Red
and green glow swords, cotton candy, and a festive mood engulfed our tiny
community. Everywhere children squealed with excitement while the
women parked their strollers- singles, doubles, and even triples- on the street
in anticipation. No, the circus had not made a surprise detour to
our sleepy mountain village. Something grander, yet more subtle was
happening. With black ink and a feather on some stretched cow hide, one letter
was being written in an apartment. A large group of men clad
in black huddled around the table and spilled out onto the balcony. See,
one missing letter renders an entire Torah scroll ineffective. Therefore, upon
completion of the last letter of the scroll, a wave of holiness descends upon
the whole roll of cow hide and what were once remnants of a cow is in an
instant imbued with serious divinity. Once that letter is written,
many new laws take effect, and reality changes. The room with the
Torah instantly becomes a place unsuitable to many activities that would have
been permitted only moments earlier. For a Jew, there is no greater
cause to celebrate in the world than the mundane’s elevation to holiness- it
calls for a parade.
Or,
it calls for the blast of a shofar. There are two different types of
shofar blasts on Rosh Hashana, a trua and a tekiya. They are easily
distinguished, the tekiya is a smooth long blast and the terua is a series of
short bursts. If we look at the Torah, there are two places where a
horn is sounded and each time two different words are used to describe the
blast. In one place the verb used is from the language of trua
and it is used in the context of war. Obviously, during a war
unification is broken and the trumpet notes the change with a series of short
and broken blasts. In a different place, the verb is that of a tekiya, and that
is in the context of a horn blast during a coronation. That is a
long and unbroken sound for the King is what unites a people and so
the blast is accordingly unified.[1]
On
Rosh Hashanah this describes our schizophrenic state of mind, both broken and
complete, both happy and distraught. On the one hand we are in the
midst of an internal battle, and our job is to uproot the accumulated stench
from the year- an enemy of falsehood has intruded and we need to get him
out. On the other hand, recognition of G-d’s Kingdom is consciously
on our mind and the big ‘therefore’ that should engender. Rosh
Hashanah is the day the whole world is recognized as what is called in mystical
terms a ‘chariot’, a place that can carry divine holiness. This change from mundane to divine is marked by the shofar.
Think that there is a King in this world and that you are an
indispensible agent of the King and the rest of repentance will be just details.
[1]
See Nesivos Shalom
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