Category: Rosh Hashanah

And we walked, the two of us together — my father and his littlest daughter — winding our way back from the Western Wall where we had just welcomed Shabbat. “Take a look at this,” he said out of nowhere, pointing to the open chumash (pentateuch) in his hand: “Vayashkem” — “vayashkem”; “Vayikra… malach” — “vayikra malach…,” showing me the many parallels between Genesis 21’s banishment of Ishmael and Genesis 22’s binding of Isaac. In each story, Abraham wakes up early (21:14, 22:3); in each he submits to God’s command to sacrifice, literally or figuratively, a beloved son (17:18, 21:10-11, 22:2 with Rashi); in each case God, through the proxy of an angel, ultimately spares the child from death (21:16-19, 22:11-12); in each, God promises that the son will become a great nation (21:18, 22:17-18.)

I have no idea why my father mentioned these stories that late-summer night. Perhaps he had begun, uncharacteristically early, to review the Torah portion which he leined every year in shul on Rosh Hashanah, which also happened to be his birthday. “What do you think it means?” he asked. I did not offer any brilliant insights, nor, to the best of my recollection, did he. But I remembered his question — the first time in my memory that someone asked me for my thoughts about a Torah story, rather than offering their own. And so every Rosh Hashanah, as I would listen to my father publicly read those stories in that beautiful, haunting melody, and wonder about the parallels and their significance, I would wander through the text, contemplating why we read them on that day. In retrospect, I realize that it was my father’s question that handed me a candle to explore dark, unclear passages, and illuminate them, find meaning, and make them my own. At times, I would explore accompanied by companions, upon whose shoulders I stood. Just as often, however, I’d head off to meander on my own, lantern in hand, and encounter others along the way with whom I could compare notes.

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There is this famous scene in Harry Potter when Professor Snape shows us that after all these years, even though his true love has died and even though she chose another, he still loves only her. After all these years, “always”…. It is a profoundly moving scene and reminds me of the Torah readings we encounter on Rosh Hashanah: when we confront G-d who operates according to His own plan and not necessarily ours, and then climaxing on Tzom Gedaliyah — when we are forced to confront the enemy that is ourselves.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, we read about the birth of Isaac — the dream of Abraham and Sarah, finally realized – and we hear a hint of Sarah’s discomfort, as she says: ”Anyone who hears of this will laugh.” This laughter can be joyous and celebratory, or mocking and shameful. She finally gets her dream of having a child, but at such a late age that she becomes famous as the strange old lady who had a baby. Certainly not what she had in mind when she asked for a child.

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That moment when the communal representative mounts the bimah, holds the shofar, inhales and blows into the animal horn releasing a primal baritone burst, the mitzvah of the shofar finds its form. Some people close their eyes and others fix their stare. What races through your mind? What do you think about during the sounding of the shofar?

The physical instrument itself, the ram’s horn, conjures the moment in the binding of Isaac when the ram caught by its horns redirects Avraham’s religious zeal and spares Isaac the fate of being the sacrifice. Rabbinic scholars highlight the shofar’s necessary bent form as a model of humility and dismiss the use of a cow horn or one laiden with gold as unnecessarily bringing up the painful context of sin of the golden calf at an inopportune time.

The biblical context of sounding a shofar includes a call to arms, ritual in the Temple, the revelation at Sinai, the end of the Jubilee cycle where all financial debts are forgiven, and in the prophetic description of the ingathering of the exiles and ultimate redemption.

Read the full article on the Times of Israel