Rosh Hashanah, first day
Genesis 21:1-34
Numbers 29: 1-6
1 Samuel 1:1-2:10
In the Torah, Rosh Hashanah is called Yom Teruah, a “day of broken cry” (Numbers 29:1), and Zikhron Teruah, a “remembering or mentioning a broken cry” (Leviticus 23:24).
The words of the Torah do not tell us how to make this day into one marked by a broken cry, how to produce it, or how to interpret the broken cry.
It seems reasonable to mark the day as a Yom Teruah by producing or hearing, the sound, and as Yom Zikhron Teruah by speaking about it. And so, on Rosh Hashanah, we generally do both: producing the broken cry and reciting verses about it the prayers. When Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, as it does today at sunset, in Orthodox and Conservative synagogues the shofar remains silent, but we still remember the broken cry.
Our verses do not tell us how to produce this sound: Perhaps a trumpet would do (as in Numbers 31:6), or maybe the human voice (as, perhaps, in 1 Samuel 4:5-6, Jeremiah 20:16 and Ezekiel 21:27). But in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, this sound often comes associated with a shofar (for example, in 2 Samuel 6:15, Zephania 1:16, Amos 2:2 and Psalms 47:6).
The ancient rabbis (in Sifra 178) prove that we do right to use a shofar on Rosh Hashanah from the verse requiring us to “pass the broken cry of the shofar…throughout the land” in the Jubilee year to “proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Leviticus 25:9) As the broken cry of freedom requires a shofar, so too does the broken cry of Rosh Hashanah.
Our verses do not tell us how to interpret this sound.
Maimonides introduces his speculation about its meaning with a cautionary word: “Even though the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a decree of the text,” which commands without giving a reason, “it contains a hint, as if to say: Awaken, you sleepers, from your sleep…reflect on your deeds and repent; remember your Creator…mend your ways” (Teshuvah 3:4). The shofar speaks to us.
More than two centuries before Maimonides, Rav Saadia Gaon (who lived from about 882-942), listed 10 different associations the shofar should bring to our minds. They include reminding us of creation, of the coronation of a king, of the near-sacrifice of Isaac, of the giving of the Torah, of the alarm signifying battle, of the coming of the Messiah and of the ultimate redemption.
But perhaps the shofar makes its broken cry, not to us, but for us. Perhaps it expresses our unarticulated yearning to return, the wordless longing of our soul to return to its source.
A Chassidic master explained this with a parable.
Once there was a king who had a little son. He gave his son permission to play in the clearing before the palace bordering on the forest, but never to go into the forest, for there he might get lost. Once it happened that the young prince did go just a little way into the forest to play. He played happily there until it began to get dark, when he decided to head back home and realized that he could not find the way. He was lost.
When night fell and the prince was still not home, the king became alarmed. He took action at once, sending his agents and scouts to all parts of the forest to look for his son. Terrible things could happen to a small boy alone in a great forest. What could the lost prince do?
But the prince was a resourceful little boy. Among his toys, he had a toy horn with him, and he blew it as loud as he could, as if to say, “Here I am, Father. I do not know where I am. But I know that you have agents all through the forest. You can find me and bring me back home to you, if I only call out to you.”
And that, said the master, that is the broken cry of the shofar.