The sound of our emotions.

Nu? How are you today? Today, Rosh ha Shana 5784, how are you feeling? Are you in a good mood or in a bad mood? Let me reformulate: what are your feelings on Rosh Hashana?

I know the answer. The most sincere answer is: boredom. “I feel really, really bored”. Which is not surprising, after all. The Rosh ha Shana morning is the longest service of the year.

But if you scratch under the boredom, what we feel on Rosh ha Shana is confusion. We are confused, indeed. What sort of a day is today? The liturgy is solemn. The melodies are sober. Repentance is the recurring theme in the prayers. We repeatedly declare that we have sinned. The Torah reading is the Akeidat Ytzak, the Binding of Isaac, a very troubling story. Yet, today is a Chag, a holiday. And holidays, by definition, are a happy time. We meet with family and friends. We wish each other Moadim leSimcha, literally: “May your time be joyous”. After the service, we head home and have a wonderful meal. The mood will be merry. It’s confusing, isn’t it?

How do we square these two very different moods? On one hand, the solemnity of the day. We will listen to Unetaneh Tokef, the poem about God who today decides “who shall live and who shall die”. On the other hand, today is a holiday. It is called Chag; it is a happy time, a day when we eat and be merry.

To answer such a question, I ask you to bear with me while we explore the soundtrack of today, the different sounds of the Shofar and their meanings. The first sound of the Shofar is the Tekiah.

Tekiah is a single long blast. It was heard all over Jerusalem on the days of the coronation of a new King. We don’t have a King anymore, but we still blow the Shofar and listen to the Tekiah to affirm the sovereignty of God over the Earth. We repeat many times during the prayers that Adonay Malakh, Adonay Melech, Adonay Ymloch Leoalam Vaed, “God reigned, God reigns, God will reign forever”.

Today is also the anniversary of Creation. God is the Creator of the Universe, the Creator of Time and Space. On the first Rosh ha Shana time began. The sound of Tekiah brings us back to the beginning of time. It is pure, uninterrupted.

But in the world we live in, we do not perceive God. Let alone we see God’s sovereignty. Despite being God’s Creation, this world is far from good and perfect. This is a sad realisation.

The pure, uninterrupted sound of Tekiah does not describe the world we see. The world is complicated. The world is broken. The sound of such a realisation is Shevarim, three connected short sounds.

Shevarim means “broken”, “fractured”. Shevarim is a series of breaths. It is the sound of our disappointment and our patience when running out. It is the sound of our frustrations. The breaths of Shevarim are like attempts to rationalise, to tell ourselves that there is a reason for our pain. It’s when we try to persuade ourselves that everything is still under our control. But we know it’s not true.

Hence, the three short sounds of Shevarim break into nine shorter sounds. The Truah. Truah literally means “blasting”.

In the Biblical text, Truah is a call for war. Rabbinic literature compares these nine sounds to the sobbing of a mother. Note: of a mother, not of a Jewish mother: the universal feeling of uncontrollable pain. These feelings are experienced by every mother at every time and in every civilisation. The most universal pain.

At the same time, Truah is a call to battle, a sound that empowers and energises, often compared to trumpets. These are two radically different meanings: the abyss of desperation and the top of empowerment. Truah represents both at the same time. Because Truah is the sound of our mind when we have lost the way.

And so we pray. Truah is the sound of prayer.

Perhaps now we can understand -or feel- the double, perplexing nature of Rosh haShana. The fact that it’s solemn and austere, and at the same time, it’s a Chag, a joyous holiday. Is it a contradiction? Yes, it is. But life is full of contradictions.

Being Jewish means praying God, in sadness and in joy. Both dimensions and emotions are present on the day of Rosh Hashana. The sadness, desperation, and loneliness that we experience while remembering our failures. And the relief and empowerment that we feel once we have gone through the process of teshuvah and reparation. They are all part of this day and are reflected in the series of different sounds of the Shofar.

With every Tekiah, we remind ourselves that God is the Sovereign of the Universe, that we have been created for a purpose, that our life has a meaning, and that the world must and can be a good place because it’s God’s Creation. With every Shevarim, we are reminded of our frustrations. Of our attempts to find a logic and a reason, of the times when we say to ourselves, “That’s nothing,” “It will pass”, “I am still in control”. When we intellectualise, we rationalise, we justify. When we try to avoid the feeling of failure, to escape the pain. With every Truah, we remember the sobbing, the crying, the pain, the tears; at the same time, Truah calls us to the most genuine and sincere action: the prayer. Truah is a sequence of short sounds; like every prayer is a sequence of words.

Rav Kook explains that Shevarim is an intellectual attempt to do teshuva, to repent and to return, while Truah is “the teshuva of the heart”, of deeply felt repentance, when our heart is open to God the same way is open to other human beings.

The sounds of the Shofar are the sounds of these different emotions. We don’t listen one by one, We listen to them in sequences, where sounds follow each other. There may not be a logic, but there is poetry.

In each of the sequences, Tekiah is the most recurring sound. We repeat that God is the Sovereign. The combination of Shevarim and Truah reflects our efforts to rationalise and how they do not work, so we break into tears. We cry with the Truah, but then we find comfort with another Tekiah that reminds us that God is the Sovereign of the Universe. In the sequences, every Truah is followed by a Tekiah. So be it in our life.

We go through this emotional journey together as a community. It is a difficult journey; we remember failures, realise how wounds are still open, and consider the pain we have inflicted on others. And we pray for the strength to do teshuva, to return to be good Jews and exemplary human beings.

Words cannot adequately describe our feelings. The sounds of the Shofar are so much deeper than the words. The sounds of the Shofar are a prayer.

Look at the shape of the Shofar. Every Shofar is unique. There are no two identical shofars in the world. The spiritual journey accompanied by the Shofar is different every year for each different individual Jew.

Shofars are never linear. They are twisted, bent, curved… the path they help us walk is not linear. It’s not easy to face our failures and mistakes and embark on the journey of teshuva. But if you have another look, you’ll notice how the Shofar is small on one end and large on the opposite. It is small where we put our mouth, and it’s large on the opposite end.

The Shofar expands our voice. It embodies the spiritual journey of Rosh ha Shahah, the movement from individual to community.

We have been lonely in the previous weeks. It is almost stereotypical; the services before Rosh ha Shana, especially the Selichot, are among the less attended services of the year. We felt loneliness at the beginning of this journey. The starting point of teshuvah is often a deep feeling of loneliness and abandonment.

But while we are in shul on Rosh ha Shanah, we realise we are not alone. We feel the power of community; we find support and comfort in being together with other Jews engaged in the same process of introspection, reparation, and return. And when we have found the courage and the strength for a real teshuva, when we know that we will not run away from our responsibilities anymore… that is the moment of Tekiah Gedolah.

A long single blast that affirms that God is One. Tekiah Gedolah is when we realise that our emotions and feelings are parts of our prayers. Tekiah Gedolah is when our minds and hearts are united in prayer and hope.

So, let us move together to the next stage of this journey.