‘Remember the days of old; contemplate the years of every generation’. Thus Moses admonishes the Jewish people in his farewell song. Rosh Hashanah is also a day of remembering. Indeed the name we accredit it in our prayers is ‘the Day of Remembrance’. Interestingly, unlike the liturgical names of other festivals, this designation seems not to be found in the Torah.. Though, maybe it is. In describing Rosh Hashanah, the Torah uses the term ‘a remembrance of the blowing of the shofar’, as a description of the day. So Rosh Hashanah is called a ‘day of remembrance’, but a special type of memory is called for. The memory or remembering of blowing the Shofar. What exactly are we meant to remember when we hear the sound of the shofar? There are various explanations, from the binding of Isaac to the coming of the Messiah, yet I believe a more basic, deeper understanding can be found. The common translation of the verse from our Parshah quoted above is ‘remember the days of old’. Yet the Hebrew can have a more basic meaning. Y’mot Olam, can also be translated as eternity. Moses is therefore calling on his people to remember, through in this case the contemplation of their history, their eternal destiny. This, indeed, can also be seen as lying at the heart of the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah. As Maimonidies famously comments, the blowing of the Shofar is meant to arouse us from our slumber and cause us to examine our lives. We are meant to wake up from our sleepwalking adherence to the material world and remember our eternal destiny. The shofar, like Moses’ farewell song, by reminding us of events in our past, causes us to contemplate our future destiny. Yet it goes even deeper. Moses used words to hammer home his message. The shofar uses that most spiritual of physical activities, the playing of music. Music has the ability to touch us when words fail. A song can transport us back to our childhood or wedding day. The sound of the shofar has the ability to go further. To lift us up to the very gates of heaven and let us taste the infinite. The question is, are we still asleep in our material slumber, or awake, listening to the sound of eternity.

TORAH PREVIEW

SHOFAR FACT FILE

1. The Torah requires us to blow a tekiah, teruah, tekiah three times.

2. As we don‘t know the precise nature of a teruah we blow both a shevarim, a teruah and a shevarim–teruah to be sure.

3. We thus blow 40 sounds from the Torah to which we add 30 during Musaf and 40 at the end = 100 altogether.

4. The length of the Tekiah must be at least the same length as the middle notes.