Sound Bites of the Soul

We are sitting on the slopes of a hill that rolls downward like the sides of an open bowl. Sunlight is ladled upon me. We wear leather sandals – or none at all – jeans or flowing skirts, and cotton tops. The amphitheater is thick with dreamers, a gypsy soup of souls who have come to celebrate song and anticipate freedom. There are numerous plainclothes cops among us. And we know it. But we have come nonetheless. Bands sing of freedom from Apartheid from South Africa's corrupted face. Juluka takes the stage. They are playing Scatterlings of Africa. The music lifts me off the grass and bounces me like musical notes down the hill. I dance and dance. I dance in joy. But I also dance in pain, for others, and yes, inexplicably, for myself. Even as my body buoys, my heart slides with the knowledge that this is not my music. This is not me.

I have the same hopes for Africa, yet I am alone, an outsiderI recently read of an experiment in which a violin was placed at one corner of an acoustically perfect hall and a second in the opposite corner. As the first was stroked just once, the second lifted that vibration from the air and began to sing in kind. Now, dancing in the sunlight beside the stage, I know the sounds of Scatterlings are not my touchstone. Sure, I am with the crowd in the bowl of light, and dream of a better tomorrow. I have the same hopes for Africa and wear the same clothes. Yet I am alone, an outsider. The question I cannot yet articulate is this: when the essence of my being flows out from G‑d, when it moves across the heavens and touches my life, how does it sound? How does it manifest? Light travels darkly across the skies and comes to shine only when it touches our atmosphere. So, too, I sense my soul travels in silence. But when it touches the skin on the back of my arm, when it enters my eyes and rests in my bones, what sound does it make then? Can anything at all capture the essence of a human being?

Some months later I am standing in a synagogue. It is Rosh Hashanah. We are about to hear the shofar. I have learned that Moses blew a ram's horn in the desert to alert the Jews to move, rest, or prepare for battle. I have also learned that he used the left horn of the ram sacrificed by Abraham in place of his son, and that the larger right horn is hidden, waiting for Redemption, to be blown as he calls us back to the Holy Land. But my mind is not thinking of that just then. It moves between rumblings that my thighs are just too thick and ought not be rubbing against each other in this way, and memories of a black sable antelope with its majestic horns I once saw gazing like a hidden prince from the African underbrush. Then cry, call, song! The shofar is moving within me. It has happened upon – within – me. Its sound begins at the narrow mouth of the horn where the lips of the rabbi kiss it with air, circles to its wavy rim, and flows into the broad and curled cup of my ear, pouring into a singular unity within my brain, within my being. How, I wonder, did I never hear this before – never recognize this sound.

Years later, I have many identities in my repertoire. I am wife and mother and daughter and sister. I write and teach and draw and dream. I cry and complain. I am the wearer of an angry mask, the singer of love, the wager of futile battles, I am hungry for meaning. But the shofar I heard that morning calls to me in penetrating and haunting song, reminding me that these are merely manifestations of self. They are notes and instruments. Who I am is neither the air of my exuberance (or anger) rolling through a trombone, nor the metal of cymbals as I clash in contact. I am not the dreams of wind on a reed, nor the fear of a vibrating string. My soul is more than the sum of my life. I am not the roles I fulfill, but rather, an actual part of the Creator. In paring down various roles and tasks, I distill information to its essence. I discover who I am outside of what I do, without what I have, without even my own name. I return to who I really am. It is then that I hear the shofar – the sound bite of the soul, my distilled essence.

I don't want to live at the mercy of my emotions or simply follow the ebb of sustenanceSo when I listen to the shofar, I get a glimpse of how G‑d experiences me. I need to know that so I can live from His perspective also. My "self" is so isolated. I don't want a contingent life, one that I remake in circumstance. I don't want to live at the mercy of my emotions or simply follow the ebb of sustenance. I want to find that one point from which I can build an authentic life. How novel to free myself from the romantic notion of self! How liberating to cut the ropes that tie me to individuality anchored down by subjective deductions about meaning. Rather, give me one note of the shofar. Pure. Distilled. Essence. It allows me to come at me from G‑d's understanding – a singular and absolute identity. Refreshing.

Sit with me, if you will, on the note just a moment longer. Hear, as it spirals round, that having cleansed ourselves of self and ego, we are not stripped bare of identity. On the contrary, inside the song of that one note is an identity vaster and richer and subtler than the universe. Resonant within the distilled essence of Shofar, is the presence of true individuality. Counter-intuitively, having surrendered attachment to self-hood, we discover the infinite dimensions within our singular, essential identity. It is much richer than an orchestra. At that point, I discover, I am high C and low A, I am treble and bass cleff together, the drums and the bells. The sound of the shofar is, in this sense, much like the flames within a coal. Or the sweetness in an apple. Even a spark in a flintstone. The flame and the flavor and even the spark of heat that leaps from the cold stone are hidden within their source. But I cannot slice the coal or the apple or the stone open and say, "Behold! The flame. The flavor. The spark. Here, take it." They are there, and yet, not there. So, too, once I touch the soul in an essential way, I rediscover individuality hidden there in a way one cannot point to. Yet, now I am free to re-enter that space without being limited by it.

So in synagogue at the age of twenty, having danced alone in the crowd at a concert under the sky, I hear the shofar for the first time. Really hear it. I am pulled abruptly away from thoughts of my thighs and sable antelopes. I am free and without a name. And then I know that my name is Shimona and that tomorrow I will dance and run, and try to paint anything as black as that beautiful black prince in the underbrush.