Shofar By Debbie Ann Doyle Ainspan

As I thought about what to say to introduce the shofar service, I thought of the lines of the Unetanah Tokef from the Rosh Hashanah service – “The great shofar is sounded, a still small voice is heard.”

I always pause at that – at first, it seems like an odd order. If there is a still small voice inside of each of us, telling us what is right, what we need to do better in the coming year, what is the role of the sound of the shofar?

But think about how easy it is for that still, small voice to get drowned out.

Yoga and meditation teachers talk about the monkey chatter that can fill our heads even when we are actively trying to quiet our minds. Instead of focusing on our breath, we are thinking about that email we meant to send before we left work or what to cook for dinner.

On top of that, I suspect that for most if not all of us, the still, small voice of our conscience, and of the Eternal, can get drowned out by much louder, larger, and more insistent internal voices of self-doubt, recrimination, negativity, guilt, and insecurity.

How do we reach down through all that noise to find true teshuvah, true repentance, a better path for the year ahead?

Maybe that is why we need the shofar to be sounded—to focus our attention.  

The sound of the shofar always gives me chills. There is something about that ancient, timeless, sound that seems to echo not just around the world, but across time, reaching back all the way through all the years of Jewish history, calling out to something beyond ourselves.

That sound, if only for a moment, can drown out all the chatter that fills our heads. It is both a wake-up call and a call to battle. We really hear the sound of the shofar, echoing across the ages, wordlessly expressing our longing to bring our lives closer to the Eternal, to finally hear that still small voice.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Synagogue or Board of Directors.

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