Rabbi Ari lev fornari & rabbi MóNica gomery: Yom truah: a desperate cry, a wider we
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5785
Oct 3, 2024
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אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל
אַחֵינוּ כָּל בית ישמעאל
הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה
הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה,
וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב
- Acheinu prayer, from the liturgy of the Torah service
As for our siblings, the whole house of Israel, the whole house of Yishmael,
who are given over to trouble or captivity, whether they abide on the sea or on the dry land:
May the All-present have mercy upon them, and bring them forth from narrowness to possibility, from darkness to light, and from subjection to redemption, now speedily and in a near time.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
The words we just sang are a desperate cry for our beloveds to be released from captivity. For the Holy One to bring them forth from a narrow place to expansiveness, from the dark of dungeons, jails and tunnels to the light of day, from oppression to redemption. Hashta, now. Ba’agala, Speedily. Uvizman kariv - soon.
These words, and these wishes, are very old and they are also timeless and heart-wrenchingly timely.
For many of us personally and for all of us collectively, the past year has been defined by Oct 7th. Which includes the 100 years that precede it and everything since. And that includes today.
Hayom Harat Olam - Today is holding a lot.
There are many ways that we could count the days that have led us to today.
Hayom, Today is 362 days since Hamas brutally slaughtered 1200 people, Israelis and internationals, infants and elders, in their homes and at a music festival, and took more than 200 hostage.
Hayom, Today is 335 days since Israel mercilessly intensified its already devastating siege on Gaza, displacing 2.3 million people, murdering more than 50,000 civilians, an unspeakable number of whom are children, destroying hospitals and schools, starving the entire population of Gaza and reducing all of its infrastructure to tears, guts and rubble.[1]
Hayom, Today is 20,940 days since the Israeli Defense Forces first occupied Gaza on June 5, 1967.
Hayom, today is 27,900 days since the beginning of Israel’s war for Independence which led to the forced displacement of more than 100,000 Palestinians to the Gaza Strip.
Hayom, Today is 5 days from October 7, the horrifying yahrzeit that has rewired the Jewish psyche.
And Hayom, today is 33 days from November 5, a one month countdown to the most consequential national election of our lives.
Rabbi Mónica:
The song Acheinu first appears in Mahzor Vitry, a siddur authored in the 11th century. For more than a thousand years, Jews have been channeling our pleas into these very words. For as long as there has been prayer, there has been a need to pray for the release of captives.
I remember singing this weeping lament for our kin in captivity on the shabbat following October 7 as we redressed the Torah. Full of grief and fear for what happened and dread for what was yet to come. We are among Jewish communities around the world who have been singing these words week in and week out, channeling our prayers for the return of the Israeli hostages, the return of all Palestinian civilian prisoners, and a lasting ceasefire, because we believe deeply that these pleas are inextricably linked.
We arrive here feeling desperate to say goodbye to the last year and her curses.
And eager to invite in the new year and her blessings.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
Rabbi Mó and I are each raw from the past year. And so we have decided to model what it takes to reach for each other, to make meaning together.
There is nothing either of us, or any one of us, could say that we know everyone in this room needs or wants to hear. In fact, we know that in speaking at all, we risk alienating ourselves or members of our community. And that is the opposite of what we want.
So we are speaking today in two voices, hoping the multivocality better reflects and connects to the manifold experiences we are collectively bringing to this day. There is a lot of trauma and heartache in this room and it resonates across generations. We are not one unified, homogenous voice. We are two among many voices and experiences.
To each of you, I want to say, I am grateful you are here in your fullness. It is my hope that our collective prayers are a homecoming for you. If you are arriving here with joy in your heart, gratitude for the gifts of the past year, share the joy you feel with all of us. We need it.
If you are arriving here today feeling desperate and scared, afraid, sad and raw, you are not alone. This is in fact what Rosh Hashanah has always been about. Known in the Torah as Yom Truah, this is the day of broken cries.
Both times that Rosh Hashanah is mentioned in the Torah, it is defined by the word Truah.
In parashat Emor, in the book of Leviticus, it says,
זִכְרוֹן תְּרוּעָה מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ[2]
A sacred occasion announced by truah.
And it says in Numbers,
יוֹם תְּרוּעָה יִהְיֶה לָכֶם[3]
A day of truah it will be to you.
More than any other ritual, Rosh Hashanah is about the fragmented sound of the shofar.
As a Jewish symbol, the shofar expresses our deepest grief, well beyond words.
There is a desperate cry in our tradition, and it is the cry of this day.
Rabbi Mónica:
One of the least known names of the Rosh Hashanah holiday comes from the ancient Aramaic translation of Tanakh, called the Targum. Yom Truah, in the verses Rabbi Ari Lev just read aloud, is translated in the Targum as Yom Yabava– Yom yabava y’hey l’chon. It shall be to you a day of sobbing.
The name comes from a debate in the Talmud about the nature of the truah we’re commanded to listen to on this holy day. What should the blast of the shofar actually sound like?
Like the sound of a woman weeping, the tradition responds. Like Sisera’s mother.
So who was Sisera, and who was his mother?
In the Book of Judges, Sisera is the commander of the Canaanite army, enemies and oppressors of the Israelites. In a battle between them, the Canaanites are defeated by the Israelites, and the survivors disperse in fear, including Sisera, who seeks respite in the tent of Yael. Yael pretends to offer Sisera shelter and safety, and in the end she betrays his trust and kills him in a rather brutal way.
The story is told twice, once in narrative form, and once in Shirat Devorah, the Song of Deborah the prophetess, who delivers a triumphant poem about the Israelite victory over their foes. At the end of Deborah’s poem, she reveals an unexpected and heartbreaking detail.
בְּעַד הַחַלּוֹן נִשְׁקְפָה וַתְּיַבֵּב אֵם סִיסְרָא בְּעַד הָאֶשְׁנָב[5]
Through the window peered Sisera’s mother, behind the lattice she wept.
On the day of Sisera’s death, the poem takes us to stand beside his mother at the window of her home– awaiting her son’s return from battle. She watches, waits, hopes, and she cries. “Why is his chariot so long in coming?” she asks. “Why so late the clatter of his wheels?”
Deborah, the poet, presumably the sworn enemy of this woman, details the depths of her uncertainty and worry. וַתְּיַבֵּב, the text tells us, Sisera’s mother sobbed.
It’s in this story that the rabbis locate the cry of the shofar. Teruah is yabava, they teach– the deep, sorrowful lament of a mother whose child has been taken by warfare. Whose child is not coming home. No matter if he is victor or victim. No matter if he is Israelite or Canaanite.
Sisera is variously identified as Philistine, Hittite, Hurrian, or Egyptian. In this way, he is a stand-in for our existential “other.” The general of an army that is out to get us– a Pharaoh, an Amalek or Haman. And yet, it’s the voice of Sisera’s vulnerable and bereft mother that is remembered. That Sisera was an enemy of the Israelites is never mentioned in these Talmudic discussions linking him to the shofar. His mother’s cry is our cry. The pain and loss of his family is our loss. His unnecessary and avoidable death in warfare, as all deaths in warfare are, is a death we mourn and memorialize.
The root of yabava, יבב, appears only once in the whole Tanakh, in this story of Sisera’s mother keening at the window. And yet, it’s this word that becomes for the rabbis the key paradigm for the cries of shofar, our ultimate call to attention in the Days of Awe. There’s even an ancient tradition that not only did the mother of Sisera cry, but that she cried out 100 sobs. Each and every time the Shofar is blasted, 100 times total on Rosh Hashanah, we are reminded of Sisera’s mother and her tears.
The cry of the shofar is universal.
And the cry of the shofar is particular.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
Another midrashic tradition locates the shofar’s sound again in the cries of a mother, but in this case, closer to home.
In Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, we’re told that the blasts of the shofar correlate to the cries of Sarah after she heard what had happened– or almost happened- to her son Isaac. The midrash describes a conversation between Isaac and Sarah when he returned from Mt. Moriah.
“Isaac returned to his mother and she said to him, ‘Where have you been, my son?’
He told her the whole story and she responded, ‘You mean, were it not for the angel, you would already be slaughtered?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ At that, she screamed six times, corresponding to the six tekiah notes of the shofar. She had not even finished crying out, when she died.”[6]
In the words of our teacher, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, “Here the shofar blasts become a kind of epilogue to the Akeidah. The ram[’s horn] calling out: You need to hear the rest of the story. There was a sacrifice. This story was not without a victim. [God] could spare the child’s life, but the mother’s heart was broken.”
Rabbi Mónica:
This has been a year of broken hearts. Shattered hearts. Of mothers grieving their children. Of children grieving their mothers. Of senseless death and loss, and of near-misses, those who survived by the seeming intervention of an angel.
God of Life:
You who heals the broken hearted,
bind up our wounds.
Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed and Rabba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum write in “The Prayer of the Mothers,”
Please hear this prayer of mothers.
You did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear or rage or hatred in your world.
You created us so that we allow each other to sustain Your Name
in this world: Your name is Life, your name is Peace.
For these I weep, my eye sheds water:
For our children crying in the night,
For parents holding infants, despair and darkness in their hearts.
For a gate that is closing – who will rise to open it before the day is gone?[7]
Today is Yom Truah. We cry for our own. We cry for others. The cry of the shofar blurs the line between whomever we might claim as “ours,” or “other.” The desperate cry of a mother who has lost her son to siege and battle, to kidnapping and captivity, is everyone’s responsibility. Today, we are all commanded to hear this cry. Even the cry of a mother who almost lost her son to an unnecessary sacrifice at the altar of violence. The possibility alone is enough to stop Sarah’s heart, and fill our hearts with her sobbing, her final breaths.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
Acheinu was originally written for Jewish captives, and the words in the siddur say kol beit yisrael, but at Kol Tzedek we also sing kol bet yishmael and kol yoshvei tevel– may all our siblings be freed from captivity, the whole house of Israel, the whole house of Yishmael, and may all people of the world be freed from captivity. May all those who are incarcerated be freed. May all those be freed who are entrenched and held captive in the belief that only violence can keep us safe.
In ten days, when we gather on Yom Kippur, we will be called to speak in the “we.” To say our viddui in the plural. It will be really challenging. What are we collectively responsible for this year, what are we collectively grieving? Most of us are in the midst of internal conflict and family conflict, conflict at work and in our communities. How do we come together and how do we understand this collective voice?
Could our model be the shofar, the blended, broken voices of these two mothers, rising together?
Rabbi Mónica sing:
אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל
אַחֵינוּ כָּל בית ישמעאל
הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה
Rabbi Ari Lev:
As most of you know, I don’t play any musical instruments. Despite years of drum, piano and guitar lessons, I can’t quite carry a tune or a maintain a rhythm. And yet, I am indeed a baal tekiah. I take great pride in my ability to blow the shofar, which I actually learned from taking voice lessons and learning how to breathe with my diaphragm.
When the first calls went out to show up at the U.S. Capitol building to call for a ceasefire in mid-October, someone texted and said, hey grab your shofar just in case.” I popped it in my bag. To my surprise it made it through security. What I never imagined was that I would be playing the shofar for some 5 hours in the hollow halls of the Rotunda, like it was a regular wind instrument.
For both of us, the past year has been personally and politically punctuated by the organizing efforts of Rabbis for Ceasefire. From the halls of congress, to the United Nations and 30th street station, we have gathered with so many of you to call for a ceasefire, to try to save Israeli and Palestinian lives. With each passing month, I developed a protest go-bag that included my tallit, a Rabbis for Ceasefire tshirt and my shofar. I have sounded the shofar so many times this year that I no longer think of it as specific to Rosh Hashanah.
This ritual object, which we so strongly associate with Rosh Hashanah, has other origins as well. Yes, it is the cry of Sisera’s mother and Sarah Imenu. But it’s also the sound of Torah being revealed at Sinai. The exaltation of psalm 150. It’s the call of the Jubilee year, when all land is restored and all prisoners are released and all debt is forgiven. It is a sound of grief but also of redemption. And it has been the soundtrack of our year of protest.
Rabbi Mónica:
In between the calls of the shofar, we have spent hours upon hours chanting Everyone for Everyone, the rallying cry of the Israeli families of the hostages, protesting for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange. Perhaps this year, everyone for everyone is the call of the shofar.
We know many of you have felt deeply held by Kol Tzedek’s leadership on and since October 7th. It has been an honor to organize and mobilize alongside so many Kol Tzedek members. We have felt repeatedly proud to call ourselves rabbis at Kol Tzedek.
We also know that some members of our community have not felt fully represented in our words and actions, that we have not fully acknowledged your concerns around Jewish safety. Multiple things are true at once. We are wrestling with the reality that many of our own family members arrived as refugees to British-mandate Palestine and we are shaped personally and as a community by that history. Please know we have been reflecting on how we can approach you in teshuvah. We are so sorry if our compassion has been inadequate.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
Speaking for myself, the urgency I feel to prevent genocide in Gaza has at times eclipsed my compassion for Jewish fears of antisemitism and the Israeli experience of October 7, even as I know these are not mutually exclusive. My heart is more guarded here than I want and I am still healing so it can open more fully.
Please know that we are reaching for each of you even as we are resolute in our calls for a ceasefire. And we hope you will reach for each other.
Rabbi Mónica:
My favorite teaching about the shofar comes from the Talmud. The rabbis tell us in Masechet Rosh Hashanah that if a shofar is coated with gold in the place where one’s mouth touches it or on the inside, it is not considered kosher. While you can beautify a shofar on the outside, gilding a shofar in a way that alters its original sound renders it treyf.[8]
In order to be kosher, the shofar itself and the sound it produces must be raw and visceral. We want to gild our shofar, to make it glimmer and sparkle. We want so badly to be perfect. We want to say the right words, to have the perfect analysis, to know all the answers before we embark on the journey. But healing and transformation is hard work. It is messy, challenging and dissonant, like the call of the shofar.
There is no such thing as doing this perfectly. We can’t expect ourselves or one another to have overcome our confusion, disappointment, or heartbreak, our fears or conditioning, our family stories. We are meant to come to the work of change as our authentic selves, our whole and broken selves. We don’t have to gild ourselves in defensive armors. The call of the shofar is earthy, smelly, and raw. The shofar calls us to radically extend the borders of our hearts and the circumference of our concern for every human life. It calls us to take seriously the belief that we, individually and collectively, can grow toward a better version of ourselves. In order to do so, we have to be imperfect and brave.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
In painful ways, the Jewish community stands at a crossroads today. I have been in so many conversations that describe this moment as an irrecoverable rupture. And as much as our liturgy calls us to be agudat achat, to imagine ourselves as one united people, we’re devastatingly divided. This rift is so personal and so political. For me it starts in my own family and it ripples out from there.
I find myself asking, is this a moment of rupture that harkens us back to the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the early beginnings of rabbinic Judaism that broke off from temple practice and began what we know as exile and diaspora?
Is this a moment of rewriting our collective story? Can we dig deep and reconnect with our families and our ancestral stories and construct a narrative in which we can heal from the traumas of the Nazi Holocaust without imagining a Jewish ethnic state that suppresses the rights and freedoms of Palestinians– a state that claims Jewish identity but does not embody Jewish values? Is there a road to imagining ourselves as one again, as one people? And if not, where is the cleave?
I want to suggest that the cleave is not where it appears. It’s not a divide between those who identify as Zionist, non-Zionist, post Zionist or anti-Zionist. It’s not a generational divide between elders and young people. It’s also not a divide between Jews and Muslims, or Israelis and Palestinians. And certainly not a divide between Jews and the rest of the world.
But there is actually a divide. This last year has revealed a real and devastating rupture here in the U.S., in Israel, and frankly around the world. It is a divide between people committed to multicultural democracy and people committed to fascist ethnonationalism.
This is the moment to protect democracy in the U.S. and to support the creation of real democracy in Israel/Palestine, which I believe is our best pathway to safety– Jewish safety, Israeli safety, Palestinian safety and safety for everyone in the region. I am deeply concerned about our safety. But I do not think there is any country that can fully protect us or anyone from the dangers of white supremacy, antisemitism and racism. What we are seeing is that a fascist Israel makes Jews everywhere less safe.
And if what we want, which is what I desperately want, is to experience a free Palestine, a democratic Israel/Palestine, and to work for it—call it one state, call it two-state, call it no state, that’s not for me to determine—what we need is to keep building a movement, a worldwide movement, that will include Jews, Israelis and Palestinians and the international community, willing to stand up to AIPAC and Christians United for Israel. Willing to work together to dismantle the Netanyahu regime, and challenge Christian zionism and white supremacy here in the U.S.
Rabbi Mónica:
Most, if not all, of us have spent the last year unsure if we can find common cause on this issue with our beloveds, our neighbors, our parents, our siblings, our childhood teachers. It has been disorienting at best and devastating at times. One of the things that has shattered is our sense of who We are and that has been true for us as a community as well. When we talk about widening our we and building a bigger coalition, we are hoping it begins here at Kol Tzedek.
That we is much bigger than our social circles. It’s going to require a kind of coalition building that the Left struggles with. But it is necessary to build that kind of power to stop this massive, escalating, and unconscionable violence; combat antisemitism and Islamaphobia; and create a democratic future in Israel-Palestine, with dignity and justice for all people who live there.
Intergenerational trauma may have brought us to this moment, but multigenerational, multiracial, multi-faith healing will carry us out of it. In this new year, we pray for the courage to imagine a much bigger We.
Rabbi Ari Lev:
One final image of the shofar–
Another tradition describes the one hundred blasts of the shofar on Rosh HaShanah as a woman in labor who cries one hundred cries as she gives birth:
ninety-nine for death and one for life.[9]
There has already been too much death.
Let the call of today’s shofar be the call for life,
for beginning again, for hope, for a redemptive future.
Rabbi Mónica:
Let us draw close the words of the piyyut, Achot Ketana,
תִכְלֶה שָנָה וְקלְלותֶיהָ
תָחֵל שָנָה ובִרכותֶיהָ
Please,
may the old year and its curses come to an end,
may the new year and her blessings begin.
L’shana tova, anyada buena, and may we be inscribed for life.
[1] See “On the floors of genocide: sand, shit, decomposing flesh and odd slippers” by Susan Albuhawa.
[2] Leviticus 23:24
[3] Numbers 29:1
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 33b
[5] Judges 5:28
[6] Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezar, 32:8
[7] Prayer of Mothers for Life, Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed, Rabba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, translated by Rabbi Amicai Lau-Lavie
[8] Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah 27b
[9] Meshech Chochmah, Emor 93