Before there was Rosh HaShannah, before these early fall days were known as the High Holy Days, before we had formed the habit of calling the first day of the month Tishre the Jewish New Year and the birthday of the world, the biblical name for this holiday was yom teruah, the day of sounding the shofar. The shofar is what is unique about today's service. Oh, the prayers are longer and some of the words are different, but those are matters of degree. The sounding of the shofar is what is unique and special about today.
And that's important, because while the prayers of the Rosh HaShannah service are addressed to God, the sound of the shofar is meant for us to hear. It's a wake-up call, an alarm clock, as if God were saying to us Don't just plead with Me for a year of life. I'm giving you life; what are you doing with it?
Zachreinu I'hayyim, melech hafetz ba-hayyim, remember us for life, O King who desires life... or maybe the prayer means Remind us to live, O God who cherishes life and wants His creatures to live. Remind us of what it feels like to be truly alive, because we feel it sometimes and we forget it so often. We pray for life, but so often we drift through life, sleepwalking through our days, and we need the alarm clock shrillness of the shofar to wake us out of our stupor.
In that lovely little book that's become a number one best-seller, Tuesdays With Morrie, the account of a Brandeis University graduate who goes back to visit his favorite professor who is dying, the professor has this to say: So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community, and devote yourself to creating something.
What is the sound of the shofar? The first call of the shofar is tekiah, the summons to human connections. There is a verse in the Torah, in the Book of Numbers (10:7), that says: When you want to bring people together, sound the tekiah. And it is through connecting with other people that we bring life to our existence. You can't be a Jew all by yourself. You need other Jews, you need a minyan, you need a congregation. And you can't be a fully realized human being all by yourself, cutting yourself off from others, judging them, rejecting them, withdrawing from them, plotting to use them but never really connecting with them.
There is perhaps no time that we feel as alive as when we discover that somebody loves us. It's one of those moments you never forget. The whole world is different. Colors are brighter, sunshine is warmer. Think of that classic movie scene of Gene Kelly singing in the rain, not minding the rain and the puddles that the rest of us complain about, because he's in love. Being loved validates our lives, because human beings were not meant to live in isolation. We were meant to share our lives with others. When Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian, would be asked "Where is God?", Buber was wise enough not to give the cliche answer "God is everywhere, or to claim that God is found in synagogues, in churches, in holy people. Buber would say God is found in relationships. We realize our humanity, we become convinced that God is real, when we connect with other people.
We feel so good, so alive when we know that we are loved, but we so soon come to take it for granted. It's a miracle, but because we live with it every day, we soon stop seeing the miraculous nature of it. In the same way that we get on an airplane and instead of marveling at the fact that we can fly safely at 600 miles an hour, we complain about the food, the crowding, the delays, --in that same way we come home to our families and instead of marveling at the fact that we have families to come home to, that there are people who belong to us, who want to share their lives with us, we shrug, we find fault, we take them for granted. That's why we need the tekiah, the blast of the shofar, to remind us of how blessed we are to be surrounded by people who care about us.
I should emphasize that when I talk about the joy of knowing that you are loved, I don't mean to limit it to the love between a husband and a wife. There are many people
today who don't have spouses. Some are single, some are widowed, some are divorced. But I would hope that there is no one here who can't look at his or her life and find people who cherish you, who care about you. And we realize that is what makes our lives worthwhile.
We pray to God for a year of life, and God says to us: "What is it you're asking for? Is it only a year of survival, a year of eating and sleeping and watching television and paying your bills?" Or is it a year of feeling alive, relishing every day, recapturing that sense of wonderous that you remember from times when you realized that someone liked you, cherishing the miracle that there are people in your life who belong to you?
Tekiah, the shofar sounds its wake-up call, reminding us to live, to stop taking for granted the miraculous fact that people like us, tolerate us, care about us. It summons us to love them and to bless them for loving us.
The second call of the shofar is shevarim, the broken note, the plaintive articulation of all the brokenness in our lives, the bereavements and the disappointments, the people taken from us whom we miss at this season and throughout the year, the dreams that didn't work out and will probably never work out. Shevarim, the broken note, issuing from and echoing in a thousand broken hearts.
How can the sound of grieving and disappointment be a call to life? First, because death and the fear of death teach us that preciousness of life. Just last week, I was speaking in Cleveland at an event organized by a local hospice. As part of the program, a hospice volunteer spoke of what working with people at the end of their lives has taught her. She said "Preparing people for death has taught me the preciousness of life, how I have to be grateful for every day I have".
How often do we find ourselves plodding through our daily routines, and suddenly a phone call tells us of someone we care about being taken ill, being hospitalized, getting a bad report on a biopsy. It jolts us out of our routine and reminds us of what is truly important. And we, whose days were so busy and so full of obligations, manage to find time to do what we realize we have to do.
It is only because life is precious that death is tragic. Otherwise death would just be a statistic, the way of all flesh. The message that cries out to us from the empty seats at our holiday tables is that life is too short to be petty, life is too precious to be squandered, life is too fragile to be handled thoughtlessly. Some people look at the world we live in and say: Life is uncertain, so what's the point of living? What’s the point of taking it seriously when the more seriously you take it, the more likely it is to break your heart? But Judaism would teach us to say: Life is uncertain, so cherish every day you have. Take no day for granted. Don't put off the good deed, the kind word, the phone call of reconciliation. There is no guarantee that what you don't do today will be there for you to do tomorrow.
Over the years, I've heard many explanations of the Mourners' Kaddish, what it means and why we say it. But this summer, I ran across one I had never heard before. As you know, the Mourners Kaddish is not about death. It's not about mourning. It's a prayer that praises God for the world that God has given us. And one commentator suggests that we ask the mourners to recite it to emphasize gratitude for the person's life rather than grief for the person's absence. It's the life that mattered; the death was only punctuation. Shevarim, the cry of the broken heart, is a tribute to life, to how much a single life can mean, not a lament for death.
That's one of the messages from the shofar sound of shevarim. But there is another. Kahlil Gibran has a line in his little book The Prophet, the deeper a groove sorrow carves in you, the more joy you can contain. And that hassidic master the Kotzker Rebbe used to say there is nothing as whole as a broken heart. It is through pain and heartbreak that we learn how to feel. When our hearts break, they create an opening for all sorts of emotion to rush in. When our souls purge themselves of old hopes and dreams that never happened, they create a space for new dreams, new dimensions of self-understanding. The heart that refuses to break has become so calloused that it's immune to all feeling.
One of the saddest things you have taught me over the thirty years that I served here is how hard it is for so many of you to celebrate. So many people know how to have fun, but don't know how to elevate it to the experience of joy, the kind of feeling that makes life worthwhile and leaves us feeling empty and cheated when we can't achieve it. I remember a story that came out of Israel's victory in the Six Day War in June of 1967. One of the first Israeli soldiers to liberate the Old City of Jerusalem and stand at the Kotel, the Western Wall, told a reporter afterward "For the first time in my life, I wanted to pray and I didn't know how". I would be reminded of that story several times a year when I was Rabbi of this congregation.
The parents of a 13-year-old boy or girl would plan the Bar Mitzvah, and for maybe the first time in their lives, they want to celebrate. They want to express their gratitude to God for having successfully brought a child to this milestone. And they don't know how. So for the Bar Mitzvah, they plan a party, and maybe it has a football theme or a soccer theme or a ballerina theme. But there is nothing about a child taking his or her first steps into adolescent responsibility. There is nothing about the moral demands that young person will soon be facing, and how the parents feel about letting their child enter that world without them. There is nothing about the parents standing on the threshold of middle age, now that they have a teenager (nothing will age a parent faster than that), and depending on this child for their immortality, to continue what their lives have been about. And when it is over, there are a lot of presents to sort out and a lot of bills to pay and a lot of people saying we had a wonderful time, but there is no sense that a once-in-a-lifetime transition has just taken place. There was no sense that the parents were alive to the miracle of a child turning a corner in his or her life.
The parents of a bride plan a wedding, and because their souls are so inexperienced at celebrating, because they want to feel something special but don't have the emotional vocabulary to do that, what do they do? They hire the loudest band they can find, so that they will never find themselves alone with their inarticulate souls in the silence.
That helps me understand the phenomenon of teenage girls going to see the move Titanic fourteen or fifteen times. They don't go for the movie; they must know the movie by heart by now. They go in order to cry, because only when they cry can they be sure they are alive. I've had so many teenagers tell me they must be terrible people because they loved their grandparents but they didn't cry at their grandmother's funeral. That's why we need shevarim, to summon us to life, to move us to take off the armor and let ourselves feel.
For all those families who are planning a Bar Mitzvah this year, for all those looking forward to a wedding, for those fortunate couples who will be making a 25th or a 50th wedding anniversary, God pleads with us: Let the sound of the shofar, the broken notes of shevarim, break open your hearts, pierce the protective armor that spares you from feeling. Let the joy flow into your unprotected hearts, and be reminded of what it feels like to be alive and to thank God that you are.
The third of the shofar's notes, teruah, is understood to be the proclamation of God's sovereignty, hailing God as ruler of the world, like the herald's trumpets that announce the king, like the Marine band playing Hail to the Chief. Now the theme of God's sovereignty, the idea that God rules the world, is a major part of our Rosh HaShannah prayers, and it operates at two very different levels. Sometimes the pronouncement that God is King asks us to bow in awe of the divine majesty. In just a few minutes, when we turn back to the prayerbook and resume the service, we will open the Ark, and the Cantor and I, as surrogates for the congregation, will bow before the awesome majesty of God. That's one dimension of it.
The second is in some ways the opposite of the first. We look out at this world and it doesn't look like God is in charge of it. We see hurricanes and earthquakes and tidal waves. We read about high school students murdering their classmates, and armies on four of the seven continents carrying out mass murders as if the lessons of the Holocaust had never been learned. We see disease and death, crime and poverty. And despite it all, we come to shul on Rosh HaShannah. We sound the shofar and insist that this is God's world. We find meaning amidst the chaos. We find goodness despite the cruelty. We cherish the light instead of cursing the darkness.
I think that's what it means to sound the teruah and proclaim God as ruler of the world. It's not to acknowledge God's greatness; it's to give God the benefit of the doubt. We ask God for so much on Rosh HaShannah. Our Father our King, grant us a year of life and health. Our Father our King, redeem Your people from oppression. Our Father our King, deal kindly with us despite our failings. And God asks only one thing of us in return: that we give God the benefit of the doubt, that we let the wonderful moments of our lives affirm our faith in God's world as readily as we let the terrible moments challenge it.
Often it's hard to believe that this is God's world because there is so much in the headlines that screams against it. But Rosh HaShannah, and the shofar's call of teruah, would ask us to look beyond the headlines. The headlines tell us of a plane crash in Nova Scotia, leaving 211 people dead. The small print tells of hundreds of Canadian fishermen setting out in their boats to look for survivors. The headlines tell of massacres, small scale or large. The small print tells of individual acts of courage, of comfort. The closer we look, the more the presence of God becomes visible.
Teruah asks us in effect to vote for God as sovereign of the world, not because it makes a difference to God whether we vote for Him or not, but because it makes a difference to us, to the way we live, to the way we respond to the good and bad news in the world, whether we see the world as a coherent, meaningful, liveable place or not.
A few years ago, at a lecture I was giving, a woman asked the question: "How can I persuade my 9-year-old son to believe in God?" I told her, If you'll pardon my saying so, that's the wrong question. The issue is not believing in God. You can't talk someone into believing. The question for Jewish parents and Jewish educators is how to teach children to recognize God when they have met Him.
How do you convince children and adults that God is real? Not with philosophical arguments. Rather, teach children that when they are sick and they get better, they have met God. When their favorite foods taste good and nourish their bodies and make them grow and make them strong, God has been active in their lives. When they go outdoors and it's a sunny day and the flowers are blooming and their hearts thrill to the beauty of the world, or when they wake up on a winter morning and there is a cover of clean, un-trodden snow on the ground and they gasp with excitement at the view, they have met God who created a world where such things happen. When they do something wrong and they are caught and forgiven, and they learn that love is not tentative and will not be withdrawn and their souls nearly burst with relief, that is a religious moment. They have met God, who teaches us to love and to forgive.
When we have learned to look at the world and see God's fingerprints all over it, when we have learned to look within ourselves and sense the spirit of God moving us to be good, to be generous, to be compassionate, when we can gather on this day of the autumnal equinox, with exactly twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness, and learn to relish the daylight with gratitude and to welcome the darkness unafraid, then we will know that we are alive.
Zachreinu I'hayyim, melech hafetz ba'hayyim, Remind us to live, O God whodesires life. Remind us of what it feels like to really be alive, to discover anew that there are people love us and care about us and to realize what a miracle that is; to know that we have the strength and resilience to survive the worst that the New Year can possibly bring and the depth of soul to find abundant joy in the best days ahead so we have no reason to be afraid of living into the New Year; and to see the face of God wherever we turn in this world.
Ashrei ha-am yod'ei teruah; Adonai, b'or panecha yehalechun. Happy are the people who know how to hear and understand the message of the shofar, for they shall spend all their days in the presence of God. AMEN.