A sermon by Rabbi Andrew V. Ettin, Ph.D.

for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

August 27, 2006

These three reflections on lessons from Jewish worship might impart some information. If so, that is merely incidental. What we hope for and want is not information but knowledge. Of course, as a famous poet wrote, “You can’t always get what you want.”

To begin with: the ram’s horn — in Hebrew, shofar. We are three days into the Jewish month called Elul, which is the month right before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This year Rosh Hashanah arrives on Friday night, September 22, when we start the year 5767. (It’s amazing how time flies.)

Each weekday morning during the month of Elul in traditional Jewish congregations, as we lead up to Rosh Hashanah, the shofar is sounded briefly at the end of the synagogue service. The purpose is to alert congregants to the impending holiday and to remind them of the need to prepare for it through introspection, reflection, and soul searching, through seeking and granting forgiveness for their offenses and woundings, a process that reaches its culmination on the tenth day after Rosh Hashanah with the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

Rosh Hashanah is the one festival on which the shofar is still sounded ceremonially in all Jewish congregations, and on that day it is blown multiple times during the morning service in a complex ritual that involves different sorts of shofar calls. Everyone recites a blessing of thanks for the opportunity to “hear” the “voice” of the shofar. Each of the soundings is announced with the Hebrew name of its rhythmic pattern before the skilled person who has been selected for this honor blows through the horn, trying to bend the note upward at the end of each phrase to suggest hopefulness. At least a hundred notes are sounded. At the end of the service, all those who have brought their own shofars might join in their own celebratory blasts. And at the end of Yom Kippur, one long shofar call will conclude the day of fasting and prayer.

Around the sounding of the shofar, an elaborate liturgy and an even more extensive context of biblical interpretation has developed to draw spiritual meanings from the use of this archaic instrument. The ram’s horn, we read in the prayers and hear from the rabbis, recalls the Genesis story of the binding of Isaac, one of the traditionally prescribed Rosh Hashanah biblical readings. Therefore it brings to mind both human fidelity and divine mercy, both of which we might find in that episode. The liturgy also brings together numerous biblical references reinforcing three large themes suggested by the shofar calls.

First is the principle of divine sovereignty: Like the monarch heralded by trumpets, the ruler of the universe is announced by the shofar, whose upward-turning notes link the earthly with the realm of spirit, and whose call celebrates order and good governance in the cosmos. Pluto might or might not be a planet according to mortal definitions, but it goes about its path unfazed by anything we say or do, following an impulse over which we human beings have no control. We might seldom think that we understand why the universe is as it is, but we may nonetheless want to believe that it follows at least normal logic. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.

Second is the theme of remembrance. The separate note patterns of the shofar have been described variously as like an alarm, a trembling, a wailing. They are said to remind and move both us and God of the possibilities for change, improvement, annually turning and returning, alerting us to keep those promises that need to be kept for the sake of the moral order of the world. The sound of the shofar jolts us into awareness that our accustomed patterns are not inevitable. It also reminds us of times when, individually or collectively, we were able to arise hopefully and sustained from life’s ashes—the destruction of the Temple, the loss of a homeland—and another—and another, the Holocaust, the excruciating agony of personal losses, the grieving spirit and aching heart that is the sacrifice endured by all in this world that risk hoping, and all who dare to love.

Third is faith in messianic deliverance. We live with the desire nourished through the prophetic voices with their biblical visions that at some point in the future there will be an earthly state of living as harmonious as the apparent stability that we see in the stars and planets. A state of living in which indeed we shall no longer study land mines and rockets but instead study how to live in peace and harmony with one another under vines and fig trees, addressing the needs of the widows, the orphans, and the resident aliens living and working in our midst, documented or not. It is the desire that sings out in Yiddish in our offertory song, “Shnirele perele,” the impassioned hope that the world we know is about to be transformed into the one we can imagine.

What none of this commentary really accounts for is the extraordinarily compelling presence of the shofar itself and its voice. It is usually called a ram’s horn in English, though it might be from a sheep, goat, or many varieties of antelope, never from a cow. Each species has its own size, colors, shadings and twists; and each one looks exactly like what it is. There is raw integrity to a shofar.

The shofar remained the instrument of choice for religious ceremonies of the Jewish people long after silver trumpets (which are mentioned even in the fourth book of the Bible, the Book of Numbers) came into routine use in palaces and the Temple. Without valves, without an artificial mouthpiece, the shofar is unpredictability itself. Each is different in sound and responsiveness. One raises it, attempts to place it properly against the mouth, blows, and has no idea what sound will emerge. One tries to adapt, but on some days and with some shofars, there seems no way to succeed in producing anything beyond a splat or fizzle. It’s a lot like life. When the call does emerge, it is absolutely visceral and animal, and each sustained note is like a bridge across the void.

All the commentaries of the prayer book and the rabbis seem to be merely a series of postulates without the shofar. Human beings are not just talking heads. After the ceremony, what people remember, far more than any of the associated biblical texts and their themes, is the kol shofar, the voice of the shofar – a voice demanding attention; a voice that gets attention without words; a voice that speaks of our own yearning, hopefulness, uncertainty; a voice pulling us from the mundane and expected into the realm of the unpredictable, into the realm where change and turning of oneself is the practice of the moment, and the results uncertain even if the intention is clear; into a realm where the presence and the working and the abiding sustenance of what some of us call God is as certain as the laws of physics and just as impenetrable by even the keenest sensibility.

Two: the phylacteries. In Hebrew, they are called tefillin. How odd that in English Bible translations, an unfamiliar Hebrew word, tefillin, which comes from the word meaning prayer, is “translated” by the Greek word phylactery that is just as unfamiliar, doesn’t mean anything to anybody, and furthermore doesn’t even equate well in Greek with the objects it is supposed to name. Tefillin consist of two small black leather boxes, each one attached to a specially wound black leather strap whose knots and windings have the shapes of Hebrew letters. During weekday morning prayers, one is worn on the worshipper’s arm and hand, the other going around the worshipper’s head so that the box is centered on the forehead just above the eyes. Inside the boxes are little compartments in which are placed a scribe’s hand-written parchment scrolls consisting of the four sets of biblical verses from Exodus and Deuteronomy in which Tefillin are commanded (Exodus 13:1-10, 11-16; Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21).

One never opens the boxes. Those little scrolls inside are not taken out and read; but the texts are quoted in the liturgy, the most familiar of the passages being the Deuteronomic commandment “Take to heart these instructions I give you today. Instill them in your children. Consider them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you arise. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a frontlet between your eyes. Inscribe them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates." (Of course, “frontlet” is another English word that really means nothing to anyone, but at least it gives an inkling of an idea.)

Wearing tefillin at prayer is generally regarded as implying that one accepts the biblical commandments and considers them binding, in this case literally, on one’s actions—the hand and arm—one’s impulses—because the box on the arm is angled toward the heart—one’s thoughts, and one’s way of looking at the world—the so-called “frontlet” on the forehead between one’s eyes.

For some who wear tefillin, however, the most important part of the ritual is not the wearing but putting them on. This begins after one has already wrapped oneself in a prayer shawl, a tallit, and it is conducted effectively in silence, because it is supposed to take one’s entire attention. First, one has to remove any watch, rings or bracelets on the hand and arm on which the tefillin will be wound. The process of putting on the tefillin entails placing the box on the arm, tightening the strap, wrapping the strap in a certain way on the upper arm, then seven times around the forearm as one recites a blessing, temporarily winding the strap around the hand while one places the other tefillin on the head and recites yet another text and blessing, then returns to finish the process of binding the hand with the leather strap, wrapping around the fingers while reciting a verse from the prophet Hosea, ending by looking at the back of one’s hand and seeing that one has formed with the shiny black strap the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter of one of the special Hebrew names of God. And where else can that letter be found so prominently? On the outside of the mezuzah, the box containing a tiny hand-written parchment scroll with two of the same texts as the tefillin, placed as we heard before, “on the doorpost of” a Jewish person’s house.

That is, through the wrapping of the tefillin, one virtually makes oneself the living embodiment of sacred teaching. The letter formed by the strap on our hand and standing for a divine name temporarily makes our physical being an inscription. It is as if we, like the specially trained scribe who writes the parchments—on animal skins—had temporarily turned ourselves—in our human animal skin—into sacred text; as if for this period of prayer we could inhabit the divine presence through the tefillin that help us in tefilah, prayer. Or as if one’s own person houses the commandments, like the mezuzah. They are on the doorposts and gates of our very being. That much of the understanding is homiletic: One can preach about it.

What cannot be so easily understood or expressed in normal discourse is the effect of the physical process of the wrapping. The ritualistic element of putting on the tefillin takes us into meditation, into something akin to a yoga exercise and, almost paradoxically, to dance. It is like a dance done with the feet and legs perfectly still, the core of the body motionless, but hands and arms and mind and lips constantly responding to one’s focused attention and intention.

In truth, most people who wear tefillin regularly may put them on with as little purposeful concentration as most of us put into driving a well-traveled daily route. But the opportunity is available for an inner turn, the unexpected rediscovery of awareness, immersing into a deeper consciousness so that the automatic twistings and windings become rather like the focused whirls of the dervish, simultaneously requiring and intensifying our concentration, helping us to reach the still core of being at the center of our own turnings—the stable point of gravity that holds together our winding ways.

Three: We place the mezuzah and its texts on the doorposts of our house and on its gates, to remind us of our obligations as we come in and as we go out. At the core of the Jewish worship service we also place a kind of mezuzah: reminders to ourselves. But there, they are not to remind us of Jewish biblical and rabbinic commandments; instead, they speak of our obligations and frailties as human beings, as we enter into prayer and as we move from it. Before the sequence of prayers at the heart of the liturgy, we enter into them asking, “Breath of Life, part my lips, that my mouth may open in praise.” Once they are concluded, we need to be accountable for what those words said and how we felt about them; we leave that time of prayer with the hope “May the words from my mouth and the thoughts within my heart be acceptable before You, my Rock and my Deliverance.” Just before we reach that prayer, we have a time to pray in silence. But silence might also need words, and tradition has provided them: “My God, keep my tongue from trouble-making and my lips from speaking falsely.” We need words to remind us of the danger of words.

We are continually undermined and betrayed by what we say, and when we say it, to whom and how, by the false ways in which we have knowingly or unconsciously distorted the truth because of our own needs, desires, vulnerability. No wonder that, as rabbis always point out on Yom Kippur, the prayerbook’s list of sins that we confess and for which we ask forgiveness include only one that has to do with what we put into our mouths and over a dozen varieties of what comes out of our mouths. Naturally, “mouths” today must include not just cell phones but talky e-mails that can so quickly speed rumors and gossip. We are wired and wireless, and sometimes oblivious and clueless. Many of us are exasperated by the people who inflict their part of a cell-phone conversation on everyone in the airport lounge, grocery store, bookstore, or restaurant. Imagine having to overhear every conversation, every prayer, every threat, every plea, every cry. Imagine being God.

Sometimes words are too much. Sometimes they are not enough. Not enough because they may drape themselves casually over the surface of life, leading the trusting and unsuspecting to assume that beneath them there is a solid place to stand, a safe place to sit and rest. Not enough because linguistic resources continually fail us. (Just think of how paltry the word “love” is for all its varied duties.) Not enough because our readiness with words can keep us from listening for the sanctified moment in the heart’s silence. Can keep us from hearing the “still, small voice” we need to hear clearly and honestly. Can keep us from discerning amid the chatter the voice of another who needs to be heard, the silence of another that needs to be noticed. Not enough because too many words may keep us from being still, and in that stillness to know who and what we are, and where, and how it is with us.

Jewish tradition holds that the most sacred name of God is unpronounceable, unutterable; and that the highest level of divine existence is a Something that is indistinguishable from Nothingness, beyond the capacity of human beings to comprehend and far beyond the capabilities of any language—even Hebrew—to describe or define. We similarly struggle to speak of ourselves, fail again and again to say who and what we are, we individual and collective mortal creatures, who are indeed more than talking heads. Through music and ritual, through dance and the visual arts we try to bring ourselves into expressive being, doing the little that we can to speak ourselves to one another with whatever resources we can command, because words are not enough.