Awakening to the Other: Behind the Shofar’s Blast
“Tekiiaaaaa.” Closing your eyes, you take a deep breath. The shofar’s blast pierces through the air, commanding solemn attention. In a moment the vibrations are gone, fleeting as the breath that produced them. You barely noticed the goosebumps covering your forearms.
Despite my nostalgia for the sounds of the shofar, my memories of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah are also tainted by discomfort. Growing up, I struggled to process the intensity of emotion that the shofar blast could elicit. It sometimes felt awkward, even uncomfortable to experience the shock of those sounds in a place as public as our overcrowded sanctuary.
Discomfort is intrinsic to the commandment to hear the shofar. Jewish tradition views the shofar as a spiritual instrument, a tool to guide us towards our inner landscapes. Maimonides wrote that the shofar is like a spiritual alarm, a technology for awakening our souls and enhancing our capacity to achieve understanding and goodness.
The traditional blessing that we recite for the shofar sanctifies the act of listening— lishmoa kol shofar– rather than the act of sounding the instrument. However, to be a passive listener nullifies the commandment to hear the shofar. The Mishnah asks whether the obligation to listen to the shofar has been fulfilled if one merely happens upon the sounds. The Mishnah is clear: one has only fulfilled the obligation if after happening upon the sound, one turns their heart towards heaven.
The type of listening that the shofar requires demands the attention of our hearts, a state of being known as lev shomea. The idea of lev shomea, of listening with the heart, is what underlies the shofar’s power to arouse discomfort in the listener. To hear the shofar is to experience something visceral with our bodies, merely prompted by sound, as opposed to an exercise of discerning precise tones. This idea is found in the Mishnah, where we learn that one cannot truly fulfill the commandment to hear the shofar without having their heart moved.
Each note of the shofar creates a distinct emotional imprint on the listener. According to rabbinic tradition, the shofar exposes us to sounds of suffering that we would normally tune down or treat as background noise. A midrash in the tractate Rosh Hashanah in the Babylonian Talmud tries to distinguish the measures of the teruah from shevarim. The midrash, or rabbinic commentary, is ultimately a debate over the emotive qualities of the noises. One authority proposes that the teruah are like broken blasts or moans; another suggests that the teruot sound like whimpers.
Abaye, one of the Talmud’s interlocutors, cites a line from the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges that describes the enemy general Sisera’s mother anxiously waiting for her son to return from battle against the Israelites. Readers are aware that Sisera has just faced a brutal death at the hands of Yael. His mother is described as whimpering– vatyabev. Abaye links the sound of the teruot (those broken blasts or moans) to this text because yevaba is the Aramaic translation of teruah. But he clearly seeks to bring us to the singular moment that this word appears in the Tanakh.
The Torah is replete with stories of wailing matriarchs. So why are the enemies’ cries the focal point for the rabbis in this midrash? Their choice to identify the teruah with the whimpers of Sisera’s mother is all the more vexing given the well established link between the matriarch Sarah’s grief during the Akedah and the shofar in rabbinic thought.
Abaye understood that holding space for the suffering of our enemies is a more complicated task than grieving for those we may naturally empathize with. Someone who identifies with the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible could naturally perceive Sisera’s mother as an enemy, and might overlook her pain as she cried out. This is all the more plausible given the violent thoughts that Deborah ascribes to her.
Maternal grief has universal reach in the rabbinic imagination; losing a child was seen as the ultimate experience of heartbreak, so profound that even the sounds associated with it were believed to awaken the soul to injustice. The disquieting noise of a parent in the throes of child loss was also thought to arouse the divine rachamim, compassion.
Rather than treating those whimpers as background noise, the rabbis witnessed the grief of the other head on. Through this encounter, the rabbis reckon that the humanity of Sisera’s mother, her vulnerability to love and loss, render her worthy of compassion and witness.
They also ascribed a redemptive quality to her suffering. In some Jewish communities, it is customary to ritually sound the shofar either one-hundred or one-hundred and one times, symbolizing the one-hundred words in the lament of Sisera’s mother. Rabbinic tradition teaches that sounding the shofar brings about God’s compassion on those who suffer unjustly. In my view, this practice is a radical act of t’shuvah, of forgiveness. It asserts that all who suffer are worthy of lev shomea, the attention of our hearts, and that even our most contentious relationships are worthy of repair. That Jewish communities re-enact this ritual each year on Rosh Hashanah means that we have been praying for the redemption of our enemies for centuries.
In the midst of an ongoing war in Israel and Gaza, the connection between an enemy’s distress and our own spiritual awakening is all the more tangible. This Rosh Hashanah, the shofar summons me to wrestle with my responsibility towards the present conflict as an American Jew. The rabbinic lore surrounding Sisera’s mother and the blasts of the shofar has opened my eyes to what t’shuvah means in this moment. Ultimately, the rabbis have taught me that for the sake of my return to wholeness, I must hold those both within and beyond the scope of my immediate identifications. Maimonides teaches that the shofar contains both a decree and an allusion, and I believe the rabbinic tradition teaches that empathy without boundaries underlies the symbolic meaning of this mitzvah.
Rachel Goldberg, the mother of Hersch Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year old Israeli American murdered by Hamas terrorists this past week, refuses to get “swept up in the enticing and delicious world of hatred,” especially hatred of the other. In her poem ‘One Tiny Seed’ she writes:
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
Indeed, a blanket of grief envelops all mothers in Gaza. Sounds of falling bombs, air-raid sirens, and gunfire are punctured by the screams of mothers whose children are starving or lifeless. Pregnant people face unprecedented risk. Like Sarah after the Akedah and Sisera’s mother, parents of captives and mothers in Gaza and might identify with the helplessness of not being able to protect one’s child in the face of imminent danger.
Queer theorist Judith Butler reflects on the political and ethical significance of injury– the fact, as they define it, “that we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another.” According to Butler, this reality affords the insight that our lives fundamentally depend on “anonymous others,” people we may never know or encounter. These reflections on the interdependence of human fate could not ring more true for Israelis and Palestinians today.
Perhaps we must thrust ourselves into contact with suffering that we would be foolish to believe lies beyond the scope of our responsibility. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes: “the shofar is the instrument that sends those cries of pain and sorrow and longing hurtling across the vast distance towards the Other.” The shofar transports us beyond the limitations of our own subjectivities into the unknown. But how far away is the Other when we hear her cries reverberating through the walls of our sanctuaries each Rosh Hashanah? How vast is the distance if we witness the pain of Israelis and Palestinians from our living rooms?
On a daily basis, I am bombarded with images, videos, and first-hand testimonies of the conflict. At the same time, no matter how much information I have access to, the violence is something I cannot know as one would their own experience; I am an American, thousands of miles away from this war. As a Jewish person who is deeply invested in the future of both Jewish and Palestinian sovereignty, it feels impossible to hold all the truths that I am confronted with, yet I feel a duty to try. Sometimes, I notice inconsistencies in my righteous anger, or when my ability to mourn is obfuscated by the pathos of identity politics. I pray that my empathy be universal and capacious. Many of us have faced similar challenges in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th and in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Yet I am reminded that, in the words of Jon Polin, “in a competition of pain, there are no winners.”
As the rabbis of the Talmud demonstrate, pushing the limits of our empathy is central to the holy work of this season, and the story of Sisera’s mother emphasizes that even in conflict we must heed the cries of our enemies. Conflict might even present the most generative ground upon which to pursue lev shomea since our habitual response to conflict tends to be to retreat to the familiar and seek out emotional validation. However, these patterns that we often rely on cannot eschew our fundamental interdependence.
But we are worn down. Still grieving the ongoing slaughter and captivity of our own. Why must we extend our souls towards the Other when our own people are shattered like the broken blasts of shevarim?
Because, as our tradition reminds us, our humanity is at stake. The Book of Genesis teaches of a concept, b’tzelem Elohim, the idea that all beings are created in the image of God. B’tzelem Elohim cannot be suspended or selective.
The rabbis’ decision to weave the sounds of the enemies’ tears into the notes of the shofar, I believe, displays a bold willingness to make legible experiences of loss that lay beyond the realm of what is intuitive, what is comfortable to hear, especially while standing in a storm of conflict. In the process of wrestling with the sounds of her suffering, of listening with their hearts, lev shomea, the rabbis acknowledge the humanity of Sisera’s mother, working against the grain of the text. Rather than denying the relationship between themselves and Sisera’s mother, the rabbis of the Talmud brought their shared humanity into focus by uplifting the universal sounds of her maternal grief.
When you hear the tekia, teruah, and shevarim, may you feel the notes reverberate through all of your being. May you lean into the discomfort and whatever else may arise, trusting that the sounds of the shofar have the power to radically sensitize us to human suffering.
References
“One Tiny Seed,” Rachel Goldberg.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2004.
Strassfeld, Michael. “Traditions for Rosh Ha-Shanah.” In The Jewish Holidays. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1985.
Dani Rader is a first year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College. She earned a BA in Religion from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. A recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Dani holds a Masters in Theological Studies.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
