Rosh Hashanah 5783 ~ Sept. 23

Rosh Hashanah 5783 - Sherwood Forest & The Call of the Shofar

I have a rather loud, and what my family feels is an obnoxious, text message tone. It is called “Sherwood Forest,” and it truly alerts me to the fact that I have received a text, rather than the little ding sound that many have on their phones. But if you listen carefully to it, it actually has a resemblance to the sound of a shofar.

Did I simply want a loud sound that would wake me up to the urgency of the message, or did I choose the sound because it so resembles a shofar… keeping me attached to the call of my Jewish soul, resonating to the recollection of the first time I heard a shofar perhaps standing beside my parents in shul, or to the unspoken prayers that my soul yearns to express which the shofar is now offering on my behalf?

Does the tone call me to redirect my attention to the Robin Hood or the Avraham within me, to value the importance of Jewish values of tzedakah within me, the values of kindness, friendship and reaching out to others? Does it connect me to Har HaMoriah, which was transformed by King David and King Solomon, into the Holy Temple Mount in Jerusalem where Abraham blew the shofar, reawakening my inner sense to not only my own personal needs, but the world’s and its constant and consistent changes -- its new beginnings?

As we hear the tone of the shofar, may the beauty of its tone inspire within us all of the emotion of those thoughts that  allow our true prayer, as the Baal Shem Tov once said, “to  become a window to Heaven”, and  a window to our inward self, spiritually, emotionally and realistically as we usher in the High Holy Days and a New Year within our nefesh, within our spiritual selves.

Shabbat shalom and L’shana tova tikatevu, may you be signed into the book of life for the year to come.

Rabbi K