a brilliant book. I went to high school with A.J., I know A.J., A.J. is a friend of mine. But he and I agreed that my voyage would be different—A.J. followed the Bible’s scriptures, I’d be the holiday pilgrim. He gave me his blessing. And he kindly wrote the Foreword to this book. So everyone can stop bringing up A.J. already.
I noted the hurdles and then pressed ahead:
I printed out a Jewish calendar and taped it to my fridge.
I ordered a shofar (ram’s horn) on Amazon.com. (FYI, they can be malodorous.)
I picked out white clothes for Yom Kippur. (We’re supposed to dress in the white of our burial shroud.)
I polished my candlesticks and found a recipe for hamantaschen (the Purim pastry).
I researched a place to go for Selichot (penitence before the High Holy Days—who knew we atone before we atone?) and a place to observe Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance). I was drawn to places where a holiday would be highlighted; not all synagogues program every holiday.
“Most American Jews don’t see identity as an enterprise of labor, a matter of toil,” Wieseltier told me. “So in America now it is possible to be a Jew with a Jewish identity that one can defend, and that gives one pleasure—and for that identity to have painfully little Jewish substance.” I wanted my Jewish identity to have Jewish substance. I wanted more “toil.” Wieseltier’s prescription for Jewish meaning—a resonance I craved—was to “get into the fight.” It was time.
First stop: Rosh Hashanah.
Rabbi Michael Strassfeld
ON ROSH HASHANAH
Rosh Hashanah is about possibilities and births, new beginnings. In some ways that’s the potential of cyclical time. You think you’re just a year older, but you can start again.
Jonathan Blake
ON ROSH HASHANAH
It’s like you’re on cruise control, mindlessly going down the highway, when suddenly you’re confronted with lights and sirens and you have to think fast and take control of the pedals or you’re going to end up part of the emergency situation up ahead.
That’s Rosh Hashanah to me: Yes, it’s a sweet time, a time for apples and honey, but even more it’s alarm-clock time: the piercing wail of the shofar that shakes us out of the stupor of the daily routine. We understandably crave comfort and convenience: the chaos of the world around us practically demands that we insulate ourselves with regimen and regularity. Rosh Hashanah bolts us awake. It says: “Life doesn’t have to be like this.” You can change. Your hurting relationships can be better. Your unfounded anxieties and petty fixations need not strangle you forever in their grip. Your accumulated, tough scar tissue need not keep you from feeling. Your life holds possibilities—beautiful opportunities—some of which you’ve falsely assumed out of your reach, some of which you haven’t even dared to dream up. That’s Rosh Hashanah to me, a blast of the possible.
9. 22. 14
THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL from the Israeli company that shipped my shofar (the trumpet made from a ram’s horn, blasted during the Jewish New Year) says the blowing technique can be learned by “filling your mouth with water. You then make a small opening at the right side of your mouth, and blow out the water with a strong pressure. You must practice this again and again until you can blow the water about four feet away.”
Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”) marks the Jewish new year, the anniversary of Creation, and requires the shofar blast to alert the world to the new beginning—the moment we’re supposed to “wake up” to who we’ve been in the last year and who we aim to become in the next one. The horn is notoriously impossible to blow, especially with its prescribed cadence and strength. Try it some time: it’s really hard. Synagogues troll for the brave souls who can actually pull it off without making the congregation cringe at the sad attempts that emit tense toots or dying wails.
This year, I’m committed to fulfilling the commandment of hearing the shofar blast not only on the new year itself, but on nearly every morning of the Hebrew month of Elul, the weeks of self-examination that begin before Rosh Hashanah and end on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
So I’m standing at the kitchen sink, spewing tap water ineptly as my children look at me askance. My seventeen-year-old son, Ben, picks up the tawny plastic horn. “Let me try.”
He kills it.
I hit on an idea. “I need you to be my blower every morning for the next thirty days.”
“Sure,” Ben answers blithely, despite the fact that he can’t be roused before noon during the summer.
Before this project, I didn’t know that the shofar gets blown daily for thirty days before the Jewish new year. (It’s actually fewer, because the horn can’t be honked on Shabbat nor the day before Rosh Hashanah.) Elul is the month prior to Rosh Hashanah and leads into the Days of Awe—the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Elul begins a forty-day period of repentance, judgment, and forgiveness. These forty days recall the weeks that Moses prayed for God’s forgiveness on behalf of the Israelites who had sinned by building a forbidden idol—a golden calf. During this period of Elul, we ask forgiveness for that first, faithless idolatry and for our countless modern missteps.
This is new to me: starting the path to repentance in August’s eighty-degree weather. I’d previously thought that self-abnegation was a one-day affair—the Yom Kippur Cleanse. And that was plenty; twelve hours in synagogue without eating has always felt to me like ample penitence. But now I’m learning a new rhythm. Contrition starts daily, early, forty days before the mother lode, spurred nearly every morning by a noise one can’t ignore.
It’s immediately obvious that there’s no way I’m rousing Ben to blow the shofar for me. He’s on Teenager Time. I’m on my own. The first day, I pick up the plastic trumpet and go into a room as far from my sleeping family as possible. I lift the horn to my mouth and try to follow the contradictory directions to simultaneously relax and purse the lips, whistling air into the mouthpiece. To my shock, out comes a blast. It’s not pretty, but it’s hardy. I keep my gaze out the window, thinking how bizarre this is and, at the same time, how visceral. The sound of the shofar is Judaism to me: raw, rousing, plaintive, adamant. I blow one more time, a little tentatively, because I don’t want to disturb the house. I then sit down on the sofa to Google the twenty-seventh Psalm on my iPhone because I learned we’re supposed to recite it aloud every morning from the first day of Elul until the end of Sukkot, the holiday that follows Yom Kippur. That’s a lot of one psalm.
The verses are about God’s protection, which we’re going to need—Elul reminds us—during the upcoming days of judgment. I hear my voice saying the words, and they’re oddly comforting—despite the motif of dread.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
. . .
Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise up against me, even then will I be confident.
I then attempt the entire psalm in Hebrew, and manage to get through it. Slowly. But I’m proud of the fact that I can, in no small part thanks to Joel Goldman, my no-nonsense Hebrew tutor.
When