Tekiah!

The sound of the shofar isn’t exactly comforting. The call of the ram’s horn always makes me stand with my back a bit straighter, my eyes a bit wider. Sometimes the final, long call (the tekiah gedolah) simultaneously brings tears to my eyes and makes me feel like I should run out the door of the synagogue to start doing good deeds. There’s something about the tone of a shofar that feels big, expansive. And there’s something about the pattern of the different calls—the announcing call , the three harkening upward-inflected blasts, the staccato bursts, and the high-pitched sustained note—all arranged in several combinations, that just sounds ancient, primal.

The shofar’s blast can sound like a battle cry, a warning, or an announcement. As we prepare to hear its call, we recite prayers around three themes: sovereignty, remembrance, and revelation. These are themes of power and majesty, reminding us of our smallness and helplessness. These prayers highlight the nature of Rosh HaShana as Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. This is a day when God reviews the record of all our deeds and decides, the Days of Awe prayerbook bluntly states, whether we will live or die. A primal call to awaken us to this bald fact: we are mortal, and there is much in our lives we cannot control.

I suspect that this year, many of us don’t exactly need a reminder of this helplessness, this smallness, this lack of control.

On Saturday, when I hear the blast of the shofar, I don’t want to close my ears to the magnitude of the day. But I’m afraid I might feel annoyed or resentful: why do I need to listen to this reminder of something I already know? Can You cut me some slack?

The prayers in the section of the service for blowing the shofar talk about God’s majesty, the creation of the world, the all-knowingness of God and our utter inability to hide our flaws. They talk about judgment and justice and glory. But they also talk about remembrance and mercy and compassion.

The “remembrance” prayers engage in a bit of name-dropping: God, we know you’re all-powerful and our fates are in your hand. Do you, by the way, know my ancestor Abraham? … We mention and we acknowledge the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a way to hold God accountable; we want God to continue keeping the promise. We acknowledge God as one who remembers the work of creation and is mindful of all that was fashioned in the beginning.

The sound of the shofar reaches into our gut to shake us awake, to motivate us to change what we need to change. But it is an echo that reaches to the farthest reaches of our existence, that calls out to God, too. It is a reminder to God to keep an ancient covenant, and it is a call to us to remember: “God remembered His covenant with them and comforted them in His great love.”

When we hear on the Day of Judgment that God “remembers all that has been forgotten” for all eternity, we understandably might shake in our boots and feel, as I sometimes do, the urge to run out and immediately set things right. But the point is not that God remembers all the terrible things we have done and hidden and forgotten—or at least, that’s not the whole point. The point is that God remembers that we’re in a relationship. God remembers the covenant.

I suppose the blast of the shofar isn’t comforting to people who are uncomfortable with the idea of God or with the notion of covenant. Whether you do or not, though, the sound of the shofar can be a powerful call to remember the complexity of our lives, to balance out the fear of mortality with an awareness of the preciousness of our finite lives, to measure the misdeeds against the compassion we have been shown. It can serve as a call to remember our responsibilities to the people around us—our responsibility to show them compassion and to approach them with the humility we are urged to feel on a Day of Judgment, the awareness of the history of our relationships appropriate for a Day of Remembrance, and the kindness and joy of the beginning of a New Year.