Blowing the shofar in Gan Alon pre-school is a very special experience. No two years are quite the same. Sometimes the children cry; Sometimes they scream. This year they giggled – and screamed. So it was with particular interest that I awaited their responses to my question: ‘What did you hear in the sound of the shofar?’

‘A banana’, said one. I guess the comparison was based more on shape than sound. ‘Pasta’, said another, since food was obviously ‘in’. ‘Sounds like my mother,’ said a third.

So what do we hear in the shofar’s call?

Before offering my own answer, I have to say that through the years Rosh Hashanah is to me less and less about a God up there whom we ask to care for the world, and more and more about what the world asks of us. I often think of the entry Etti Hilesum made in her diary in July 1942 when she was forced to leave her beloved Amsterdam:

[O]ne thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

The shofar is addressed to that ‘little piece of God’ in me and you, and in the billions of other people, those tiny portions of seemingly independent consciousness and independent will bound together by the sacred vitality which unites and transcends all life.

‘Hear the call of the shofar’, says the blessing which precedes its sounding. Hear what? Words limit. But the shofar speaks no words, so the meanings of its cries are not limited by language.

‘Listen’, it says. Listen to the voices you haven’t heard, or have tried not to hear. Indifference, said Elie Wiesel, whose passing we mourn this year, is living as if someone else’s pain does not exist. We can place suffering people in institutions; we can put refugees behind walls. But if we hear none of their voices we incarcerate our own humanity as well. ‘But the calls on us are overwhelming; we can’t take it all in’, we feel. ‘Just listen to something, someone,’ the shofar begs.

‘Listen to the earth’, it cries. For the shofar is not a fabricated artefact but part of a once living animal. I imagine its call in the hills of the Galilee and the Scottish Highlands. ‘Listen’, it cries, ‘I am the life which dwells in the rivers and forests, the wild goats and deer, the insects as well as the eagles. Destroy me and you destroy yourself. So hear!’

These cries are born on waves of wonder and contrition, at the joy and majesty, sorrow and destitution, of life.

To whom are they addressed? I hope God hears them. I hope those in power hear them; it is our responsibility to strive our utmost that they do. But these matters lie beyond our ultimate control.

What we can ensure is that the ‘little piece of You, God’ within each of us hears, and responds. It is that awareness, that consciousness and conscience in us all, ‘for whom the shofar calls’.

Leshanah Tovah, may this be a good, peaceful, worthwhile year for us, our families, our communities, all Israel and all the world.

Leshanah Tovah, may this be a good and worthwhile year.

The relationship between Rosh Hashanah and memory goes to the heart of the festival. Following the Torah, the rabbis called New Year ‘Yom Hazikaron’. The words are hard to translate; Rosh Hashanah is not a memorial date like Armistice Day or the day preceding Yom Ha’Atzmaut. Rather it is a day about the nature and purpose of memory itself.

Memory is fragile and often contested. We feel sure that events happened in this way; everyone else insists that they transpired in a different order. We adorn memories, rewrite them unconsciously to suit our conscience, and imbue on the fabric of memory experiences which occurred far later. Our very identity is profoundly connected to memory; (and we know that illness can erase it entirely and that the meaning of our life is transient and frail).

Therefore, what we do with our memory is of profound importance to the quality of our lives. Even the most charmed life is full or irritations. Is it these that we allow our memories to feed on, so that our mind is full of vexation and the desire for revenge, rehearsing old quarrels and recalling entrenched enmities? Bad days can be like that. Or is there some inner enzyme, some sweetness of the brain, which allows negative experience to fade into relative oblivion, while we remember the holidays and happy days, the love and blessings life has given us?

On a transpersonal scale, how do we use memory as nations and faiths? The question is hardly academic. There’s little more dangerous for humanity than the propagation of national and religious identities of resentment and exclusion. It’s easy to find reasons to perpetuate ancient prejudices and hatreds. It is hard to overcome them through acts of human solidarity and compassion. Yet, if humanity is to survive, we must.

Deeper and more enduring than even the oldest national memories is God’s memory. Before God, we are told, ‘there is no forgetting’; ‘the mark and memory of every deed comes before God’. I cannot believe in God as reading an eternal ledger. Rather, I do connect the sense that God is presence in all life with the truth that everything matters. There is nothing which has no repercussions; no word or deed which does not bring pain or healing in its wake. Nothing goes utterly unnoticed by the people, even the animals and trees, which surround us. There is accountability in the very nature of things.

Yet the most central blessing of the Rosh Hashanah service does not refer to a God of justice. Instead, it speaks of God as Zocher Habrit, ‘‘remembering the covenant’.

What covenant? I think of this as simultaneously the covenant with the Jewish People, the covenant with all humankind, and the most ancient covenant of all, with life itself. It is as if God, that sacred vitality which resides within all living things, was calling out to us: ‘I want you to survive. I want memory itself to be a force not for punishment, or vengeance, or hate, but for life, goodness and generous compassion.

Leshanah Tovah, may this be a good and worthwhile year.

However late it comes in the secular year, Rosh Hashanah always arrives in a rush and it’s hard to feel ready. Also, its themes can feel hard to grasp, – unlike Yom Kippur with its focus on apology and forgiveness. So for the next three days I’m writing a short reflection on the central subjects of the Rosh Hashanah prayers to help us reflect and prepare.

Hayom harat olam – Today is the birthday of the world.
Rosh Hashanah celebrates creation and God as its ruler: God is Melech, King, and Sovereign over all the earth.

Though I did cry watching the royal wedding several years ago, I’m not moved by images of palaces and power in the way our ancestors maybe were. Nor do I believe in a God who owns and directs the proceedings of the world in any obvious manner. I am not sure either that the earth has a birthday.

Yet these ideas speak to me powerfully. They go to the heart of what matters in life, of why life matters at all.

For the world is full of joy, as well as cruelty. Few people tire of the sight of a robin alighting close to one’s hand, or of a glimpse of the new moon, or the sound of a stream, or the call of a lamb, because there’s beauty in such things. In a civilisation constantly focussed on ownership, on what is ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, these things don’t belong to us. We neither possess them nor control the moments when we are blessed to witness them.

They speak to me of God; not of a God who is a giant ‘He’ or ‘She’, but of the infinite life which unveils itself in these small mysteries of being, a bird, a river or a poem. The vitality which flows through them and all things is sacred. To it alone everything belongs.

This is what the words ‘God is Sovereign of all the earth’ mean to me. No doubt they mean something different to you, and to each of us, because life unfolds its mysteries around us all in variant ways.

This view of life is more than just a pleasant thought. It commands. For, though we cannot claim ownership of life’s mysteries, we do have the capacity, almost infinite capacity, to destroy them. As a species we are adept at hurtfulness, exploitation and killing, both wantonly and by negligence.

In celebrating creation, in naming a date on which to honour it, we commit ourselves to abjuring cruelty and destruction. Instead we promise to honour life, all life, to the best of our ability in all our deeds.

That is the heart of what Rosh Hashanah is about, and every other day as well.