The Sound of Our Enemy’s Mother Weeping
The meaning and purpose of hearing the shofar: a Rosh Hashanah teaching
Dear Friends,
In a few days the sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn, will resound in synagogues around the world, heralding the Jewish New Year. This ancient, wordless call never fails to stir me. Among the many worthy interpretations of what the sound of the shofar is meant to represent, one powerful and poignant teaching reaches out to me at this moment from across the centuries, and I want to share it with you.
In the Torah, the purpose of the shofar is to assemble the community, to announce celebrations, and to muster the troops for battle. Sometimes the blast is called a tekiah and sometimes a teruah. The Torah gives no information about the duration or nature of these soundings.
When studying Judaism, it is essential to remember that the Torah is not the final word but rather the launching point for interpretation. The richness, depth and endless nuance of Jewish practice emerges over many centuries, a living tradition that continues to this day. The evolution of the meaning of the shofar blasts offers a great example of this process.
Our ancient sages audaciously transformed the purpose of the shofar blasts from an external call to gather, as described in the Torah, into an internal call to awaken us, to expand our consciousness. The sages insisted that in order to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the shofar, we must look inward, and direct our hearts to its deeper meanings.
They took the two general Biblical terms for blowing the shofar – tekiah and teruah – and added a third term, shevarim. They then assigned specific patterns for each of these different blasts, which we still utilize today. Tekiah is an unbroken blast, meant to call us together and to herald a New Year. Shevarim and teruah are shorter, broken notes. (Shevarim actually means “broken”.)
In the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 4:9), the authoritative compendium of Jewish practice compiled in the 3rdcentury CE, the rabbis describe what the broken blasts of the shofar are supposed to remind us of. The broken blasts are meant to remind us of yevava, which means “sobbing” or “weeping.” The broken calls of the shofar are meant to open our hearts to the sound of weeping.
But whose weeping are we being called to hear? In the art of Torah interpretation, one chooses words with careful intent. The rabbis utilize yevava to describe the sob-like quality of the broken shofar calls. But there are a number of much more common Hebrew terms for weeping. Why did they opt for yevava? That verb, it turns out, appears only once in the entire Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Judges. The sages want us to pay special attention to this verse:
“B’ad hachalon nishkefa vateyabev em Sisera” - “The mother of Sisera stood at the window, sobbing.” (Judges 5:28)
Who was the mother of Sisera? This passage is from the Song of Deborah. Deborah was a prophetess and judge who led the Israelite tribes in their very early days in the land of Israel. Israel was attacked by the Canaanites, led by their general Sisera. In a stunning military rout, Sisera’s army was defeated by the less well-armed Israelites, and then Sisera himself was killed. Deborah sings a song of victory. At the end of this song, she imagines Sisera’s mother: “Through the window the mother of Sisera gazed and sobbed, ‘Why is his chariot delayed in coming? Why are the hoof beats of his carriages so late?’”
Deborah imagines the enemy general’s mother weeping. Our sages teach: the broken sound of the shofar is not just the generalized sound of anguish. The teruah is to remind us of the crying of Sisera’s mother, when her son did not return home. Our enemy’s mother. Our sages teach: to fully respond to the call of the shofar, we must let even the crying of our enemy’s mother enter our souls.
This is a radical, challenging call to empathy. The sound of the shofar is meant to shatter the walls we erect between us and them. It is meant to challenge our certainties, to humble us, to soften us, to restore our humanity. Even in these dangerous times, this is how I want to enter the New Year.
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The Rabbis of the Mishnaic era were living amidst the ruins of Judea. Multiple Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire, fueled by messianic fervor, had failed. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, perhaps millions of Jews had been killed, enslaved, or exiled, and an ancient way of life based on pilgrimages to God’s house in Jerusalem was no more. A new version of Judaism was taking shape, and its framers took a dim view of militarism and hubristic excess. Again and again, the rabbis audaciously reinterpreted harsh commandments in the Torah in order to undercut and even defy their retributive intentions. They downplayed war and conquest, and instead centered lovingkindness, prayer, passionate study, and moral debate as the pillars of our way of life. It was in this spirit that they took the shofar blast, which in the Torah is essentially a call to arms, and added that it also must be a call to empathy.
This is the Judaism that carried us through our centuries of exile, and that endures to this day.
When the State of Israel was founded, many serious and thoughtful Jews grappled with how to translate the lessons of rabbinic Judaism, which holds a jaundiced view of political and military power, and an obsession with ethics, into the demands of statecraft and self-defense. They sought to create a nation worthy of its heritage. Other Jews insisted that power was the essential prerequisite for survival, and all other considerations, including moral ones, were secondary. Those worshippers of power now rule and direct the State of Israel.
Earlier this week, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz crowed, “Gaza is burning.” Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that, in the face of its increasing international isolation, Israel would need to become both “Athens and Super-Sparta.” This brazen identification of Israel with Sparta, the archetype of the ruthless and militarized city-state, is shocking, both insofar as Netanyahu is truthfully describing the direction Israel has taken, and in its utterly unapologetic denial of the pillars of Judaism. To align Jerusalem, whose very name means “City of Peace,” with Sparta is an abomination.
It is as though the Israeli government and its supporters at home and abroad can only hear the tekiah blast of the shofar, the call to arms, and are deaf to the message of the teruah, the call to empathy. In its current actions against the Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is engaged in a betrayal and perversion of Judaism.
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When I hear the blasts of the shofar in synagogue next week, my intention is to let all of them reverberate within me. May the unbroken clarity of the tekiah summon me to gather with Jews all over the world, to proclaim that the Jewish People lives and endures, to once again hear the sound that we heard at Mount Sinai, calling us into renewed covenant with each other and with the Source of All. May the sobbing calls of shevarim and teruah crack open the casing around my heart, inclining me away from hate, and towards compassion, even for the suffering of my enemies.
L'shanah tovah tikateivu – May you be inscribed for a good year,
Rabbi Jonathan Kligler
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Yasher Koah, cousin!
YiSHaR koach. Shanah Tovah