The Resounding Power of the Shofar

Rosh Hashanah is called in the Torah Yom Teruah and Zikhron Teruah – the Day of the Sounding of the Horn and the Day of the Remembrance of the Sounding of the Horn. Beyond the name, the date, and the requisite sacrifices, the Torah offers little guidance, leaving it to the rabbinic sages to give the day its meaning and substance.

Resh Lakish, the renowned 3rd-century sage of Eretz Yisrael and hevruta (study partner) and disciple of Rabbi Yohanan, offered a strikingly theurgic interpretation. He asserted that human action can directly influence God’s behavior:

Yehudah bar Nachman opened [the discussion] in the name of Resh Lakish: “God ascends amidst acclamation” (Psalms 47:6). When the Holy One, blessed be He, ascends to sit on His throne of judgment, He ascends with justice, as it is written: “God ascends amidst acclamation.” But when Israel take up their shofarot and sound them, the Holy One, blessed be He, rises from the throne of judgment and sits instead upon the throne of mercy, as it is written: “The Lord, amidst the sound of the shofar.” He becomes full of mercy, and He turns the trait of judgment into the trait of mercy for them. When does this occur? “In the seventh month” (Leviticus 23:24). (Pesikta d’Rav Kahana 23:3, Mandelbaum ed., pp. 336–7)

For Resh Lakish, the sounding of the shofar is prayer par excellence, an act that transforms Rosh Hashanah from Yom HaDin (the Day of Judgment) into a day of mercy. Its theological implications are profound: the blast of the shofar embodies the conviction that human actions carry cosmic weight, that what human beings do in this world matters, and that their deeds can move God.

Thus, one enters Rosh Hashanah as a subject before the King. Yet in sounding the shofar, Israel proclaims and enacts a deeper truth: that God listens, as it were, and responds.

Moreover, this teaching establishes a paradigm for humanity’s place in God’s world. If on this holy day human action can shift God from judgment to mercy, then surely our day-to-day choices also matter, shaping not only our own lives but the wider world.

The sounding of the shofar, then, is not only a call to awaken God to our concerns, but equally a call to awaken ourselves—to embrace the role God has entrusted to us as builders and repairers of the world. In this light, there is no greater way to celebrate the renewal of the year than by recommitting ourselves to that sacred task.