We each have times when there is more than we can say, when words cannot communicate the feelings that we have in our heart.
At the core of all our emotions is G‑d. All love is but an outward expression of our love for Him. All fear is a shadow of the awe He inspires, and all beauty is paled by His radiance.
The name Rosh HaShanah means not “the new year,” nor “the beginning of the year,” but “the head of the year,” the time when all things, our feelings, our fortunes, and our fate comes to a head and are invigorated with new life.
Everyone feels special about the High Holidays - “Days of Awe.” The feelings that we experience are our souls’ natural response to the heightened spiritual climate of the times.
The Torah commands us to give expression to the upsurge of these feelings, to call out from the depths of our soul, tapping the essential spark of G‑d that lies at the heart of our beings. Unspoken, above thought, this call resounds in the piercing sound of the shofar.
“Wake you sleepy ones,” Maimonides tells us the shofar is saying. “You who slumber... and forget the truth in the vanities of time. Look to your souls.”
The simple, artless call of the shofar reflects the inner outcry of a Jew’s deepest spiritual potentials. The shofar’s call is not an intellectual statement. Like feelings that are so powerful they cannot be expressed in words, the shofar communicates a message too intense to verbalize. Within the depths of our hearts lies an unlimited spiritual potential; the very core of our being is our Divine soul, an “actual part of G‑d from above.” This potential cannot be grasped in conscious thought, for it is unlimited and unbounded as is G‑d Himself.
The quintessential element that is most truly ourselves is not our individual “I,” but our inner G‑dly soul. The sounding of the shofar gives voice to this core potential. The shofar’s call is not the call of the mind or the conscious “I,” it is our deepest selves thundering into articulation.
The expression of this spiritual potential has an effect in the human realm as well. For at this point in soul there is no separation between people. At the level at which we are “an actual part of G‑d,” we all join as one.
The unity established among us evokes G‑d’s blessings. As our Rabbis explain in the interpretation of the phrase from our prayers: “Bless us our Father all as one”: When we are all united as one, we are fit for G‑d's blessing: blessings of abundant material and spiritual good, including the ultimate expression of goodness, the coming of Mashiach.
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