Blowing the Shofar

Last night, in a class on Rosh Hashanah and the month of Elul, Estelle Frankel brought us two shofars. One was hers and one was God's. She handed one to each of two students present. I had never heard a shofar before - except as the opening sound in Godspell. But here it was a totally different experience. I imagine it would be very powerful to hear one of these sounded over the desert. It would remind you of your soul being echoed from a distance. But what it sounded like to me was the call of a loon. It had those long wails, the breaking from a low note to a high one. The punctuated trills. And the two shofars sometimes were in unison, sounding a harmony, or creating a tonic or third wave of sound in between them.

As with the shofars, often two loons will be calling to each other over the water in the darkness. That's when we would hear them. In summer, up at Uncle Bud's Cabin on the lake in Maine, at night, with the yellow porch light attracting the moths and mosquitoes. We would sit on the porch, reading, talking, or playing games of cards. And my mother would hear the loon, and she would sit back and retreat into herself. It was like the loon was calling her home. Because, in a way, it was.

There is something comforting about hearing a sense of longing outside yourself. Because that's what a loon makes. That's what a shofar does. It makes the sound of a soul yearning to come home, or, as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride when they hear Wesley's soul-wrenching cry, the "Sound of Ultimate Suffering," and that's how they know it is the Man in Black.

But the shofar, making that sound, brings us home. Because it creates that longing outside us, it gives us permission to feel it inside, where we typically ignore it. And then, once it is felt, it can be released. And we realize that in fact, our soul is not out wandering in the desert somewhere, nor does it want to be. It's right here in our chest. And all we have to do is remember its longing to come home, and give it that space to live here with us, instead of letting our egos push it aside.