Kol Demamah Dakah- The Still Small Voice A Reflection for Rosh HaShanah, 5786
Dedicated to the complete return of all the hostages and the safety of our siblings, defending the State of Israel.
- The Temptations of Forgetting
I would like to share with you a particular temptation I have experienced in the past year, simmering just under the surface. I know I am not alone.
One of the names of Rosh Hashanah is Yom Hazikaron, the days of memory. Indeed, for Jews the key to redemption is always found in the act of memory, and the fear of forgetting, for in forgetting we lose who we are.
Yet memory is a double-edged sword. Psychiatrist have identified a phenomenon known as the mnemonist, the person who simply does not forget. You may remember what you ate for breakfast on 9/11; the mnemonist remembers what he had for breakfast on 9/10. Every event, every moment, is filed away and constantly accessed. For some people, the personality begins to disintegrate, as the inability to distinguish between that which is important and that which is fleeting creates a sense where one lives in the light of an infinite progressions of events, the vast majority we would deem ultimately forgettable.
We live in a so-called information age, and yet paradoxically in the relentless bombardment of sound bites, our lives do not become more enriched and informed, but rather we become emotionally numb like the mnemonist, who cannot distinguish what is worth retaining and what is worth jettisoning into the trash heap of oblivion. News seems like a relentless barrage of negative events, of vitriol. This is a deeply dehumanizing moment in our culture, fueled by nihilism and mass despair masquerading as righteous anger. Language has become vulgar, signifying self-importance, but actually denoting truly little. Compassion and empathy, fundamental qualities of healthy societies, are often seen as signs of weakness. For us, Jews and the State of Israel have become the convenient objects of the collective grievances of a culture that has lost its footing- its grounding in any meaning or real truth.
More than ever, there is a temptation to forget and detach, for forgetting can feel liberating, even freeing, We unload ourselves of the negativity, the toxicity, the claims of others and allow ourselves to just be in the moment. This is the temptation to which I alluded to in the beginning. (A pastoral care message: you must find time for self-care and detachment if you have any chance of maintaining your equanimity, much less your sanity.) The memory of recent years feels like an unbearable burden.
However, in the process of forgetting there is a danger. We can give up on history, our community and the world as well, as we turn inward and find towers of isolation away from the chaos surrounding us.
We cannot give up, however; our tradition teaches us that one must wake up every day with the adage, “the world was created for me.” This does not mean what an egoist might assume, that ‘I am the center of the world.’ Rather, it means that I am unique in this world, called for a purpose, and the world cannot be all it could be without my active participations. By not assuming who we really are, we also deny our own greatness, and the world cannot be fully redeemed!
The key to the days of remembrance of Rosh Hashanah is not to remember everything. Rather, remember what is important and to forget what is essentially irrelevant. We do this through listening to the sound of the shofar. But how? What is the connection between horn blasts and remembering?
Quite a lot.
- The Sound of the Shofar
Consider the opening lines of the famous Ashkenazi prayer U’Netaneh Tokef. In this prayer, the angels are said to be trembling in the light of the Divine Presence. The judgement of the entire world is at hand! “Who will live and who will die?” What awakens them to the gravitas of the day? The shofar:
The great shofar is sounded, and a still, soft voice is heard; the angels tremble, fear and dread seize them, and they exclaim: the Day of Judgment is here!
What in essence is the Shofar in this image? It is the herald of the Divine King. Just as a monarch is announced by sounding trumpets, here God’s heavenly retinue realize that God is in their midst. That realization engenders complete terror, but there is nowhere to hide.
The descriptions of the shofar, however, are instructive. On the one hand, the ‘great shofar’ is blown. One would imagine an overpowering sound, a sound so overwhelming that it is not only heard but actually felt in one’s body. On the other hand, it is manifested as ‘a still, soft voice,’ a sound that seems to be barely audible. One needs to attune oneself to even hear it. These images seem to be mutually exclusive. Yet, these two images, contradictory as they are, reference two moments in our lives in which the Divine is experienced.
- The Shofar: God’s Presence at Mount Sinai
Many verses in the Rosh HaShanah liturgy- especially the Shofarot section of the mussaf prayer- reference the resounding sound of the Shofar during God’s revelation at Mount Sinai.
You were revealed in Your cloud of glory to Your holy people to speak to them. From the heavens, You let them hear Your voice and revealed Yourself to them in pure clouds. So too, the entire world quivered before You, and the works of creation trembled before You, when You, our King revealed Yourself upon Mount Sinai to teach Your people Torah and mitzvot. You let them hear the majestic splendor of Your voice, and Your holy words from flames of fire; amidst thunder and lightning You revealed Yourself to them, and with the sound of a shofar, You appeared to them, as it is written in Your Torah: “And it was on the third day, as morning dawned there was thunder and lightning, and a dense cloud over the mountain, and the sound of a shofar was exceedingly loud; and all the people in the camp trembled
This liturgy refers to a moment immediately before the Ten Commandments. God descends upon the mountain and the mountain is aflame. The people hear the sound of the shofar, with the sound steadily increasing. This is the image in the prayer Unetaneh Tokef as well. This is the ‘great shofar’ referenced above. In both the prayer and the Biblical text, the sound engenders terror and trembling. At Sinai, the people are about to enter into a covenant with the demands of the Infinite, God’s Torah and mitzvot. With the case of the angels, they tremble because they know the world is being judged based upon the faithfulness to that covenant.
In both cases, what is important to understand is that on Rosh HaShanah we are awoken. We are reminded of the fact that to be a Jew is to be someone who lives his or her life in faithfulness to this Divine call. In our response to the Divine call, initiated at Sinai, our lives are enlarged. In the contemporary Jewish world, there are many interpretations as to how we might understand and interpret the Divine word. What is not debated is that to be a Jew is to be called, to be obligated. Ultimately to be a Jew is not ethnic in nature, but to respond to this call. Seen this way, every year Rosh HaShanah should be understood as a renewal of our covenantal obligations.[1] The sound of the shofar is to resonate within our hearts the initial revelation of Sinai, when we became God’s people.
In fact, according to some authorities, it is a mitzvah to remember revelation at Sinai , or at least not to forget ( Deut. 4:9-14). As Jews we are called to be a people of memory, and not merely to remember ourselves but transmit this memory to the next generation. In doing so, every act of remembering in a sense resonates with this initial call, our mission to the world. Memory obligates us to be a people filling the world with Torah and with mitzvah, for each of us individually and collectively to understand that we are to emulate the Divine in how we live our lives daily. We are to live enlarged existences reflective of the Divine- human partnership to which we are called.
- The Shofar: God’s Internal Revelation
However, for so many, we live in a ‘post-theological’ world, where I fear these images -of a far-off mountain, of fire and lightening, of Divine voices- fall on deaf ears. For many who have lived relatively secular lives without ritual, denied the transmission of memory, these images are exceedingly difficult to experience. To be truthful, even for many of the faithful, these images may be invoked, but I am unsure many actually can feel or even imagine such a moment. For so many, when they hear the shofar, they do not feel ‘the great shofar’ of the moment of Sinai.[2]
However, there is another type of revelation that indeed can still be accessed by all, if one if willing to attune themselves to the art of sitting in silence and contemplation. Interestingly, while the Torah enjoins us to remember the moment of Sinai, the Torah is also emphatic that you saw no images of the Divine but only heard a voice. We tend to think that the greatest revelations are those things that are visible to the eyes, but what we see can be deceiving. In Judaism, what is important is not the art of seeing, but the art of really listening.
Franz Kafka in his Blue Notebooks, a collection of brief thoughts, invokes a striking image instructive for us.
Everyone carries a room inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
Here our inner soul is compared to a room. We ‘furnish this room and decorate it’, creating a place for us to live. For most of our lives we feel comfortable and accustomed to the familiar objects. However, there are moments in our lives, moments of silence, when we hear the mirror rattling; something is indeed not right about our room. Why the mirror? Mirrors are that which reflect us to ourselves. At these silent moments, we realize the mirror is not quite right, and by extension our vision of ourselves. It is an internal revelation of sorts. In these moments our complacency is shattered. This is the second image of the shofar of Unetaneh Tokef, “the still, small voice.”
Interestingly, this image of attuned listening comes from Sinai as well, but in a radically different context. The image is taken from an episode in the life of the profit Elijah. In the story, Elijah escapes to Horeb (another name for Sinai), fleeing from the evil Jezebel, who seeks to kill him. He happens upon a cave forty days and nights, clearly alluding to Moses’ ascent to the top of the mountain. The cave in rabbinic thought is the rock outcropping where Moses asked to see the ‘face of God’, but God will only show his ‘backside”. Atop Mount Sinai, Elijah too has a vision.
As the Lord approached, an immensely powerful wind tore the mountains apart. It broke up the rocks. But the Lord wasn’t in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire came. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. And after the fire there was only a gentle whisper (kol demmemah daka). When Elijah heard it, he pulled his coat over his face. He went out and stood at the entrance to the cave. Then a voice said to him, “Elijah, what are you doing here?” (Kings 1 9:11-14)
On the top of Sinai Elijah too sees a ‘pyrotechnic display,’ but the text is again emphatic that God is not found in these fleeting images, but rather in a kol, a compelling sound. However, unlike the shofar of revelation in which the sounds of the shofar are overwhelming, here God is revealed as a small voice, a gentle whisper. Only when one listens closely does one hear this voice. In our prayer as well, the shofar is not only seen as an external call from above, but an internal call from within, experienced through the act of listening. Just like Elijah, in those moments of silence, in the sound of the shofar we can hear the voice of the Divine asking us, “What are we doing here?” The world of illusory images- of media and ‘influencers’ – are so committed to distracting each of us from this critical question. No wonder the angels- and we- may shudder.
A midrash teaches that when we are yet still in the womb, and angel comes to us, teaching us the entire Torah. However, at the moment of birth, the angel touches us on the lips, and we completely forget everything we have learned. Understood this way, Torah is implanted within our very souls, and the act of learning is not a project to learn something never understood, but to retrieve something that was forgotten, lost. The voice of the Divine resides within our hearts, and the sound of the shofar seen this way is not so much the voice from beyond, but the voice from within. Detached from the cacophony all around us, in the sound of the shofar we can access this call as well.
“What are we doing here?” When we can answer this question, we regain purpose and agency, enlarging ourselves and our lives. While each of us will interpret this call individually, collectively I believe there is one call this year each of us must hear.
- The Work in Front of Us
Rosh Hasahanah this year is falling during a dark time in history- for the Jewish people and for the world. Our world has become increasingly tribal, and the Divine image inherit in each one of us has been degraded. Hateful words and the lack of compassion have slid into political violence.
Rabbi Norman Lamb z’l, in a sermon for Rosh HaShanah following the political upheavals in the 1960s, culminating with assassinations of President and Senator Kennedy as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King, spoke about his age like the era before the flood. Interestingly, the Torah tells us that the earth at that time ‘ had become full of hamas.” (Yes, you heard that correctly.) In Hebrew, the rabbis understood this term as violently taking that which does not belong to you, a world in which all boundaries and limits are crossed. Fifty years ago, Rabbi Lamn prophetically diagnosed our national malady:
In the eyes of God and Torah, chamas is not only a matter of the dramatic assassination that makes the headlines, but it is as well the thousand little assaults that we perpetuate every day against our neighbor’s sensitivity, a friend’s ego, a mate’s peace of mind, a parent’s dignity, a child’s self-respect, a colleagues self-worth, a competitor’s equal opportunity.[3]
He continues to teach that one does not need to physically kill another to be guilty, but we can be guilty of hamas ‘in tiny little installments,’ in the daily acts we do. Political violence grows out of a culture in which we no longer see ourselves in the other.
The shofar is the call from God, both from beyond and within, challenging us to bring more Godliness into this world. As the Divine image has been eclipsed in our age, so has the human image, allowing indescribable violations of our human dignity.
The call of the shofar is not only for Jews, but for humanity. It is a wake-up call, alerting us to who we are called to be in this world. In today’s toxic brew of hatred and strife, forgetting is very tempting, but ultimately an abdication of our covenantal obligations to fill this world with the sacred. Ultimately the surge of war and violence we see in our world, will not be defeated through that same violence- even as it is sometimes necessary – but through the elevation of the Divine/human partnership implied in call of the shofar, an annual reminder for us to remember what is most important in life.
In these dark times, let’s allow the shofar’s call to pierce our hearts. I think we need this more than ever. May this year bring us each the renewal for which we pray- for ourselves, our families, and the entire world.
Shanah Tova.
[1] Indeed, some historians understand Rosh HaShanah as a covenant renewal ceremony. There are elements of this in Nehemiah 7:72-83.
[2] I thank Rabbi Larry Hoffman for bringing this insight to consciousness in an extended conversation with him on the very issue of how we renew liturgy and theological language.
[3] R. Norman Lamn, The Royal Reach, p.110