No one had pressed the emergency buzzer, but a nurse came rushing into the hospital room. She had a worried look on her face.This is real. And you are completely unprepared.
“I thought I heard someone crying,” she said.
Nothing is wrong, I assured the nurse, standing at a patient’s bedside. No one is crying — it’s just the shofar. I held the ram’s horn in my hand, and didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or proud. Embarrassed that I had disturbed a nurse on this Rosh Hashanah afternoon. Proud that the tekiahs and teruahs and shevarims I had just made on the shofar, for the patient’s sake, had sounded like a voice crying.
That’s what a shofar is supposed to sound like.
A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.
Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth creaks open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don't know which one.
Last year the first day of Rosh Hashanah also fell on Shabbat. My uncle had been dying of cancer for two months, and the extended family (most of whom are secular) had a get-together at their home in New Jersey on the Sunday, so I wasn't in shul for the shofar service. But I got back into Manhattan in time for the massive migration of Upper West Side Jews to Riverside Park for tashlich. Imagine hundreds of Jews of all ages and denominations - mini-skirts, black hats, Birkenstocks, two-piece suits - lined up along the Hudson River for blocks and blocks and blocks, schmoozing and davening, and throwing our sins into the river for the fishes to eat.
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