These are hard times, and this is a hard practice.
I stand here, in an empty sanctuary some weeks before Rosh Hashanah, attempting to cry out with the shofar, across time and space, hoping that you may hear the sound on Rosh HaShanah.
Rabbi Nahman of Breslav says (Likutei Moharan Kama 22) that the capacity to cry out, whether through shouting, praying, singing, or the sound of the shofar is a channeling of power that can shatter the control of evil power and falsehood.
But he also warns that whenever a person channels holy power - your shadow side awakens as well. The voice of your darkness echoes and hovers around the sound of your crying out, and at times the echoes can even drown out the original sound.
On this basis he explains the mishnah in the third chapter of tractate Rosh HaShanah that says that if a person blows shofar into a pit, people who hear the sound of the shofar itself have fulfilled their obligation. But people who hear the echoes of the sound have not fulfilled their obligation.
The Hebrew word used for “fulfilling an obligation” is yatza - literally to go out. Rebbe Nahman re-reads this mishnah to address a person who cries out, or blows the shofar from within a pit of personal (or communal) darkness. People who hear the actual sound of the shofar, the holy power that is in that crying out, will be able to find a way out, latzet, from the darkness. But if all they can hear are the echoes, the shadow side of that power, they will not find a way out.
I feel that this year I am like the “tokea bebor” blowing the shofar in the pit of darkness. My prayer is that even as this sound travels through electric currents and is reconstituted as an echo and even an echo of an echo, that somehow, through all this, we will hear the true sound of the shofar which will bring us back together and take us back to freedom.
A Prayer
לשם יחוד קודשא בריך הוא ושכינתיה בדחילו ורחימו בשם ההוא טמיר ונעלם ובשם כל ישראל וכל הבריות הנה אני ניצב לקיים מצוות תקיעת שופר להשמיע קול זעקת הנפש. ויהי השופר הזה צינור למקד ולברר כח עזות דקדושה לשבור מעלינו עול מלכויות ורועים דס"א ולמצוא דרכנו לצאת מחשכת הבור. ואל יתגבר קול הברה של חטאי על קול השופר המפלס נתיב בעומק הלב לעלמא דחירותא ונאמר אמן |
For the sake of uniting the holy, blessed One and the Shekhinah,
of bringing closer the world as it is and the world as it could be,
I bring my fear and my love,
as I come for all of Israel and for all beings in the world,
I stand here to offer myself in the practice of blowing shofar, to give voice to the cry that rises within.
May this shofar be a channel,
To focus and clarify our power
To break free of tyranny, and to find our way out of the pit of darkness.
May the echoes of my own shadow not cover the pure sound of the shofar itself, as it carves a path into the depths of the heart,
where we will find a way out
Into freedom
And let us say -
Amen