The shofar speaks in a language that does not have words, is beyond words. It is the soul’s language, somehow mournful, joyous, triumphant and pleading all at once, beyond time and space, eternal, primordial and otherworldly. More powerful than speech in its emotional intensity and impact, it is a mode of communication that bypasses the mind and enters straight into our hearts so that we feel its call viscerally with a different kind of knowing that we cannot explain or articulate. This is how God speaks to human beings.
There are places inside us that speak this shofar language regularly, and they, too, are the voices of God, though we recognize them not. They cry out without words to be heard, vague sensations of yearning or unease or sadness or awe or even an inkling of ethereal delight, sometimes loud, sometimes softer, sometimes a sharp pang, like a tekiah, and at other times, more of a throbbing sensation, like a shevarim, or a sense of frenetic energy, like a teruah. We tend either to dismiss them for their murkiness, to drown them out with distraction, or to be so quick to analyze them and box them into definition, causation and explanation that we suffocate the vital life force they came to offer us. What they are asking for is quiet patient attention, to sit in the dark with them and let them unfold slowly, over the course of many hours and one hundred cries – as with the shofar on Rosh Hashanah – to let their message remain misty and mystical and felt, and only very slowly and gradually and tentatively to come into the light of language and explicit understanding. They do want to tell us something, but it is something that can only be communicated subtly and slowly, so that realization dawns on us in its own sweet time.
This is how God speaks to human beings. We dismiss these messenger angels at our peril, and at the peril of the larger community that needs us to manifest as our fullest selves. When we learn to listen to them, when we begin to turn towards them instead of turning away, what we are doing is a very deep teshuva, a returning, both to ourselves and to the God who has been calling to us. The quiet, patient presence of our attending changes us; it softens us and gentles us, so that there is a new kindness, both inside and out, and the wordless voices that are speaking inside us, often banished pieces of ourselves, farflung scattered exiles like the Jewish people themselves, these parts of us, once heard, can gradually be gathered and re-integrated, making us whole and unified once again.
This is where redemption happens, slowly, inside us. The shofar is the first herald of the messianic era. Its blasts sound at first like woeful cries, but over time, they are transformed into the music of joy and celebration and triumph. It is listening that redeems them. On Rosh Hashanah, the mitzvah is lishmo’a, to listen, to listen to the shofar’s wordless calls and to listen to its echoes, divine echoes, inside us and also inside those around us, to really listen and turn towards the murky, nameless, uncertain stirrings that have come, on angel’s wings, to speak to us, to heal us, and to bring us home.
Photo by Johannes Plenio at Pexels
