D’Var Torah
5785 (October 3, 2024) Rosh HaShannah I
Rabbi Micah Friedman
Shanah Tovah!
It is wonderful to be here with you all to celebrate this new year of 5785.
In preparing for this day together, I have felt heavily the weight of the fact that this past year 5784 has been an incredibly challenging one for the Jewish people. And, in different but related ways, it has also been a challenging year for all Americans.
In light of this reality, I would like to invite us to turn to the practices of Rosh Hashanah and the following holy days, as spiritual tools of resilience. The central mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah – listening to the Shofar – can help us to practice and strengthen G0dly capacities which are inherent to the human soul: namely, crying out from the depths of our hearts and listening compassionately to the cries of others. Both of these capacities – crying out and listening – are deeply necessary in our day and age and can help us meet the uncertainty of the year ahead with resilience and wholeheartedness.
Before sharing more about how I suggest we understand our sounding of the shofar today as a practice of simultaneously crying out and listening compassionately, and at the risk of providing an unnecessary recap of this year’s events, I feel I should mention some of what is undoubtedly weighing on all of our hearts.
We find ourselves today 361 days since the horrific attack of October 7th in which hundreds of men, women, and children were cruelly killed and 251 people taken captive as hostages in Gaza. Today, 101 of those hostages are still unaccounted for and the State of Israel continues to be in a state of war with Hamas in Gaza and increasingly with Hezbollah in Lebanon and even directly with Iran. The human costs of this war has been heartwrenching with more than a thousand Israelis killed and tens of thousands of Palestinians killed and a political path towards sustainable peace continuing to elude us. Today, after this week’s ballistic missile attack from Iran, it seems clearer to me than ever that we do not know where this war is headed.
As American Jews, our heart-wrenching experience of the war has been amplified by how the American public conversation about the war has played a significant role in the larger public conversation about the future of this country in an election year when almost everyone across the political map seems to be in agreement that the stakes are quite high.
These events have unearthed within our own American society a deep and disturbing degree of misunderstanding, intolerance, and even hatred of the State of Israel and of Jews that has shocked so many of us. Even those of us who may not have felt surprised by this unearthing of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment, have surely been deeply disturbed by some of what we’ve witnessed this year.
To put it simply, our hearts have been constantly swollen with concern and fear.
So, this only underscores the importance of my question for us today: how can we understand and relate to the rituals of Rosh HaShanah as practices that can help us to navigate this difficult reality? How can being here today to whisper, sing and shout in prayer as we sound the shofar help us to meet the year ahead along with all of our concern and uncertainty?
To begin with, we can see that one of the central themes of the Torah that we turn to on Rosh haShanah is about G-d’s great, powerful, transformative capacity for compassionate listening.
In the Haftarah today, G-d listens to the voice of Hannah as she prays frantically and passionately and fulfills her request for a child of her own. In the Torah portion, our reading begins with G-d’s taking note of Sarah’s quiet suffering as she yearned deeply for a child of her own. Then, the parsha demonstrates that G-d also listens to the cry of Yishmael and responds with compassion to the hunger and thirst of Hagar and Yishmael. 3 times today we read of G-d’s characteristic capacity to listen to the concerns of the human heart and to respond with compassion.
These stories are far from unique. Rather, this theme reverberates throughout our tradition and implies (or perhaps commands) that we too attune our ears to be able to hear the cries (both full-throated and whispered) of others.
In Psalm 145 we read:
קָר֣וֹב יְ֭ה לְכׇל־קֹרְאָ֑יו לְכֹ֤ל אֲשֶׁ֖ר יִקְרָאֻ֣הוּ בֶֽאֱמֶֽת׃
Close is HaShem to all who call out to G-d – to all who truly call out
In Psalm 34, we read:
קָר֣וֹב יְ֭ה לְנִשְׁבְּרֵי־לֵ֑ב וְֽאֶת־דַּכְּאֵי־ר֥וּחַ יוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃
Close is Hashem to the broken-hearted – G-d delivers those crushed in spirit
In the book Shemot, the entire process of Yetziat Mitzrayim – of redemption from slavery in Egypt – is set in motion because the children of Israel cry out from their suffering and G-d listens to their cry and takes note.
In the book of Devarim 11:22, we are commanded:
“to love YHWH your God, to walk in his ways and to cling to G-d” and Rashi in the name of the midrash teaches that this means that “just as G-d is merciful, so we should be merciful, just as G-d acts with compassion, so too we should act with compassion.”
The implication here is clear – Jewish tradition requires of us that we listen compassionately to the suffering of others and respond with compassion.
However, at a time when we ourselves are filled with fear and concern, this extension of empathy may seem out of reach to us. In fact I have heard as much from more than one rabbi over the course of this past year.
- Perhaps, we wish we could truly open our hearts to the suffering and pain of others, but find ourselves entirely focused on the suffering of our own.
- Or perhaps, we feel that truly hearing the cries of others would not be strategic, and would undermine our efforts to support those people who need our support to fight the good fight.
This emotional response is understandable and I imagine we have all been there before. However, our tradition offers us the cry of the Shofar as a spiritual tool for transcending this limited dimension of thought and feeling. Through the wordless wail of the shofar we can make room even for the suffering of those people who are certainly our enemies.
In the Talmudic discussion in Masechet Rosh HaShanah about how to sound the Shofar, the wailing sound of the shofar – for which this day is named Yom Truah – is associated with the weeping of the mother of an enemy Philistine general. In the book of Shoftim (Judges), we encounter a story in which the heroic Devorah leads an army to victory against the forces of a powerful general named Sisera. Sisera escapes the battlefield – only to be slain by the cunning Yael. When Devorah learns of Yael’s actions, she erupts into a victorious song celebrating their triumph in which she imagines Sisera’s mother weeping at the window as she waits for her son to return from war:
בְּעַד֩ הַחַלּ֨וֹן נִשְׁקְפָ֧ה וַתְּיַבֵּ֛ב אֵ֥ם סִֽיסְרָ֖א
Through the window she looked out and wailed
Va’Teyabev – and she wailed – becomes a prooftext for the halakhic opinion that our Shofar should sound like Yevavah – wailing. In other words, when we sound the Shofar in the wailing way in which we have since antiquity – we are meant to call to mind the weeping mother of an enemy general.
Now, it is the case that his midrash was composed generations after the actual war with Sisera and his army. Yet, the spiritual and moral implication is clear: It is incumbent upon us to make room in our hearts, minds, and souls to be able to listen to the cries of all humanity. It is our spiritual and moral responsibility to create room even for the weeping of those who might wish us dead or defeated.
This ethical vision of the ancient rabbis is bold and daring. Not only must we hear the cries of others, but as we ourselves sound the shofar we are giving voice to both the suffering and the insistent yearning for a better life that motivates all human beings.
When I visited Israel in July, I attended a class given by Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman – president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. In his talk, Rabbi Hartman articulated the voice within him that says “now is not the time for empathy with our enemies” and he insisted that the moral integrity of the Jewish people depends on our continued effort to see and celebrate the humanity of Palestinians. Speaking to a group of hundreds of rabbis and jewish professionals from throughout the diaspora, Rabbi Hartman charged us with taking up this mantle of empathy for others in a way that feels inaccessible to him as he stocks up on canned foods and maintains constant readiness to run to a bomb shelter.
So, today, I echo this charge to you all. As we sound the shofar in Musaf, may we hear in the wailing of the Shofar the echoes of both our cries and the cries of others – even our enemies.
In a sense, whenever we open a prayer book we are engaged in a daring act of empathy. When we sing together the words of the Machzor – words written by Jews who lived in very different times and places then our own – we embody an understanding that our yearning for better lives and a better world springs forth from the same foundational drive of the human spirit.
In this way, the central traditional ritual practices of Rosh haShanah – sounding the shofar and reading the words of our predecessors – can be understood as practices of cultivating our capacity both to listen with true empathy and to give voice to the deepest yearnings of our hearts and souls.
We do not know what this new year has in store for us, our families, the Jewish people, or the world. We can be certain, however, unfortunately, that there will be many difficult challenges ahead and that people will continue to advocate for drastically different agendas for the future.
If we are able to open our hearts to the call of the Shofar – then we will be better suited to engage with others in a way that is open-hearted and whole-hearted – that preserves our own moral integrity even in the face of others ethical failings.
The radical vision of empathetic listening and crying which emerges from the Torah and Midrash can also help us to understand – and more importantly to bring our hearts into – the religious vision of the Musaf Amidah that we are preparing to recite together. The central component is the quoting of verses which clearly look forward to a world in which “all inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth” will hear the sound of the shofar.
- This shared experience is necessary for the true, complete peace for which we pray every day.
The process starts with our own listening and crying out – together – in genuine prayer.
As we prepare to sound the Shofar again in Musaf – the blasts of the Shofar which are understood to be the most important – may we practice and strengthen these G0dly capacities of the human soul: namely, crying out from the depths of our hearts and listening compassionately to the cries of others.
L’Shanah Tovah Tikateivu! May we be written for a good year.