Editor's Note: Huffington Post Religion has launched a scripture commentary/reflection series, which brings together leading voices from different religious traditions to offer their wisdom on selected religious texts. We are pleased to announce a series of reflections on scripture associated with the Jewish High Holidays with reflections by Rabbis from across the country and diverse traditions.
This is the third such series following Ramadan reflections on the Holy Qur'an as well as Christian reflections on the Gospel. Next month we look forward to having Hindu leaders offer scriptural reflections upon the occasion of Diwali.
We hope all readers, Jewish and non-Jewish will gain wisdom from the insights of our contributors during the High Holidays.
"And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, there shall be a sacred assembly, a cessation from work, a Yom Teru'ah, a day of sounding the teru'ah." (Numbers 29:1)
All Jewish holy days have mitzvot, special commandments connected to them. The mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah is "L'shmoah kol shofar," to listen to the sound of the shofar. The shofar is a ram's horn. The sound it makes is unpredictable, eerie, powerful, and ancient. Its connection to Rosh Hashanah is not just from the Biblical verse (above), but from the story we read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac. There, at the very last minute before Abraham commits what for us is the unthinkable act of murdering his own son, Abraham looks up to see a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. Abraham looks up, wakes up to a different possibility, and substitutes the ram for his son. Sounding the shofar evokes that ram. The shofar calls us to wake up, to do tikkun nefesh, an accounting of our souls, and to ask for forgiveness: first from other people...and then, from God. The sound is both a challenge and a warning.
There are three sounds: tekiyah, shevarim and teru'ah. The sound of tekiyah, a long whole note, connects us to creation, revelation, and redemption. We hear that sound: we are present as the universe is created. We hear that sound: we stand again at Sinai. We hear that sound: we are partners in bringing about redemption.
It seems that the ancient rabbis knew what tekiyah sounded like because they describe it. But they are not so sure about the other two sounds. Given that Torah calls Rosh Hashanah Yom Teru'ah, the day of the sounding of the teru'ah, it was important to the rabbis of the Talmud to get the sound right. They determine the sound based on a surprising source -- a word that appears in the Book of Judges about the mother of Sisera, when she hears of her son's death: "The mother of Sisera stood at the window and ya-bev: she made the sound of yevavah [which is the Aramaic translation of teru'ah]." (Judges 5: 28)
The mother of Sisera? Remember who Sisera was? In the time of the Judges, Sisera was the captain of the enemy army that oppressed the Israelites. Why do we care about his mother?
Here is what the Talmud says: "What is the sound of teru'ah? One opinion is that... she (the mother of Sisera, upon hearing of his death) sighed and sighed and therefore the teru'ah should sound like a gasping sound, and one opinion is that she cried and cried and therefore the sound of the teru'ah should be constantly broken like uncontrollable crying." (B.T. Rosh Hashanah 33b)
Because there were two different sounds, sighing and crying, the ancient rabbis compromised and included both sounds in the shofar service on Rosh Hashanah: they called the first, shevarim, three gasping sounds, and the second, teru'ah, nine staccato sounds like crying. Both of these sounds emerge from the anguish of the mother of Sisera.
There is another tradition that links the sound of the shofar to a different mother. This midrash, rabbinic story, describes that when Sarah mistakenly heard that her husband Abraham had sacrificed her beloved only son, "Sarah began to cry, and moan the sound of three wails, which correspond to the three blasts of the shofar, and her soul burst forth from her and she died." (Midrash Pirke d' Rabbi Eliezer)
Two different mothers, one the mother of our enemy; the other, the mother of our own ancestor, Isaac. The tears of both Sarah and the unnamed mother of Sisera are in the sound of the shofar.
What are we meant to learn from linking this sound to the stories of these mothers? Perhaps the lesson is that the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah reminds us that every human being, whether our enemy or our friend, has a mother. Every human being killed, whether enemy or family, leaves a mother sobbing by a window or dying of a broken heart. We are all children of our mothers, and we are all children of God. We can't truly hear the sound of tekiyah gedolah, the long whole note signaling redemption, until we see the face of God in every human being. Perhaps that is why the Zohar, the major text of Jewish mysticism, says: "All sounds on high are included in the Shofar."
We enter the New Year with the sounds of the shofar reverberating through us. May they remind us to try to see every human being as one created in God's image. And then perhaps, this New Year will be a year of peace.
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I thought it was the most beautiful religious service I had ever attended and I swore that if I could I would attend every year. The first time I heard the sound of the shofar, I knew I was listening to a sound from antiquity and I was in awe of the deep sense of tradition & spirituality it evoked within my own soul.
I want to wish all Jews throughout the world, but especially here in the US a very happy or Shana Tova holiday season.
Frederick Douglass
Unpredictable? A trumpet makes unpredictable sounds if someone who doesn't practice blows through it. But the ram's horn's sounds are quite predictable, if somewhat difficult to produce, otherwise what's all this about the three calls and their meaning?
The Shofar heralds the Feast of Trumpets/Rosh Hashanah, the final feast that has yet to be fulfilled. The Lord's Return! Are YOU ready?
http://savvyinternetladies.com/blog/christchurch-quake-analyzed/
http://savvyinternetladies.com/blog/last-week-before-the-2010-rapture/
http://savvyinternetladies.com/blog/what-might-it-really-be-like-on-the-day-of-the-rapture/
Come Lord Jesus....
This is a lesson thousands across this planet are faced with every day, it transcends ideology and religion.
I wonder, if we as a species collectively learned this lesson, how we would treat each other?
Do you think our beloved Post-Christian Founding Fathers made an error when they gifted us with a godless Constitution?
and then some 100s of years of more evolution of consciousness and " we hold these truths to be self evident ..all men [ human being]are created equal and endowed by their creator .." i am not an expert and dont know whether the decleration of independence i spart of the constitution
but endowed by their creator
sounds godfull
founding fathers [ highly educated ] were the product of the pilgrim fathers who left england to gain religious freedom [ but not freedom from religion ] and were allready drafting a self government model on the Mayflower
in the land they landed in , the Iroquois confederacy had a self government model also
in the 1923 Afghanistan constitution which was definitely godfull and a monarchy it said " free education for all "
of years ago. This author still identifies the long-gone woman Sisera as 'the mother of our enemy'.
Wow.
What if every culture on earth was equally obsessed with their ancient (or even fairly recent) history ?
History and heritage always worth remembering, both the good and the bad. It makes us who we are, for better or worse.
Sorry that you have to learn that this forum is only about attacking religion and religious texts.
The great thing about religious texts, and the kind of interpretation that the Talmud practices, is that they offer an opportunity for a special kind of interpretive reflection. But this reflection requires, first of all, that we approach the text in a positive spirit, and second, that we have enough confidence in our own moral understanding so that we can discover it in the text (even if we have to resort to translations into other languages, puns, and other devices to make the "discovery"). In this forum both respect for tradition and cooperative playfulness are lacking.
You have demonstrated my point about the hostility that finds its way to this website. The intent of a section devoted to scriptural commentary would not seem to be debating whether anyone should read scripture in the first place. But that's the internet for you.
A later writer then would have misread the text literally, and "fixed" it by having God "save" Isaac. Perhaps this writer was aware of actual child-sacrifice practices in the area (confirmed by archaeology). He would have been making a moral statement, although not one that needs to be made in more recent societies.
The "sacred texts" declare God is not to be tested, but God, supposedly knowing the outcome anyway, "tests" Abraham.
Such irrationality makes me think of Twain - "...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!" -- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), American writer and humorist, whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain’s writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and condemnation of hypocrisy and oppression.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009.
You are right about the nonsense in the Bible but otherwise you are obviously ignorant of the Jewish Bible.
A story of Biblical investing: Able killed (an animal) for the Jewish God, who loves such offerings and who rejected the vegetarian offerings of Cain, Able's brother. The Heavenly Father therefore created a jealous man who murdered his brother. The nonsense: the Pie-in-the-Sky did not lift a finger to protect the investor, Able, who's investment He accepted.
BTW, the Hindu gods love vegetarian offerings and hate killing animals.