Shofar blowing for Elul 5785
www.HumanisticTorah.org
This is rough machine-generated transcript that may have some errors.
Hello chaverim. Hello friends. My name is James Branum, and I’m doing what I do every year, which is I do some shofar blowing for my friends online who may not have the opportunity to hear shofar blown during the month of the lull or during the high holiday season before I blow shofar, though, I’ll mention that it is a mitzvah to hear shofar. It is a teaching in Judaism that there’s something valuable that comes from hearing the shofar blown during this time of year.
Now, as a humanistic Jew and as an unbound Jew, of course, I feel a lot of freedom to reinterpret this, this tradition, in a different way. And so for me, what I see the shofar as being about is, first and foremost, it is a wake up call. It is a call to recognize the power of this season of the High Holidays. Is a time of the setting of new intentions, a time of assessing our lives and saying what’s working and what’s not working, and then making proactive choices to bring those things about. And so for me, the shofar is rooted in that.
It’s also rooted in the the idea of preparedness and and of keeping others safe. The shofar, of course, was once a sound of alarm. It was sometimes used in the context of war, but especially to warn people of danger coming. And at this moment in time, here in the United States and in many other parts of the world today, we don’t feel very safe. There’s a lot of things that are lot of forces that are out there to do harm.
And so this high holiday season, what I take from it is this is a time to take seriously what it means to be a Jew, what it means to be a humanist, and what we will be doing in the coming year to make this world better, to be forming the work of tikkun olam. So anyway, that’s a little bit of a prelude for this.
I will say I’m adapting this a tiny bit from a more traditional context to fit our context here. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to do a little bit of a call and response. I’ll be doing both parts, obviously, of of part of the pattern that would normally be done in the Rosh Hashanah morning service. But I’m doing it here just— because so, so first though, let me do give a blessing, and this one will be a humanistic version. Baruch b’or ha olam, Blessed is the light of the world, which has brought us to this moment and to this time for the blowing of the shofar.
(SHOFAR
Everyone, hope you have a wonderful new year to come. May it filled with love, with solidarity and with pride of being in this moment, in this time, and of being human beings were called to be. Thank you and Shanah Tovah!
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