My dog doesn't like bagpipes. We've taken her to the
Memorial Day parade in Centerville a couple of times, back home on Cape Cod,
and as you would expect for a New England parade, there’s pipe-and-drum. Oh,
boy, she does not like that sound. I love it. I grew up with it. I would love
to study bagpipes (I have this vision of playing them at 8:30 in the morning on
Shabbat at Camp Harlam on the hill to get everyone to breakfast. Anyway). That sound
causes her to jump, to the point where if she hears bagpipes in the background
of a song I’m listening to or on Television she starts to whimper. Hrmn. Maybe
no bagpipes after all.
In a few weeks, when we gather in this place, when we see
faces familiar and new, we will hear another powerful, yet strange sound; the
blast of the shofar, a sound awesome, alien and powerful. It is a fitting sound
for the day we celebrate God’s majesty, a day where ‘even the hosts of heaven
are judged’. The sound of the shofar is like no other, entirely foreign to our
daily lives. No man-made instrument, be it trumpet or car horn or computer, can
replicate it. I’ve heard computerized versions, and recordings of the shofar, and
our organ even has a shofar key, and it does not sound the same; there is no
comparable experience to hearing the ram’s horn in person, on the day of Rosh
Hashanah. You cannot fake the shofar blast.
For such an instrument as this, one that awakens the Jewish
soul, that proclaims God’s sovereignty, we would expect an instrument that
dazzles. I have always had a childlike fascination with musical instruments:
the curve of the neck of a guitar, the way light reflects off a brass horn, how
a clarinetist holds their hands just so, the shine and color of the violin. All
these instruments great and small are works of art; even the computers,
turntables and keyboards used by the dj or producer are like some powerful,
glowing machine, alluring and frightening at the same time. Yet, the shofar is
none of these things. It is a simple instrument; no buttons, no strings, no
valves. It has neither reed nor mouthpiece. It takes no ornamentation; no
metal, no elaborate designs. Indeed, the moment you carve or cover a shofar in
metal or add any kind of decoration it is rendered unusable, unfit to fulfill
the commandment. There is only one quality of the Shofar with which the rabbis
were concerned; it’s sound. It had to produce the right sound, the sequence of
blasts—the notes—that signaled the opening of the gates at the Days of Awe.
Truly, with the shofar, it is what’s inside that counts.
And yet the mitzvah is not to sound the shofar, but to hear
it. Again, the sound, not the sound-er, is what is important. Why must we hear
the shofar? What compels us to hear its sound? After all, it’s weird. It makes
us uncomfortable. We giggle when we hear it, when the ba’al tekiah the shofar sounder, turns blue, then purple, then goes
to plaid as their Tekiah Gedolah goes on “too long”. Why this sound? Why a
sound at all?
So we learn, in Sefer
HaChinuch, that “at the root of the precept lies the reason that since man
is a creature of physical matter, he is not aroused to things except by
something stirring.” In other words, sounds stir something up in us. Maybe it’s
the song you first slow-danced to, or that one aria in an opera, or the primal
sounds of heavy metal or hip-hop all hit you right where it counts. Yes, the
auditory cortex, but also the neshama,
the soul.
And the shofar is supposed to make us feel weird,
uncomfortable. As Sefer HaChinuch
continues, the shofar is the sound of judgment. We hear it and we are
supposed to ‘entreat mercy for [our] sins from the Master of Mercies…” and “break
the impules of [our] heart that is evil with the cravings and sinful matters of
the world.” We hear the shofar three times, and the sound is supposed to remind
us of our own disappointments, our own stumbles, and seek to do better. We feel
awkward because deep down inside, the sound causes us to struggle, our hearts turning
toward the mistakes we’ve made in the past year, laid bare without pretense. We
don’t like that. That makes us uncomfortable. We want the sound to go away, but
it will not. Instead, we need to hear the sound, to listen carefully, listen to
our hearts carefully, and turn ourselves toward the right path.
Three and a half more weeks and we hear the sound of the
shofar. Will we be ready to hear the sound? Will we be ready to turn ourselves
from within? For just as it is with the shofar, so too is it with us, and our
souls: it’s what’s inside that counts.
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