Listening to the Shofar - Tehila Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

and so now we're about to start the new year with the blast of the shofar and happy is the people that knows the shofar's bless they walk o lord in the light of your countenance happy is the people that know the shofar's blessed the people that know the secret of the shofar blessed were a happy people because were people that are committed to walking in his light and in that walk following our hearts guidance following our higher self our light inside us our guidance from a higher source beyond our habits beyond our instincts that's where we find our joy we build our integrity we find our character we find our meaning we live our best self and we taste our destiny happy is the people that know that secret of the shofar and so before we get started i want to invite to gila to share her thoughts about the inside meaning of the shofar of the new year i'm real torah from the real world so tahila here on continuing with our preparation for the upcoming festivals um today i would like to just share a little bit about some of the things that i've been thinking about the shofar um so i'll be honest sometimes i struggle a bit with the shofar you know the torah only gives us one commandment about rosh hashanah in bamidbachar numbers chapter 29 in the first verse it says that rosh hashanah is called a yom trua a day of blowing the horn this is just this you know we have all these other ideas about rosh hashanah like it's a judgment day and being written in the book of life and hashem is planning everything you know that's in store for us in the coming year and these are really important additions those are ideas that are passed down extensively in our oral tradition when the torah wants to neatly package up rosh hashanah into one nifty mitzvah it's really just the shofar that takes center stage and so this is what happens to me i'm in synagogue and i really don't want to mess this up right because there's like there's one mitzvah in the torah and i'm there i'm you know probably have a kid on my hip and a kid in the you know the carriage and i find myself like i'm waiting for the shofar and then there's this anticlimactic moment it's like here it comes they're going to blow the shofar oh shoot what should i be thinking what should i be praying what should my intentions be and then i'm just oh gosh there's so much pressure and then it's like and then it's over and i'm like what that was it i did i didn't i didn't i didn't get it all out i didn't i didn't like say to hashem in my heart all those things that i wanted to say so it's like this very nerve-wracking moment i hope i made it count anyway this past friday night this funny thing happened to me and it gave me a little bit of insight onto the subject so since corona we've been praying at home on friday nights because the synagogue and the town that's closest to our farm they have pretty they're pretty tight restrictions on the number of people they let into the synagogue and since we live kind of far away at the farm and we have a pretty significant walk we don't have much chance of making the cut um we've really actually been enjoying seeing all the friday night prayers together as a family um and so this past friday night uh we're sitting in the living room it's so nice and we get to psalm number 92 which is you know the beautiful psalm about the song of praise for the sabbath day and i have my eyes closed i'm thinking oh i just love shabbat and we're singing and singing and i'm i'm singing my little heart out and i realize that we sound absolutely terrible together i mean jeremy and the kids were really really off key and i didn't want to i don't want to say anything like we're in the middle of the song um they want to hurt their feelings so i just kept on singing on key a little bit louder and louder and hopefully they'll catch on you know they'll adjust to my voice and realize that you know they need to be singing along with me uh but the louder it's i sang it seemed like they were just singing off-key just as loudly and i'm thinking myself oh man did i give birth to a completely tone deaf bunch of kids so i just gave up and it was actually starting to hurt my ears but when i finally shut up i actually realized that they sounded pretty good and then it hit me that the one that was singing off-key was me and they were all just too nice to say anything and they just kind of kept on singing you know as i'm trying to not just sing off key but force my miserables singing on to them um and you know they were just too nice to say anything they just politely ignored me and kept on singing and i felt like wow i wonder if that happens to me a lot like maybe there are a lot of times that i'm sure that i'm right and that everyone else is wrong and i just you know want them to catch on to what i'm saying and i keep talking louder but maybe if i would just listen for a second i would see that there's something to what they're saying you know just kind of be quiet and listen a little more um and that got me thinking a little bit about the shofar if you just ask the guy off the street what's the myth about rosh hashanah he would probably say to blow the shofar and you say well what if you know if you don't have a shofar well you know then get someone else to blow chauffeur and you can listen but that's kind of you know second best right but if you carefully read the blessing that we say before the shofar it doesn't say blessed are you hashem master of the universe who commanded us to blow the shofar but rather it says blessed are you hashem who commanded us to hear the shofar and that's not just semantics that has practical repercussions like let's say you blow the chauffeur and you're just you know belting it out and doing a great job but you have some of those noise cancelling headphones or you're in like a really loud train station and you can't hear the shofar you actually didn't do the mitzvah even if you blew the shofar perfectly you have to actually hear it this is about internalizing about listening and when you think about it it's kind of unusual right we're so used to having commandments that we do in the festivals with our body right you you know it's like something you do you sit in the sukkah on sukkot you eat mata on pesach you bring the first fruits on shavuot but the mitzvah of rosh hashanah is to not actually do anything it's to stop talking stop praying stop thinking and just listen the rambam maimonides talks about the power of the shofar he says that we don't really know exactly why hashem wants us to hear the shofar on rosh hashanah but one of the important aspects of the shofar is that it's a wake-up call he says wake up wake up you sleepers because you can walk through life half asleep bumbling around bumping into things with no clarity of what you're doing um and you know the only way to come out of that is to say i'm going to wake up and listen i'm going to actually listen to what hashem has in store for me what does hashem want from me hashem is calling out for us all the time are we always listening the rambam kind of says it's like an alarm clock coming to wake us up um and in our own silence of listening to the shafar we have an opportunity to just absorb that wake-up call just be there and to hear it and to listen when i learned that idea it took off some of the pressure of having to what am i supposed to think about it's like hello you're not supposed to think about anything you're supposed to be listening rob cook in chapter 17 of his seminal work on repentance called the light of juva he says that the beginning the very root of the ability to repent lies in the skill of listening to the voice of hashem he says that doesn't mean that we don't have to change our actions right we have to go the long and exhausting you know walk that long and exhausting journey of correcting ourselves which is so hard right uh you know waging a war against our evil inclination but he says it's so much easier and deeper to do this if you accompany it with the correction of the most fundamental problem which is that sometimes we think of hashem as you know outside of us or far away from us he says the initial correction the ability to begin to do tuva to begin to to repent is by listening and realizing that hashem's voice is inside of us if you feel disconnected from hashem if you feel that hashem is far away how much easier it is to go astray but when we sharpen our ears that skill of listening with less talking and more hearing we can begin to correct that you know in yom kippur the high priest in the temple goes into the holy of holies this is like a super climactic thing and you would imagine that he would have some amazing prayer like a moving touching maybe even prophetic or divinely inspired um you know prayer to say but he goes in and he actually doesn't say anything because the deepest form of worship is actually just in the silence and in the listening you know i i think that you know a way to think about rosh hashanah is when we each go into our own personal holy of holies right in the temple of our heart that place where we look inside um and there's nothing really to say anymore just to tune in and to actually listen beyond words beyond our own intentions the things that we want to put out and ask hashem rather just turn inwards and start the year by seeing what hashem is asking of us so this year i'm setting my goal to just be present in the shofar to really really listen and i hope that i'll be able to wholeheartedly say the blessing the blessed are you hashem master of the universe that commanded us to hear the sound of the shofar thank you tehila that was absolutely gorgeous