During my final year in yeshiva, a film crew came to the beit midrash to record our prayers and studies. The film crew was filming footage for a PBS mini-series that chronicled several young Americans as they embarked on careers as clergy in various religions. The Jewish subjects of the mini-series attended Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and so a camera crew recorded several days of life in the yeshiva as part of the production of the series. The mini-series is quite good. I recommend tracking it down and watching it. You might even find a few seconds of footage of yours-truly looking like a young and carefree student….
But, interesting as the final product turned out to be, my most enduring memory from the mini-series is not any one scene, but the experience of the morning when the film crew came to morning services. We had been told the day before that Shacharit would be filmed and that we should go about our business as though nothing was different about the morning. We did not quite conform to those instructions. Whereas on a normal morning, the minyan coalesced gradually as students trickled into the beit midrash—in a manner that would be very familiar to anyone who has seen Anshe Sholom at the published start time of Shacharit—the beit midrash was packed with students the morning that the film crew was scheduled to film. Whereas students often learned quietly at their seats during “downtime” at Shacharit or stared absentmindedly into empty space, everyone was attentive and focused when the film crew recorded Shacharit. We enthusiastically replied “Amen” to each and every berakhah. We leapt to our feet when it was appropriate to stand, we closed our eyes in devout concentration, and we acted just as Jews are supposed to act when they are being filmed for a movie.
I thought of that episode a few weeks ago when we found out that London’s mayor Sadiq Khan was interested in visiting our shul during his first official visit to Chicago. Because of some very tight time constraints, he was only able to attend the 8:00 AM downstairs minyan and was not able to stay for the entire service. The regular attendees at the 8:00 AM minyan were informed that Mayor Khan would visit their service, and the shul board was notified, but we did not notify the entire congregation because we wanted the mayor to have an authentic experience while he was here and did not want to create a spectacle or undermine the integrity of our regular Shabbat tefilot.
Shacharit that Shabbat at the 8:00 AM minyan was not quite as it is on a more typical week. Instead of 15 or 20 or 30 people at the minyan, there were 50 or 60 people there. Nobody talked to the person sitting in the neighboring seat. Everyone enthusiastically responded “Amen” to each and every berakhah. We leapt to our feet when it was appropriate to stand, we closed our eyes in devout concentration, and we acted just as Jews are supposed to act when we are being observed by a celebrity visitor whom we wish to impress. And we did, in fact, impress him and the members of his staff who came to our shul. They appreciated our community’s hospitality and openness and admired our religious life…as they were able to see it.
Isn’t it hard to be sincere when you know that someone is watching you?
We gather on Rosh Hashanah and declare that God scrutinizes our actions and evaluates our lives.
כָּל־ עַד־סוֹף וּמַבִּיט צוֹפֶה אֱ-לֹהֵֽינוּ ה׳ לְפָנֶֽיךָ וְיָדֽוּעַ גָּלוּי הַכֹּל מִמֶּךָּ נִכְחַד לֹא כָּל־הַיְּצוּר וְגַם אֶת־כָּל־הַמִּפְעָל זוֹכֵר אַתָּה הַדּוֹרוֹת.
״You remember all of creation, and all things that were formed none is shrouded from You. All is revealed and known before You.”
אָדָם מַחְשְׁבוֹת גָבֶר מִצְעֲדֵי וַעֲלִילוֹת וּפְקוּדָּתוֹ אִישׁ מַעֲשֵׂה בָּא לְפָנֶֽיךָ כָּל־הַיְּצוּר זֵֽכֶר כִּי :הַזֶּה כְּהַיּוֹם נִפְקָד לֹא מִי אִישׁ מַעַלְלֵי וְיִצְרֵי וְתַחְבּוּלוֹתָיו
“Who may be overlooked on this day, when the memory of every being formed comes before You? Each person’s works, his purpose, at the path that he chooses and follows, the thoughts and the plans of all mankind, and the impulses behind each person’s acts.”
But that scrutiny must be undertaken with an ethos of integrity and honesty if it is going to be worth anything. The stakes on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are too high for us to “look busy” or “look impressive” when we face God’s scrutiny. We won’t fool God. But we might fool ourselves.
The Rosh Hashanah Mussaf prayer is the longest and most elaborate Mussaf of the year. In place of a single paragraph recited on other festivals, which briefly describes the ritual observance of that holiday in Temple, the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf amidah contains three massive sections that explore three major themes of the day: Malchiot—God’s sovereignty and kingship, Zichronot—God’s capacity to recall and remember all of Creation, and Shofarot—the theme of the shofar itself as an instrument that accompanies communication between humanity and God.
Each of these three sections, Malchiot, Zichronot, and Shofarot is itself comprised of three sections. An introductory paragraph at the beginning, and a concluding paragraph with a berakhah at the end. The heart of these additional sections however are ten Biblical verses that speak about that theme.
Have you ever stopped to examine those verses and what they actually say about the shofar? I had a chance to study them with some of you a few weeks ago and we uncovered a curious pattern.
The shofar is an instrument and shofar blasts are a kind of music. Who is the audience for that music? Perhaps we are the audience for the shofar. When we hear the sound of the shofar we are meant to experience that sound as God bursting forth into human history with a clarion call for us to wake up. As Maimonides, Rambam, writes in Hilkhot Teshuvah:
הָקִיצוּ וְנִרְדָּמִים מִשְּׁנַתְכֶם יְשֵׁנִים עוּרוּ כְּלוֹמַר בּוֹ יֵשׁ רֶמֶז הַכָּתוּב גְּזֵרַת הַשָּׁנָה בְּרֹאשׁ שׁוֹפָר שֶׁתְּקִיעַת פִּי עַל אַף כָּל וְשׁוֹגִים הַזְּמַן בְּהַבְלֵי הָאֱמֶת אֶת הַשּׁוֹכְחִים אֵלּוּ .בּוֹרַאֲכֶם וְזִכְרוּ בִּתְשׁוּבָה וְחִזְרוּ בְּמַעֲשֵׂיכֶם וְחַפְּשׂוּ מִתַּרְדֵּמַתְכֶם דַּרְכּוֹ מִכֶּם אֶחָד כָּל וְיַעֲזֹב וּמַעַלְלֵיכֶם דַּרְכֵיכֶם וְהֵיטִיבוּ לְנַפְשׁוֹתֵיכֶם הַבִּיטוּ ,יַצִּיל וְלֹא יוֹעִיל לֹא אֲשֶׁר וָרִיק בְּהֶבֶל שְׁנָתָם טוֹבָה. לֹא אֲשֶׁר וּמַחֲשַׁבְתּוֹ הָרָעָה
“Even though the blowing of the shofar on Rosh HaShanah is a Biblical decree, it hints at something, i.e., ‘Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep! And slumberers, arise from your slumber! Search your ways and return in teshuvah and remember your Creator!’”
Or, perhaps, God is the audience for the shofar’s cry. The shofar is our wordless cry to God that expresses emotions that are beyond words. It is a cry of a child to a parent. Words are not needed to express pain and fear and longing for a parent’s comforting embrace.
My teacher, Rabbi Yehuda Amital, of blessed memory, noticed a pattern in the Biblical verses that comprise the Shofarot section of the amidah. Some of the verses explicitly speak of the sound of a shofar as a sound that the Jewish people heard. We were the audience for the shofar that was sounded on Mt. Sinai as described in Exodus 20, “And the people saw the thunder and the flames, and the sound of the shofar, and the mountain smoking; the people saw and they staggered, and stood far back.”
And some verses explicitly speak of the sound of the shofar as a sound that the Jewish people created. God was the audience for the shofar that is described in Psalms 98, “With trumpets and the sound of the shofar, shout for joy before the Lord, the King.”
Rav Amital noticed something else. There are fundamentally two types of sounds made by the shofar. A tekiah is a straight and triumphant blast. A teruah is a wailing and plaintive cry. We have some uncertainty about precisely the best way to make a teruah cry and playing out those permutations result in 100 shofar blasts on Rosh Hashanah.
Throughout the verses from scripture that are at the heart of the Shofarot blessing, the shofar sound that initiates with God throughout those verses is a tekiah, a straight and triumphant blast, whereas the shofar sound that is initiated by human beings is a teruah, a wailing cry. The ten verses make a tekiah, teruah, tekiah pattern. Verses that describe God creating a tekiah sound, verses that describe human beings making a teruah sound, and then verses that once again describe God making a tekiah sound. This tekiah, teruah, tekiah pattern is a fractal expansion of the way that the shofar is sounded in shul.
What might all of this mean?
According to the editors of our Rosh Hashanah prayers, the triumphant straight blast of the shofar is a sound that can most authentically come from God. We can imagine God communicating with total clarity and without ambiguity. When we communicate, however, even using the very same instrument, the shofar, we need to speak in a wavering voice. God speaks, using a shofar, in clarion calls and in single notes. We communicate to God with all of our pain and conflict and wavering. The tekiah is God’s use of the instrument to communicate with us and to wake us up. The teruah is our use of the shofar to communicate with God and to express our weakness.
If we hide our weaknesses when communicating with God, then we miss a chance for intimacy. How can God comfort us when we ourselves do not give voice to our distress? If we hide our weaknesses when engaging in the hard work of introspection and self-evaluation that takes place at this season, we miss a chance to change the direction of our lives.
Think back ten or fifteen years ago when surveillance cameras became ubiquitous in American cities and when cellphones with built-in cameras became popular. Do you remember how concerned so many Americans were that we were ushering in a police state that would empower the government to spy on us and take away our freedoms?
And, while civil libertarians continue to warn about the dangers of government surveillance, the more dominant narrative this year has been the use of cellphone cameras to record the actions of the police themselves. How ironic that the technology we feared would be abused by the government to record our misdeeds, has instead been used by civilians to chronicle and publicize apparent misconduct of some representatives of the government itself.
I recently asked a Chicago police officer what he thought of the various videos of police shootings that have been publicized in the past year. He told me that some of them clearly indicated misconduct, poor judgement, or poor training on the part of police. Other videos, he said, were too narrow in their scope or focus to be useful. They showed only one perspective of an encounter and, in his opinion, it is impossible to form a comprehensive judgement from a narrow perspective.
Indeed. It is impossible to form a comprehensive evaluation from a narrow perspective. But it is a fantasy to think that it could be possible to film or record a perfect record, to create a “library of everything” that would give us a view of the Full Truth. But, on Rosh Hashanah we are scrutinized by the One who is הַמִּפְעָל אֶת־כָּל־ זוֹכֵר who remembers all creation, and that scrutiny gives us an opportunity to evaluate ourselves, if we choose to look at ourselves, as individuals, and as a nation, with honesty.
Even without a perfect and comprehensive record, even without access to the Full Truth, we can say that the instances in the past year, literally too many for me to recall, of deeply disturbing footage of an African American individual being shot by police or even killed with little or no provocation is not only a personal tragedy to the families of the victim. But those tragic episodes tell us something about our country and dark fears that we had hoped had been consigned to history.
I have learned things about this country that I wish were not true and I wish I did not know. I know about myself that I still resist believing in the endurance of racism in this country.
I know about myself that I resist believing in the persistence of antisemitism in the United States on a scale far larger than I had previously assumed.
The reason to be sincere and honest in our evaluation of ourselves as individuals and as a country is not because we are being recorded by cellphone cameras. Cellphone cameras can never reveal a full perspective of the truth and the partial truths they reveal can be evaded by rationalizations and escapist denial.
We are being watched by God, who is זוכר נשכחות – the one who remembers that which has been forgotten.
אתה זוכר מעשה עולם
“You remember all of creation, and all things that were formed – none is shrouded from You.
All is revealed and known before You, Lord our God, who gazes and looks on to the last of all the ages.”
God’s comprehensive gaze and perfect memory are not supposed to cause a crippling inability to act. Adam and Eve hiding in the Garden of Eden, cowering in shame before God, is not a model we are meant to emulate.
Nor should we try to act in a way that we think looks impressive. The way my classmates acted when the film crew came to the yeshiva or the way we davenned extra hard and extra well when a celebrity comes to shul is natural and very human—but is also not a way to go about having the important conversations we need to have with God at this season. Only if we have the courage to be honest in our evaluation of ourselves can we have a conversation with God about who we are and who we wish to become.
כשר לאו ואם פסול שהיה מכמות קולו נשתנה אם מבחוץ פסול מבפנים זהב ציפהו
The Talmud explains (Rosh Hashanah 27b) that a shofar that is gilded with gold is unfit for use on Rosh Hashanah if the gold changes the sound of the shofar. The Talmud also teaches that a shofar that is placed inside another shofar is unfit for use on Rosh Hashanah if the sound that is heard is the sound of the outer shofar and not the internal one:
יצא לא שמע חיצון קול ואם יצא שמע פנימי קול אם שופר בתוך שופר נתן
We have things to say to God on Rosh Hashanah and we have things we need to hear from God. But we have to be sure to speak in our own voice and give voice to our own truths and we need to hear even very challenging things.
On Rosh Hashanah we remind ourselves that we are being watched. But the challenge is to keep that awareness from leading to shame or paralysis and also to avoid the false comfort of imagining things being better than they are.
This is a day and this is a season to have a conversation with our conscience and with God. That conversation must be an honest one. And that honest conversation can only begin with an honest appraisal of who we are.
Shannah Tovah.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 