Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on September 24, 2014

Biblical Sound a Fitting End to Year of Anguish

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Published September 24, 2014.

An almost impossibly difficult year is about to be over, and a new one, filled with new hope and new possibility, will be upon us. As we do each year on Rosh Hashanah, we will stand together and listen to the piercing cries of the shofar. This year more than ever, its important that we stop and consider just what the sounds of the shofar signify.

The Torah refers to Rosh Hashanah as Yom Teruah, a day of teruah. In attempting to explain just what teruah means, the Talmud translates it as yevava, crying. The proof text from which this explanation is derived is fascinating one might even say shocking: the Talmud derives the idea that teruah means crying from the tears shed by Siseras mother as she agonizes over the fate of her son.

Sisera was the commander of the Canaanite army and a reviled enemy of the Israelites. Yael eventually kills him by driving a tent peg through his head. There was never any love lost between the Israelites and this military figure, and the Bible never doubts that Yaels killing him was just. And yet, his mothers anguish registers so deeply that we hear her sobs year after year after year, every time we hear the shofar blast.

A midrash offers another basis for associating the cries of the shofar with the cries of a frightened mother. When Isaac returns home after the Akedah, we learn, he tells his mother what his father had done to him. She asks, Were it not for the angels intervention, would you have been slaughtered? and he answers simply, Yes. At that moment, the midrash says, she lets out six cries and then dies and those cries are the basis of our shofar blasts today. Here again, the blowing of the shofar conjures the experience of a mother terrified for the well-being of the child she loves.

In another version of the story, an angel approaches Sarah as Isaac is bound upon the altar and tells her what is about to happen, adding that Isaac is currently weeping and screaming. Sarah cries and those cries, we are told, are the basis of our shofar blasts. Note the subtle difference between the two stories: In the first one, Sarah sees Isaac and knows that he has been saved; in the second, she has every reason to assume he is about to die. She cries from the utter horror that perhaps his life is ebbing away even as she and the angel speak.

The cries of the shofar correspond to the sobs of a frightened, grieving mother whether Isaacs or Siseras. A chasm divides Isaac and Sisera: Isaac is one of the patriarchs of the Jewish people a bit hapless perhaps, but remembered as fundamentally good and righteous; Sisera, on the other hand, is an enemy and an oppressor of the Jewish people. And yet Jews come together each year to listen to the cries of both mothers, Isaacs and Siseras. As the late Rabbi Yehuda Amital wrote, There are countless differences between Sarah our matriarch and Siseras mother. Yet despite the worlds that divide them, there is one thing they have in common the natural terror a mother feels for her son.

Holding these two mothers together in memory is crucial, because at this late date, when so much blood has been shed and so many dreams shattered, perhaps the anguished cries of parents afraid of losing their children is the only thing that can actually bring people together.

Read more:

Hearing a Mother's Pain on Rosh Hashanah

Category: Talmud
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