01 Sep ROSH HASHANAH: THE SOUND OF THE SHOFAR

The “highlight,” so-to-
speak, of the Rosh

Hashanah prayers is
the sounding of the
shofar. In all, 100
sounds are blown over
the course of the prayer service on Rosh
Hashanah.
What is the meaning and significance of
this mitzvah, and what should we be
thinking and feeling when we hear the
shofar sound?
To introduce the answer, let’s consider an
analogy to a very common situation: a
mother comes home and sees a big mess
in the house. She turns to her kids and
asks them to spend a few minutes
straightening up. She goes upstairs to
change.
When she comes back down, she sees the
exact same mess, and the kids sitting in
the exact same places where they were
beforehand. They completely ignored her
request, as though she did not even exist.
This simple scenario helps us understand

the concept of teshuvah, repentance,
which is what the shofar blowing is all
about.
Whenever we sin, whenever we do
something wrong, we are, in effect,
ignoring Hashem. We’re acting as though
Hashem is not here with us, as though He
is not part of our lives. After all, if we
made Him part of our lives, if we were
aware of His presence, then we would
never have dared to do something He told
us not to do. So, each time we commit a
sin, we are pushing Hashem out of our
lives a little more.
Teshuvah is the desire to bring Hashem
back into our lives. It is a fierce, desperate
longing to restore that relationship, the
feeling that we cannot live without Him,
that we need Him with us.
This explains the Gemara’s famous
teaching that when a person performs
teshuvah sincerely, his sins are not just
erased but transformed into merits. This
is astonishing – our sins can become
mitzvot if we perform teshuvah properly.

We actually receive
reward for the sins! How
does this work?
The answer is that when
we perform teshuvah, the
distance created by the
sin makes us long for
closeness with Hashem
even more. We feel
disconnected from Him,
and this makes our
yearning much stronger.
It thus turns out that the
sin led to a strengthening of the person’s
bond with Hashem, and so it is
transformed into a mitzvah.
The sound of the shofar has no words. It
is a cry from the innermost depths of our
souls. We are crying out for closeness
with Hashem. We are yearning for a
stronger relationship. When we hear the
shofar sound, we should be thinking
about how much we want and need
Hashem in our lives, and how much we
regret driving Him out of our lives
through our mistaken behavior. This isn’t

about being sad; it’s about longing and
yearning, a desperate feeling of needing
someone whom we had pushed away.
If we can experience this longing on
Rosh Hashanah, then we will transform
our misdeeds into great sources of merit,
and, no less importantly, we will put
ourselves in a position to make this
coming year much better than the
previous year, a year when we avoid
many of the mistakes we’ve made in the
past, and when we truly live with Hashem
each and every day.