Shofar and the Sounds of our Lives

“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself - Well...How did I get here?” Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”, 1981.“Death waits for no one - and if he does, he doesn't usually wait for very long.” Markus Zusak, Australian novelist.How do shofar sounds connect to the lives we all lead? Beethoven said that “music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” Why? Because music is a language that speaks directly to our hearts and souls. The language of the shofar comes in three distinct sounds. The first is tekiah –the long unbroken note. The second is shvarim, which in Hebrew literally means breaking, where the shofar wail begins to break down into three distinct sobbing notes. And the last is truah, those multiple staccato like blasts. And at the very end, we go back to the one long unbroken note, the tekiah gedolah – the great tekiah.The music starts out smooth and flowing and then it breaks down, mirroring the arc of our dreams and illusions. We all start out with a certain picture of who we were supposed to be or who we thought we were going to be, a fantasy of life, complete and unbroken. We are going to grow up and have wonderful friends and get a great job, be healthy, and find the love of our dreams.But then, inevitably, in some hard to predict way, the cracks appear. things don’t quite go how we thought they would. And slowly we have moved from tekiah to shvarim. One day we look in the mirror or step on the scale or get the bank statement or the doctor’s test results, or watch that person abruptly turn and walk out the door without looking back, and there is the lingering ache: "This is not the way I thought it was going to be at all. This is not where I thought I was going to be." And that’s when we hit truah.One way of thinking about shofar blowing, is about recognizing in our own lives, that movement from tekiah all the way to truah, to breakdown, and then—and this is the key—we make our way back to tekiah, and not just the tekiah we started with, but to a longer tekiah, to a healed life, one that we can still redeem. Rosh Hashana gives us that first opportunity of the Jewish calendar to check in with ourselves it’s going to be ok.And the way you can start this process is by using Rosh Hashana as a kind of full stop in your schedule, a time to check in and change course if need be. So, a question to ask yourself: What is my single most important goal for the coming year? What change do I wish to make immediately in my daily (weekly) schedule?One thing that people often do not realize about Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, is that at their root, they ar every optimistic, hope filled holidays. The High Holidays project an enormous confidence in our ability to turn our lives around and live meaningfully. To take one example from a phrase that recurs in Rosh Hashana prayer. In Hebrew it is “Hayom harat haolam,” roughly translated as “today the world was created or conceived.” This is not a statement about history or physics. We have no calendar for the world’s creation. But it is an immensely important idea in terms of our attitudes to our future.If today the world is created, we are speaking about living in the moment and not getting paralyzed by the past. If my life begins now, then whether the past was great or horrible, I can try to actively choose to renew my life now. To do that means first identifying what keeps me stuck. What event or moment(s) in my past do I think about the most? Why? What importance do I ascribe to it (them)? How does it affect my ability to live freely in the present?The psychologist Mordechai Rotenberg has a wonderful phrase: “I hope to have a wonderful past.” How I think about my life today and tomorrow can even affect that status of past events. Have you ever gone through something that was just terrible at the time, and you wished it had never happened and then, some time later, maybe even years, you say to yourself, `even though it was very painful at the time, if I had not gone through it and learned from it, I would not be the person I am today’. Every day is a chance not just to change the future, but also the past.So this Rosh Hashana, perhaps ponder the following: What might it be to live the life we actually want? What would that life look like? Who would populate your world? How would you spend your time? What would you change immediately, today? What would you give to yourself that you have denied yourself? How would you break the bonds of shame of self-denial; of not feeling deserving; of saying I will do it later/ tomorrow/next week/next year/never; of convention/of caution/of propriety/of social fear/of artificial standards – and instead say, “I own my life. It is mine and none other. I cannot live for everyone else. I am running out of time. I am going to live.”If your answer to this question is I have no idea, or I am not quite sure why I feel held back from living that life, then Rosh Hashana—through prayer, through shofar, through music and community--is there to give you the space to try and begin to formulate an answer, a plan. Treat these holidays as a reminder, a prompt in the middle of your day and a bell that rings in the middle of your night. Where are you at? Who do you wish to be? What is stopping you? And is there a place for others, even for God (however you conceive of that word) to aid you in that search? What would be a life of meaning of infinite value? Don’t I deserve that kind of life?