Mental health in the parsha – Rosh Hashana: The cry with no words
Going into this new year, there have been stretches where I didn’t have the words. Not for a speech, not for the machzor, not even for myself. Times the thing sitting in my chest was too heavy to name. There were times I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep going at all.
If any of that sounds familiar, then what I’m about to say is for us, and I think it might be the most understanding thing Judaism does all year.
We spend Rosh Hashana holding a machzor thick with words. Pages and pages of them. And then, right at the center of the whole day, we stop the words completely and do something that has none of them. We blow the shofar.
The holiest sound of the year isn’t a sentence. It isn’t even a word. It’s a raw, broken cry.
The sound is a cry
Our sages actually tie the shofar’s sound to crying. The broken notes, those short sobbing blasts, are built to sound like weeping. Like a person who has run out of language and is just making the sound that’s left when the words are gone.
Because some of what we carry doesn’t fit into words. We can be holding the machzor open to the perfect page and still have this thing in our chest that no sentence in there quite reaches. The feeling that’s too big, or too tangled, or too heavy to explain, even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves.
And Rosh Hashana looks right at that and says, okay. Then don’t use words. Just make the sound. The cry itself is the prayer.
There’s a place in it for all of us
Here’s what gets me most about that. A wordless cry is the one prayer that nobody is too anything for.
We don’t need the right words. We don’t need to be religious enough, or put together enough, or okay enough. The person with the most beautiful kavana and the person who can barely lift their head off the seat in front of them make the exact same sound. The shofar doesn’t sort us. It has a place for every single one of us, and most of all for the ones who walk in feeling like they don’t fit anywhere.
If we’ve been feeling like we’re on the outside of all this, like everyone else belongs and we’re just quietly getting through it, the sound has room for us too. Maybe most of all for us.
When it’s hard to go on
And let me say the hardest thing plainly, because someone needs to read it this year.
Some of us are walking into this new year genuinely not sure we can keep going. Not being dramatic. Just worn down in a way sleep doesn’t fix, carrying something we can’t put down and can’t explain. If that’s where we are, it doesn’t mean we’re weak, or broken, or failing at anything. It means we’re tired, and we’re human, and we’ve been carrying far too much, alone, for far too long.
The shofar was made for exactly that place. When there’s nothing left to say and no strength left to say it, we don’t have to find the words, and we don’t have to find the strength. We just make the sound, or we let someone near us make it for us, and it carries anyway.
The cry gets heard
There’s a reason we read about Hagar on Rosh Hashana, and it’s this same idea.
She’s out in the desert, certain her son is about to die, and she can’t even bear to watch. She just breaks down and cries. And then the Torah says וישמע אלוקים את קול הנער. Hashem heard the cry.
Not the speech. The cry. Nobody in that scene delivers a beautiful, well-worded prayer. There’s a mother sobbing and a child crying, and that is what reaches Heaven. The cry with no words gets heard.
The well was already there
And then look at what happens next, because it’s the other half of it.
Hagar is sure there’s nothing. No hope, no water, no way out. And the Torah says ויפקח אלוקים את עיניה ותרא באר מים. Hashem opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.
The well was there the whole time. She just couldn’t see it. The despair had closed her eyes to the very thing that could save her, and it was sitting right there in front of her.
That’s so honest about how the dark places actually work. When we’re deep in it, we’re completely sure there’s nothing and no one, no water anywhere. And sometimes the truth is that the well is closer than we can see, and what we need most is for someone to help our eyes open. That’s what a good friend, or a rabbi, or a doctor really does. They don’t invent the well. They help us see the one that was already there.
Today the world is born again
And here’s what makes it Rosh Hashana, and not just a hard day.
We say היום הרת עולם. Today the world is born. Today, right now, the whole thing begins again. Which means we are not sentenced to be whoever we were last year. The one of us who was so tired, so stuck, so sure nothing would ever change, gets a genuinely new page today. Not a lecture. A new page.
That’s the strange gift of this day. It holds both things at once. It takes our wordless cry completely seriously, and it also says, gently, this is a beginning. Both are true, on the very same morning.
What we can carry into the year
None of this is me having it figured out. It’s just what I want us to carry in together.
If we don’t have the words this year, let’s not force them. Let’s just make the sound. The cry is heard exactly as it is.
If we can’t see the well, let’s let someone help our eyes open. Not being able to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
If we’re not sure we can go on, let’s not carry that one more step by ourselves. Let’s tell one person. That is its own kind of shofar.
And let’s take the new page. Whoever we were last year, today the world is born again, and so, a little, are we.
May the sound of the shofar carry up everything we couldn’t say. May our eyes be opened to the wells we can’t see yet. And may this be a year of life, and health, and of never having to make the sound alone.
Shana tova.
If these days feel heavy, I also put together a short piece for the season called When the Machzor Feels Heavy.
You can read it as a flipbook at https://bit.ly/4cC5PPo, or as a
PDF, for reading or printing, at https://bit.ly/4cyHyK1.
Please share it widely, and feel free to print copies for your shul.
If any of this is sitting close to home, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. In Israel, ERAN’s emotional first-aid line is 1201. Wherever you live, a local crisis line, your doctor, or one person you trust is a good place to start. The well may be closer than you can see, and none of us has to look for it alone.
Dedicated l’ilui nishmat Zev (Will) Shakin, z”l, who loved Israel and lived v’ahavta l’reacha kamocha. May his memory be a blessing, and may his light keep reaching the people who need it.
Mental Health in the Parsha is a weekly series on the weekly Torah portion and what it can offer us right now. These thoughts are meant for reflection and conversation, not as a replacement for professional mental health care.
