweetness and sincere aspirations. We dip our apples in honey and offer a prayer that this year will be a shanah tovah u’metukah, a good and sweet new year.
On Rosh Hashanah, we hold all of these feelings at the same time. Grief and hope, fear and anticipation coexist, creating the rich emotional landscape of this holiday. Experiencing this emotional roller coaster can be destabilizing; giving voice to all of its ups and downs is even more so. We need to keep all of these competing feelings front of mind in order to do the work that Rosh Hashanah demands of us.
Truthfully, it’s a lot. And we need all the help we can get.
Normally it is the sound of the Shofar that helps us find our footing in that cognitive dissonance. Its powerful notes resonate with both ends of our yuntif emotional spectrum; it hits both the exultation and the remorse, both the outward expression and the turn inward. It serves as our spiritual north star, helping us orient ourselves to where we are and showing the direction we need to go.
When it works its magic in this way, the Shofar generously transfers some of its duende to us.
Today, the Shofar is silent; it cannot provide what we seek. The responsibility for locating duende within ourselves, then, falls entirely to us. How we go about that is an individual pursuit: the way I find my duende might be radically different from how you find yours. But I’ll leave us with two suggestions, guided by what makes this day unique from other Rosh Hashanah days.
My first suggestion for finding duende today is remembrance: As I mentioned a little while ago, the Talmud explains that when Rosh Hashanah coincides with Shabbat, it becomes a day of zikhron teruah, remembering the Shofar. We can sample a taste of duende by holding space for our memories.
Embrace the silence we hear today instead of the Shofar and remember what it has sounded like in the past, how it made you feel, how your response to the Shofar has shifted and changed with time and with the circumstances of your life. Listen for its echoes, recalling those who once stood up on Rosh Hashanah to sound the Shofar and who no longer are here to do so. Borrow from your bank of experiences of the Shofar to prepare yourself for hearing it tomorrow. The Shofar’s duende can also be felt in silence, in our memories.
And my second suggestion: To state the obvious, today is Shabbat. Shabbat is our day of rest, a day to pause, to refrain from doing. When all of our normal occupations and busy-ness are stripped away, we’re left with ourselves and we’re left with our community. One way to move toward duende is to lean into the Shabbat experience. Be fully present, cultivate an awareness of what you bring into the room with you and, if necessary, leave it aside, if just for a little while.
Then notice the incredible community we have here surrounding us. For some of us, Chevrei Tzedek is our most significant experience of the warmth and embrace of community. Others of us are blessed to have multiple communities to participate in and feel at home in many different places. Still others of us are newer to Chevrei Tzedek or are still in the process of finding a way to engage in community that feels just right.
Wherever you are on that journey, community can be a place of encountering duende. When done right, community celebrates with us in our moments of joy and mourns with us in our moments of loss. Community encourages us, stands with us in support and solidarity, walks with us through moments both significant and less so, both public and personal.
Tomorrow, when we finally hear the Shofar’s voice, we won’t just be listening to an ancient ritual instrument. In its teki’ot, the sounds of the Shofar, we will hear the voices of those who came before us; we will feel the complex and sometimes contradictory emotional pulls of this day; we will taste the sweetness of a new beginning. We will enter this New Year with duende.
May we all be inscribed for a good, sweet, year. Shanah tovah.