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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good Morning.

In our previous home we had Jewish neighbours on one side, and, on the other, a Christian lady. Soon after we moved in, she commented to the Jewish couple that the new resident – meaning me - had taken up the French horn, but wasn’t very good at it. ‘Don’t worry,’ they replied, as they told us later, ‘He’ll soon give it up.’

They were right. I was practicing blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn, in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year which begins this coming weekend, when the shofar’s cry will punctuate our prayers.

But for whom does the shofar sound?

The instrument has a history. It recalls the ram offered by Abraham, when, at the last moment, God told him not to sacrifice his son. Thereafter it came to represent all the sacrifices the Jewish People were forced to make through many exiles and persecutions, when no voice from heaven intervened hence the shofar’s call became a cry for life, all and every life. I remember saying, before blowing the shofar days after 9/11, ‘This is for all human sorrow, all loss, and all hope.’

But a shofar is not a human artefact. It comes from the world of nature, and it calls out for the animals too. I hear in it the curlew’s cry and the sharp retorts of seabirds at dusk. It’s an articulation of the deep togetherness of all life.

The shofar’s most tender sound is like weeping; its longest note expresses the indestructibility of hope.

May it sound for all life, heralding a year which carries us from sorrow to joy.

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