I want to wish you my heartfelt blessings for a Shana Tova, a good year, a year of happiness and health, and above all peace.
But what is Rosh Hashanah? If you look in the Torah you will find that the day is never called Rosh Hashanah. Instead it is called Yom Teruah or Zichron Teruah, the day of blowing the shofar or the day of remembering the blowing of the shofar. The shofar is the key mitzvah and symbol of the day. But what does it symbolise? What does it represent? Clearly it’s a call, but who is calling whom and what are they trying to say?
Moses Maimonides, the greatest Rabbi of the Middle Ages, said the following: “Even though the blowing of shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a scriptural decree, nonetheless it contains a hint, a symbolism, namely “Wake up, you sleepers from your sleep and you slumberers from your slumber”. According to Maimonides, the shofar is God’s wake up call to us. But what does it mean to say that we are sleepwalking through life? And why do we need to wake up? How does that change our lives?
Maimonides continues with a remarkable statement that explains it all. He says, in effect, that we are judged by the balance of our lives. If most of our acts are good, then we are judged for good; if most are bad, we are judged for bad. And so the whole world; if its acts are, on balance, good then the world is judged for good, and vice versa. Then, says Maimonides, the shofar is telling us to regard our lives and the state of the world as if they were evenly poised between good and bad, and as if our next act could tilt the balance of our lives and of the world.
What a remarkable statement. It is so easy to think that we can’t really affect anything much in the world. After all, there is only one of us and there are 7 billion people on the face of the planet. What are we but a wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the seashore, dust on the surface of infinity?
But the Rambam says no. The shofar is telling us to wake up to the possibilities each of us has to change the world for the better. Because the truth is a single act of kindness, hospitality to the lonely, help to those in need, listening to someone who is close to despair, even a single smile, can bring healing to a life.
We never fully realise how much difference we can make. And if the Mishnah is correct when it says: “Nefesh achat ke'olam malei”, “One soul is like an entire universe”, then all we have to do is change one life to begin to change the universe, the only way we actually can, one life at a time, one day at a time, one act at a time.
The shofar is God’s call to us. Think of the possibilities that lie all around you to change someone’s life for the better. If you do that, you help write them in the Book of Life, and God then writes you in the Book of Life. That is the challenge to us all. In the enveloping darkness of a troubled and turbulent world, God’s call comes to us and says don’t think that you have no power to change the state of the world, you really do.
God is calling to us to heal some of the injuries of our fractured world. May He give us the opportunity to change someone’s life for the better, and may we be challenged by the call of the shofar to do just that in the days and years that lie ahead.
Shana Tova to you all.
