Dear Friend,

I must have been around six or seven. My father came home a few days before Rosh Hashanah with a new shofar. He suspected that his trusty old sandy-colored shofar had a crack, and he needed a kosher crack-free shofar to blow on Rosh Hashanah morning at our Chabad House. The new shofar was black and slender. It was the last one in the store—and it was hard to blow.

I spent every waking moment blowing it in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the living room. When my mother would get fed up with the noise, she would send me out to the yard. The neighbors were too polite to tell me what they thought, so I blew to my heart’s content. Eventually, I mastered the shofar. It took a few years, but my father started favoring the black shofar as well.

It’s official. Rosh Hashanah is upon us. This is the time when we start planning for the year ahead. We all have mitzvahs that we can improve in. It may be hard, but we can do it.

Like learning to blow a difficult shofar, all it takes is time and effort.

Menachem Posner,
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team