Shanah Tovah.
Day 2 – The Sound of Empowerment
I
As a rabbi, one of the best things that can happen in any social situation is that someone comes up to you with a halakhic question. Even better if it’s a stumper! The real pinnacle of rabbinical interaction though, the, forgive the reference, holy grail of she’elot is one where the party with the question introduces it by saying: No rabbi, ever, has ever been able to answer this question. Boy – do we rabbis love a challenge.
Recently, at a beautiful bat mitsvah party, my turn finally arrived. The moment we all wait for graced me with its ethereal presence – and the question, the one that has never been adequately answered (this was my chance!) was this:
Why do we say the blessing on hearing the shofar when the Torah commands us to blow the shofar?
I have to say – generally I think I avoid a lot of the worst pitfalls of rabbinic egotism, but I actually was surprised at how shocking this question was. He was right! The blessing doesn’t match the mitzvah! Worst of all – I had no idea why.
II
Here’s the story – and stay with me, because it gets a bit technical.
Let’s start with the Torah. The very first verse of Numbers 29 says: “And in the seventh month, on [day] one of the month, a proclamation of holiness there is to be for you: any-kind of servile work you are not to do. A day of blasts it is to be for you.”
That’s it – that’s the source. The Sages latter firm up the details – the blasts should be on a Shofar and not a Trumpet (both were options, and both were used in ancient Jewish worship). The blasts should be of three kinds (essentially, they had no idea what kind of blast was described so they mixed together every sort they knew into the jumble of sounds we know today). The horn must be from a kosher animal in the sheep family, etc. Fast forward 1000 years from the Torah and we have a fairly clear notion that we are obligated to blow the shofar on the first of Tishrei. Right? Well…
If it was so clear cut, then the blessing we would say upon blowing the shofar would be about blowing the shofar. That is what is commanded. Instead, we say lishmo’a kol shofar, that we are commanded to hear the sound of the shofar.
When this question was posed to me, I was temporarily speechless – it had never occurred to me that the two didn’t match. Now that my questioner pointed it out, I couldn’t unsee it – and I had to know why. What happened? Did we change the law? Did we change our minds about what the Torah means?
III
It turns out that the blessing did change. Rabbi Achai Ga’on, one of the first Jewish sources after the closure of the Talmud, who lived in the 7th century, records that the blessing should conclude litko’a bashofar, ‘to blow the shofar’. It isn’t just Achai, there’s a whole slew of early Jewish sources between the 7th and 12th centuries which take for granted that the commandment is to blow the shofar and the blessing should match, including some big hitters like Rabbeinu Tam, the Semag, and many others.
Perhaps you’re thinking – who cares?! So what, the words of the blessing are different?!
The reason this matters is not just because the words are different – it is because the assumption underlying those words is very very different. There’s only one mitzvah on Rosh haShanah. That’s it. Today there is only one commandment that we are fulfilling by being here. Any guesses? It’s shofar – but what is the obligation exactly? Is your obligation today on Rosh haShanah to blow the shofar? Or is it simply to hear the shofar? Are you, and everyone, required to each grab a shofar and blow it? Or is it enough just to sit and listen?
If our tradition had taken the other fork in the road. If we had affirmed that the mitzvah today is to blow the shofar – how different would today look? Rather than sit passively while someone else performs the mitzvah, each of us would be standing, shofar in hand, making a cacophonous noise in here. It sounds wonderful and chaotic and empowering. So we need to know, why did it change?
IV
The change is stark. One of the primary texts of the early rabbis, the Tosefta, says הכל חייבין בתקיעת שופר – every person is obligated to blow the shofar. Then, in a dramatic about-face, the first ever code of Jewish law, written by Maimonides nearly a thousand years later, says exactly the opposite: הַכּל חַיָּבִין לִשְׁמֹעַ קוֹל שׁוֹפָר – every person is obligated to hear the sound of the shofar. These dueling texts offer very different visions of practice.
Maimonides gives no explanation as to why he changed the obligation to be about hearing and not blowing.
There are two primary theories that explain the swap – one more generous than the other. First is that Maimonides had a different version of the Talmud or Tosefta in front of him – that he actually was looking at an existing text that said the mitzvah was to hear the shofar and simply copied that principle. If such a version did exist we have no record of it, and we know that generally Rambam was very careful about using good manuscripts and about updating his own writings when he became aware of an error.
The other theory is simply that Rambam didn’t like the notion that everyone would be blowing their own Shofar. If you spend any time studying Rambam’s works, you quickly discover that he can be…just a wee bit elitist. He generally doesn’t trust regular people to do things right, and tends to prefer that the important jobs are handled by the educated, the intellectual – well, by rabbis. The notion that every Jew would be blowing shofar for themselves would be anathema to his whole worldview.
V
I think Rambam is wrong about this. My questioner was right to point out that the two things don’t match – the obligation as specified in the Torah, and the language of the blessing we typically use (thanks to Rambam). A thousand years after Rambam, there isn’t a synagogue in the world that uses the original formulation of the blessing. That means that Jews, of all sorts and in all places, are actively disempowered. The original direction of our tradition is towards empowerment – every person has to blow the shofar for themselves. Each of you bears the obligation to make today a day of blasts – no exceptions. Instead of that empowered practice, brimming with individual agency, you have been reduced to passive consumers, listeners of the sound but not creators of it.
Judaism, as must be said again and again, is not a spectator sport. There is nothing special that happens up here at the Bimah that we can do and you cannot. Rabbis have no special privileges nor special powers (despite what we might wish!). All Jews are completely equal in the covenant of Judaism – and all, at least when it comes to shofar, should have an equal obligation. It is about empowerment, about agency, and ultimately about access.
VI
The person who is most responsible for my Jewish journey, my first real teacher, is an incredible man named Earl Schwartz. There’s an idea in many Ḥasidic text of ḥassidim nistarim – secretly pious people. If such a thing exists, Earl is one of them. He makes absolutely no effort to demonstrate his incredible knowledge, kindness, or ethical leadership. He could have been an absolute prodigy of a rabbi but instead became a kindergarten teacher. Nobody quite knows how many languages he reads or how much of the Talmud he has memorised but everyone is certain the answer to both is: a lot.
Earl was the first person to open my eyes to the elitism of Maimonides and to condemn it. Whereas many of Rambam’s contemporaries praised the average Jew and emphasised that God is equally accessible through revelation to all people – Rambam actively excludes all but the very few from his category of the elect. In a famous parable found in his Guide to the Perplexed, Rambam compares spirituality to the concentric circles of courtiers seeking an audience with a ruler. He says:
The ruler is in his palace. Of his subjects, some are in the city, some outside it. Of those within, some have their backs to the royal palace and face away from it. Others face it and approach, seeking to enter and stand before the king, although they have not yet seen its walls. Of those who approach, some reach this house and circle around it, seeking the gate. Some enter and tread the anterooms. Some reach the inner court, the royal chambers, and are with the king in his royal abode. But entry does not mean seeing the ruler or speaking with him. Further effort is needed before one can present oneself and see him, close up or from afar, or hear him speak, or talk to him.
He then spells out the implication of this parable, divvying us into seven categories of people:
Outside the city is everyone with no religious creed
Inside the city but with their backs to the ruler’s dwelling are those who have ideas and beliefs but whose beliefs are unsound, either through some grave intellectual error or because they blindly follow someone else’s error. Given their false beliefs, the more they walk, the farther behind they leave the palace.
Those who approach and seek entry but have never seen the palace are the masses of Torah followers, ignorant but observant of the mitzvot.
Those who reach the palace and circle it are the jurists who hold true beliefs by sheer faith. They pore over the laws of pious practice but do not probe their foundations intellectually or seek reasons to confirm their faith.
Those who do probe those principles have entered the antechambers. They reach widely different ranks, of course.
Those who have proved all that can be proved and have won what certainty is possible in theology, or have neared certainty where only near certainty is possible, have reached the ruler in the inner precincts of the palace.
Those who have perfected themselves theologically and strive to turn their every thought toward God—renouncing all else and devoting their every intellectual act to contemplating all that is and seeking, in every facet of reality, the signs that teach them of His rule, insofar as they can grasp it—stand in the ruler’s court, in His council.
The vast majority of us would be relegated to the few few categories of this taxonomy – myself included. I think I’m somewhere between 3 and 4, and I expect you are too. Sorry!
High standards are great, but Maimonides is not attempting to inspire – he is sharing this to be imperious, to impose an expectation and aspiration which is unreachable. He is writing, throughout the Guide to his student, the one student he believes might have a chance of reaching close to inner sanctum, the upper level, joining the exalted elite who stand in the ruler’s court and council.
VII
The question asked of me at that bat mitzvah party is about more than what words we say when we blow the shofar. It is the entire edifice of Judaism which, following Maimonides and others, takes an opportunity to empower average Jews and twists it into an occasion for exclusion. Rabbis are often the guiltiest of this sin – and it is a sin – for too often rabbis see their role as protecting Judaism from Jews instead of protecting Judaism for the sake of Jews. Their resentment becomes rejection and our synagogues become monuments – dead and empty, inaccessible to all but a select few.
How do we begin to repair this? How can we recover a Judaism which puts as its primary goal the empowerment of Jews? It’s a big job. It’s one I think SAMS takes very seriously – and rightly so. We can’t do it overnight – and the impetus can’t come from rabbis alone. But for a start, we can claim our right and responsibility to blow the shofar for ourselves. Just as the sound of the shofar broke down the walls of Jericho, this shofar can burst open the labyrinthine walls of Rambam’s palace, giving us all the power to get close to the throne.
After our service concludes, during Kiddush – I and some of our other shofar-blowers will be up here at the Bimah with several shofarot and some alcohol wipes to sanitise them. Come up and try it. Even if it sounds bad. Even if you don’t think you can do it. Even if you can’t yet say the blessing as perhaps it was always meant to be, you can start with the sound and take your Jewish life into your own hands. Here’s to a year of Jewish empowerment.
Shanah Tovah.
