Sermon: Rosh Hashanah: The Danger of Pressing del*.*

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 18 September 2012

Well before I became a Rabbi I ran a business distributing natural and healthy foods to mass caterers.  We ran a little fleet of vans taking Carrot Cakes to the National Theatre, vegetarian meals of stuffed holoshke cabbages to British Rail depots, onion and spinach bhajis to Nottingham university, Chocolate fudge biscuit cakes to the sandwich bars of all of Britain’s major cities.   This is not a sermon I could give on Yom Kippur!

 

We were a go ahead business and this was the late 1980’s – so we ran our accounts and our deliveries by computer – the state of the art for small businesses of the day with a memory of 10 mega bytes. Now 25 years later that is rather a lot less than the memory used to store just three photographs on your home computer.

 

What this meant is that we did not have enough memory storage on the computer to keep a record of all of our deliveries and so every last day of the month we – but which I mean I – needed to come into the warehouse late at night to print off the months’ invoices for our records and then to delete them all from the computer so that it could keep going.   To do this I had to type in these letters – and precisely these letters:  del *.inv   which in old fashioned computer speak means delete all of the old invoices – * meaning all and inv indicating invoices.  I did this month after month for a couple of years – and then came the dreadful night when it all went wrong.

 

Like I said all I had to do was to print off the invoices then press del *.inv.  That night I pressed the wrong buttons del *.*   There was a sharp intake of breath then from those of you who know computers and what that particular configuration of keys means – it means destroy everything and start again.  So every single record on our computer – of every delivery, every stock item, every supplier, and every customer in one keystroke disappeared.  Ouch!

 

Twenty hours of typing later we existed again.   Deliveries could be made again and the vans could roll out of the warehouse with the snack foods Britain probably didn’t really need.

 

Now on your mobile phone today you will find that there is a reset button somewhere on it or a function on the screen which allows you to reset your phone to say the factory settings.  And if you did press this button – you really would not have to worry – the whole phone would be carefully configured to ensure that you couldn’t wipe everything out and need to start setting the phone up from scratch – most of the functions that you would need would still be there ready for you to use.    We will come back to it.

 

But now I would like to go from new tech to old tech.  Judaism is full of portable symbols honoured by time that mean a lot.  Jews don’t build cathedrals because our history tells us that the cathedral can be destroyed by anyone who decides that they don’t want us around.  Our symbols of the power of the Jewish religion are little portable things that you can take to any hovel, make again if they don’t last the journey.  They are the Shabbat Candlesticks which symbolise a household which seeks God’s presence at least weekly, the Mezuzah which is a box – any kind of box with a simple scroll inside to say that the inhabitants of the house take on the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, the challah cloth which says that food in the house is appreciated as we say blessings to mark our appreciation of God’s bounty, the Chanukkiah whose lights on the festival of Chanukkah tell the world that this household or this community is proud that the light of Judaism cannot be snuffed out by anyone.

 

One other portable Jewish symbol is so basic and so elemental that it only has one component.   It is instantly recognisable and it can be created anywhere a Jew settles.  It is this – the Shofar.  Such an obvious symbol of Rosh Hashanah which we will again hear sounded just a few minutes from now.  The shofar – a ram’s horn, derived midrashsuggests, from the horn of the ram which Abraham sacrificed in place of his son.    Who could ever think of using anything else to herald the New Jewish Year?

 

Actually the Torah does not specify that a Shofar should be used.  In the passage in the Book of Leviticus where the festival we are celebrating today is introduced, it is called a Yom Teruah – a day of sounding or blowing – but it does not say there what should be blown.

 

Elsewhere in the Torah when the word teruah is used it clearly refers to the sound made by a silver trumpet, not to a ram’s horn.  These are the trumpets which were made to indicate that it was time for the encampment of the Israelites to move forward on their journey (Numbers 10:2).  There is one time in the Torah where the word teruah is used in connection with the Shofar – but this in not on the day that came to be Rosh Hashanah – rather the Shofar is sounded in the Torah on Yom Kippur – the day when land was returned every fifty years to the tribes to which it was originally assigned on the original jubilee.  The Torah just isn’t certain.

 

When we hear the Shofar sound one of the things that is really special about it is that we feel in our bones that we are hearing the same sound that our ancestors heard for generation after generation after generation at this time on this day right back to the dawn of Judaism.  But is this Shofar what our ancestors really heard?  The Mishnah, (Rosh Hashanah 3:3-4) the record of what was done in Judaism eighteen hundred years ago says actually – no.  What our ancestors used to hear in the Temple in Jerusalem on Rosh Hashanah was not just Shofar – but also two silver trumpets sounded on either side of the Shofar blower.  All three would be blown together – with the shofar sounded for longer on each music phrase so that its would be the sound you were left with.

 

That’s not how we do it today – we now only hear the shofar – and there is an elaborate ritual of how we hear it – the exact sounds that are made, their sequence and number – the glorious last blow of the shofar, the Tekiah Gedolah for which there are two traditions – one of them is that the Tekiah Gedolah should be only twice the length of a regular tekiah – really not long enough to soar with – the other is the tradition that is followed in our Synagogue and most around the world, that the Tekiah Gedolah should last as long as the shofar blower has one breath to blow it – and this is hiddur Mitzvah – the optimal performance of the duty.

 

Why today do we hear the shofar only?  Rabbi Meir Shweiger tells us it is exactly because the Shofar is so simple – just a simple hollowed out and polished horn – nothing else.  What happened to the trumpets?  The trumpet is grand and makes a terrific sound .  After all the mitzvah on Rosh Hashanah is not to blow the shofar, but to hear the shofar – as we will state in the first blessing for the shofar which we will say in a few minutes “asher kidshanu  b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu lishmoa kol shofar”  thanking God for enabling us to hear the sound, and surely we would do best to hear the grandest sound possible.  But the trumpet is a man made object, carefully fashioned, from materials smelted from the earth’s core.  The shofar is as simple as you can get it – as close to the origin of our bodies and the bodies of the animals we live amongst as possible.

 

So what we hear says Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, when we hear the shofar, is the voice of God calling to us – the most elemental sound, unadulterated by human intervention.  When we play the man made trumpet it is the voice of humanity calling back – because we made that.    And that said Rabbi Hirsch is why the trumpet left Rosh Hashanah.

 

The Shofar is the closest we can get to God calling us – it is the sound heard in Torah at Mount Sinai when God calls us to received the Mitzvot, the commandments, which order and give meaning to our lives, and there it is referred to by name – no trumpets on that day.  It was the sound of God commanding us to restore a decent social order where all Hebrew slaves were freed and everyone had the wherewithal to live, in the Book of Leviticus when the Jubilee was declared.  And there too the Shofar is referred to by name.

 

A famous passage in Maimonides Mishnah Torah puts words into the sound of the Shofar:  “Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber…examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator.”     The Mitzvah, the Jewish duty, is not to blow the shofar, the person doing it is merely enabling it to make the sound.  The Mitzvah is to for you and me to hear the shofar.  It means that each and every one of us here today and everywhere around the world where Jews are gathered for Rosh Hashanah is equally and individually obligated to hear the voice of God from the sounds that will be made – elemental, basic, simple and not so tough to understand.

 

The Shofar sounds say on this day – reset.  They do what that button on your phone does – enable you to stop doing the things that tie you up in knots, that feel like habits that cannot be broken, that have established themselves as ways of life that are destructive – that are sins, missing the target that we know God has set us.  Reset.

 

The Shofar sounds do not say del *.* – get rid of everything that you were or have been. The past is still meaningful, the relationships that you have built are relevant, the challenges that you have faced have not disappeared.  The sound of the Shofar which each and every one of us hears – in this service, in all of our family services, in the homes of house bound members of our synagogue where a shofar blowing member enables any who wish to hear the sound – says simply reset.

 

Return to and find the potential to pray – if your life says that there is no time for reflection, no chance to stop and reach out beyond the everyday, no opportunity to join your community as together we call out to God – then right now as you hear the sound of the shofar – reset.  Open yourself to that possibility – come and join Alyth at prayer on Shabbat in the many ways possible or even on Sunday morning in our Shacharit and bagels group, or pick up your Siddur at home and pray yourself.

 

If the year just past has been one where you feel that you have learned nothing new to make Judaism mean more to you, where our sources have not revealed to you new wisdom and new perspectives – then right now as you hear the sound of the shofar – reset – get ready to search out the opportunity to learn this coming year – here in London there are so many opportunities available, through our Synagogue and its Otzar programme, through our Leo Baeck College and through the many offerings of Jewish learning and at home in books or through the internet.

 

If you have found that it has been very difficult to live a life of decency and giving – a life of being a mensch where the welfare and happiness of others, your family, your friends and the many whom you could help beyond your immediate circle – has been tough to reach through the pressures of everyday then reset.  Let the sound of the Shofar push you to reach further, to find a place to help make the world better this year.  It could be as simple as visiting someone who is isolated, joining one of our many Alyth Social Action projects which put you in contact with people who benefit hugely from our help in London, in Kerch and further afield, it could be finding a cause that means much to you and giving a little of your time now.

 

In just a few minutes the first of the three sequences of blowing the shofar will begin with Nachman of Bratslav saying “other powers than God rule over you if you separate your will from God’s will”  and Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck saying “the kingdom of God is not a miraculous future.  It is always present and demands [only] a beginning and decision from man.”

 

May the sound of the Shofar reset each one of us to a future closer to the best that we can be.

 

Cen Yehi Ratzon