In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s terror, the great Russian author Boris Pasternak was invited to attend a conference of Soviet writers. He knew that if he attended and participated in the conference, he would surely be arrested based on what he would say. He knew that if he stayed home, he would surely be arrested for disobedience. And he knew that if he attended the conference and said nothing and did not participate, he would be arrested for “ironic insubordination.”
Pasternak attended the conference. He said nothing whatsoever for the entire first day of the conference. On the second day of the conference he also said nothing. On the third and final day of the conference his friends urged him to speak. He would be arrested in the aftermath of the conference regardless of what he did. Let him at least speak and benefit from one last chance to have an audience. Let his audience benefit from a few final words from their mentor.
Pasternak rose to his feet on the third day of the conference. Pasternak was over six feet tall; he was a giant of Russian literature and a towering presence. When Pasternak rose to speak, the two thousand writers at the conference were silent as they waited to hear what he would say. Stalin’s murderous police chief Zjdanov, waiting in the wings and watching the proceedings, was silent as he waited to hear what Pasternak would say. It is said that the silence at the Soviet writers’ conference while two thousand people waited for Pasternak to speak, could be heard as far away as Vladivostok.
Pasternak said one word: “thirty.”
All at once, two thousand writers leapt to their feet and belted out in unison Pasternak’s own Russian translation of Shakespeare’s thirtieth sonnet. Russians consider Shakespeare to be one of the greatest writers of literature in the Russian language, but of course it is only because of translators like Pasternak that they can believe that, and all the writers knew Pasternak’s translation of Sonnet 30 by heart.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Pasternak had demonstrated that memory can defeat tyranny. Pasternak the man could be imprisoned in the gulag but his poetry had already been memorized by thousands of his colleagues and could not be destroyed. Pasternak had demonstrated that a sordid and brutal dictatorship cannot stamp out the “remembrance of things past” and the awareness that there are other ways to live together and there are other ways for human beings to treat one another and there are other ways for human beings to speak to one another. “I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,” the sonnet states. We can always return to old dreams and aspirations, even after many years of frustration and denial and despair.
Stalin couldn’t touch that, and Pasternak was not arrested that day.
Years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the writer George Steiner came to Yerushalayim and spoke about this episode at a public event where my teacher Rabbi David Ebner heard him and in turn shared the story with me.
Steiner, who has since spoken and written about Pasternak on several occasions, used the occasion of the fall of Communism to look back wistfully at a time when dictators and poets both knew, and knew with deadly seriousness, that words had power and should frighten tyrants. “Nobody in the White House,” Steiner mused, “would ever think to arrest a poet.”
This story, and Steiner’s comment, lead us to think about our own use of language. There is a dark side to the freedom of speech. In an environment where speech is free, we are at risk of treating speech as though it is worthless. Have we forgotten the power of language and the precious value of genuine and sincere communication? Do we sometimes engage in virtue-signaling through empty gestures in place of helpful action? Do we declare things to be true about ourselves or about others without engaging in the hard work necessary to ground our statements in reality? Have we used language as a tool of instrumental logic, as means to pursue our own ends, without questioning those goals themselves?
Rosh Hashanah is a day to reconnect and recommit to the power of language and the power of communication.
Today is a day filled with words in a season filled with words. And yet, despite the multitude of prayers that we sing and recite, we are surprisingly uncertain about the power of our words. We go so far as to recite multiple prayers for the ability to pray itself.
.אוֹחִֽילָה לָאֵל
“I hope in the Almighty,” one of them begins.
.אֲחַלֶּה פָנָיו
:אֶשְׁאֲלָה מִמֶּנּוּ מַעֲנֵה לָשׁוֹן
“I implore His Presence, I ask of Him to grant me eloquent speech, so that in the congregation of the people, I might sing of His might and utter joyful songs praising His deeds. The arrangements of thoughts belong to man, but [only] from God, comes eloquent speech.”
Despite praying for the ability to pray, despite these “meta-prayers,” we nonetheless cannot overcome a basic uncertainty that we can be effective at conveying all that we wish to convey during these days of awe. Will God grant us the eloquence to express precisely what needs to be said with the subtlety and delicacy that are needed? Can a finite vocabulary of human language capture feelings and messages that are as infinite in their complexity and diversity as humanity itself?
And can we dare to confine our innermost thoughts to words at all? Rabbi Michael Feuer, writing about the nature of speech and its role in communication, describes a paradox of the power of speech:
“Words are a powerful bridge, allowing communication and shared understanding” he writes. But then he continues, “speech is also the death of inner experience, forcing the infinite into an inert form which can be received by another.”
On Rosh Hashanah we cannot risk a “prayer-malfunction” and we cannot risk a communication failure. We also need to communicate without compromising our interiority and our ability to take part in the internal work of the season. We overcome these obstacles on Rosh Hashanah by communicating with an instrument.
The shofar picks up where language ends. The shofar communicates what words cannot express. But it does so in a way that we can then learn from the shofar how to speak and communicate with God and with our fellow human beings.
Maimonides sees the shofar as an instrument for communication, but he sees us, the congregation, as the recipients of that message. The message of the shofar is one of alarm:
.עוּרוּ יְשֵׁנִים מִשְּׁנַתְכֶם וְנִרְדָּמִים הָקִיצוּ מִתַּרְדֵּמַתְכֶם וְחַפְּשׂוּ בְּמַעֲשֵׂיכֶם וְחִזְרוּ בִּתְשׁוּבָה וְזִכְרוּ בּוֹרַאֲכֶם
“Ye that sleep, bestir yourselves from your sleep, and ye slumbering, emerge from your slumber, examine your conduct, turn in repentance, and remember your Creator!”
Presaging Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30—which speaks of one who will “wail my dear time’s waste” when called to remember—Maimonides identifies the shofar’s audience as those of us who must remember Truth that has been forgotten amidst the “vanities of time.” We slumber because we do not realize how precious each moment can be.
The shofar interrupts that sleep and imparts a message that we somehow cannot receive through words. It touches us and stirs us and awakens us from our slumber. You know exactly what Maimonides is describing if you too have had the experience, as I have, of recognizing, “oh! that’s what you were trying to tell me” after someone has erupted in anger at you like a blast of the shofar.
But the liturgy, the words we will actually say together in just a few more minutes before the shofar is sounded, suggest a very different audience for the shofar blasts.
מִן הַמֵּצַר קָרָֽאתִי יָהּ עָנָֽנִי בַּמֶּרְחַב יָהּ
קוֹלִי שָׁמָֽעְתָּ אַל תַּעְלֵּם אָזְנְךָ לְרַוְחָתִי לְשַׁוְעָתִי
“From the narrowness [of distress] I called [to God,] He answered me with the breath of Divine relief. You have heard my voice; do not shut Your ear to my [prayer for] relief, to my cry.”
Yes, the shofar does speak to us and the starkness of its sound can shock us out of complacency, but the intended audience for the shofar is God.
On a day filled with words beyond count and poetry of the most intricate beauty, we turn to God with a message that is spoken without words and a prayer with no melody and no content beyond the blasts of the shofar. The shofar on Rosh Hashanah, and its laws, are clearly parallel to the laws and dynamics of Jewish prayer in numerous details.
A shofar should be curved just as a human being should be bent and humble when standing before God. One can fulfill his or her obligation to say a prayer or a berakhah through listening to another person recite that prayer or berakhah, e.g. one person can recite kiddush on behalf of many who are gathered together at a meal, and the same is true for the mitzvah of hearing the sound of the shofar. Kavanah, the conscious intention to fulfill a mitzvah, may only be indispensable for the mitzvah of prayer and a few other similar mitzvot, such as the mitzvah of hearing the shofar.
But Rabbi Shlomo Efraim Luntzhitz, the seventeenth century rabbi of Prague most famous for his commentary to the Torah—the Keli Yakar—saw the laws of shofar as a metaphor, not for prayer but rather for preaching, for delivering drashot and, by extension, to the task that we all engage in of communicating with others with the hope of influencing them.
A Shofar should be bent rather than straight. This teaches not only the humble stance of one at prayer, but the humility needed to reach out and engage someone in a potentially challenging conversation in a manner that will be heard. Who wants to change to accommodate someone who acts like they don’t have to change? And, on the flip side, when I have the chance to admire the humility of those around me, I become more humble myself as I appreciate and am even awed by their example.
The Mishnah teaches about one who blows a shofar into a pit:
.התוקע לתוך הבור …אם קול שופר שמע יצא ואם קול הברה שמע לא יצא
If the sound of the shofar can nonetheless be heard, the mitzvah is fulfilled, but if one only hears an echo, then one has not fulfilled the mitzvah.
So too, effective communication must be authentic and direct and not an echo. If I parrot the words of someone else, I will not be heard. Sometimes when I debate or argue I hear myself repeating lines and arguments that I’ve heard from someone else. Sometimes I even find myself quoting myself and recycling old lines and cliches. When I become a caricature of my own beliefs and opinions through repeating stale lines from my own repertoire, I cannot be heard. The reason we are not heard when we speak that way is because when we speak that way, we are not really communicating. Hearing an echo is not hearing a message.
The rabbis further taught that a gilded shofar, one plated with gold, is invalid if the gold plating distorts the sound of the shofar:
.תנו רבנן… ציפהו זהב … מבחוץ אם נשתנה קולו מכמות שהיה פסול ואם לאו כשר
Our voice loses integrity when it is transformed by wealth.
Does relative prosperity change the words that we say or the messages that we share and broadcast? Do we hide things we know to be true or do we refrain from messages that need to be shared because we fear for our jobs or worry about our personal material interests?
Are we still loyal to the causes for which our grandparents struggled as an impoverished and oppressed minority? What do I say differently to you, or what do I not say altogether, because you are my employers?
A sound that is transformed by gold cannot convey the truth.
Jewish law concludes that:
כל הקולות כשרים בשופר
Any sound is valid to fulfill the mitzvah of shofar. This often gets people into trouble in shul when they mistakenly try to correct or redo a shofar blast that sounds hoarse or unclear. But it doesn’t matter if the voice sounds pretty. The sound doesn’t need to be perfect.
So too, communication can be effective if the message is real and authentic, if it comes from the heart and is meant to be heard.
דברים היוצאים מן הלב נכנסים אל הלב
The Medieval Hebrew aphorism, matters that come from the heart can penetrate the heart of another, governs these comparisons between the shofar and human communication.
This Rosh Hashanah, let’s recover the ability to speak to one another.
Inspired by the sound of the shofar, let us communicate beyond pretense.
In 5779 let us leave behind the heavily curated presentations of ourselves on social media and instead see ourselves with honesty and relate to others, in real life, as authentic human beings.
When the “remembrance of things past” causes regret, as it does to the speaker of Sonnet 30, he finds comfort in friendship:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
Friendship, and any authentic encounter between one person and another, or between humanity and God, are a way to restore and rebuild when our memories fill us with regret or wistful longing for what was but is no longer, or what never was and never will be. But to have that solace, we need the sort of relationships with others that come from genuine communication.
If we can recover the power to communicate in this way, then our relationships with other people can flourish, our connection to God can grow, and we can use the power of language to overcome any fear and obstacle.
One of my hopes for the new year is to improve my communication with you and for all of us to strengthen a community in which humility, sincerity, and integrity characterize all of our communications with one another. Think of the friendships that would be strengthened. Think of what our community could accomplish if we hear the shofar this morning and allow it to teach us to speak to God and to one another.
Shannah Tovah.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 