Elul is the month of preparation, of awakening, when the shofar is sounded succinctly each morning, before it cries out in one hundred protestations on Rosh Hashanah:

Even though it is sounded simply by decree of the Torah, there is an implied meaning in the shofar’s call: ‘Wake up, you sleepers, from your sleep, you who slumber from your slumbers. Search your deeds… Remember your Creator.’ (Maimonides: Laws of Repentance 3:4)

The first note of the shofar is Tekia, a sustained and aspiring outpouring, as if to say, ‘Listen! This is an amazing world. Consider that tree, sustaining the lives of so many birds, giving shade through scorching days. Hear the sound of the longed-for rain as it falls on the leaves. Watch the moon fade away as the dawn sun brightens. Pay attention as the birds sing out their homage at twilight, while the orange horizon deepens into red. Melo chol ha’arets kevodo – All the earth is full of God’s glory.

But how this world is broken. ‘Shevarim, fractured, in pieces,’ observes the shofar. ‘Why did you have to flee?’ we ask our guest from Afghanistan. ‘Because they murdered my brother.’ I switch off the news; I can’t bear hearing any more about drone attacks and bombed-out buildings. I don’t want to know that yet again a climate target has been missed. I go down the street to the nearby woods for solace: who dumped that pile of cans and plastic bottles, as if the world was our rubbish heap?

‘Teru’a; weep!’ cries the shofar. ‘Yelulei yalel,’ explains the Talmud: ‘sustained sobbing.’ We must go deeper than anger and frustration; we must open our heart to the hurts and the tears. That young woman, she’s crying for her husband who won’t be returning, won’t open the front door and lift up their youngest, who comes running towards him, in a great hug. But not now, don’t cry now; she must hide her grief from the children. ‘All our tears are gathered at the New Year, all our anguish, all our pain,’ wrote Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known subsequently as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘They become disembodied,’ pure outrage, pure weeping. They ascend to the throne of God, who hears because the anguish of the world is close to God’s heart.

Therefore no, don’t despair! Teki’a, calls the shofar: take strength! Remember the sacred spirit that flows through all life! Remember life’s wonder! Listen; that bird, it’s a cuckoo come back from a three-thousand-mile journey. It’s here again. And we’re still here. We shall regroup, repair, rebuild our faith, our spirits, our world. We shall find the energy. We shall never surrender our souls, our vision, our determination, our hope. We shall heal the world, and if not the whole world, if not even this country, then at least this small corner, this tiny portion of infinite, sacred life with which we are entrusted, for which we are responsible, right now.  

Thus, day by day the shofar calls to us, cajoles us, summons us, inspires us, until its great outpouring on Rosh Hashanah, the renewal of creation.