Beyond the Headlines: 'But I already heard the shofar at Selichot' - opinion

After a talk I gave recently ahead of Rosh Hashanah, a teenage girl came up to me and asked, “What is the most important thing my family and I should actually do on Rosh Hashanah?”

“Hear the shofar,” I told her. “That’s the central mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah.”

“Oh, then we’re fine,” she said. “We already heard the shofar during the Selichot prayers at the Western Wall.”

That was when I realized I had gotten something wrong.

I had just given an entire talk filled with ideas for Rosh Hashanah—about the media, social networks, self-improvement—and somehow I had failed to explain the most basic thing of all.

I told her that hearing the shofar during Selichot is a meaningful custom, but hearing it on Rosh Hashanah is different: it is a Torah commandment. A special blessing is recited before the shofar is sounded, and while it is being blown, we remain silent and simply listen.

This year, since the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, when we do not blow the shofar, we will only hear it on Sunday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah. The shofar is usually blown between the morning and early afternoon, in synagogues throughout the Jewish world. Many communities publish the times in advance, so it is worth checking. Or you can simply come to synagogue for the service.

The girl thanked me and said she would tell her parents. Then she added that until now, she had thought apples and honey were the main thing about Rosh Hashanah.

We are living at a time when there is such a deep desire to connect, to learn, to do more. But at the same time, many people are missing even the most basic practical Jewish knowledge.

So, with all due respect to the short ideas and inspiring messages I post every morning, sometimes, before explaining that the word shofar is connected to shipur, “improvement,” we need to start with something much more basic: What are we supposed to do? Where do we do it? When? And how?

Don’t be embarrassed to ask. And don’t hesitate to explain it to someone else.

Thank you to the teenage girl from Or Akiva, who taught me an important lesson last night.

No matter how far you stray

If I had not heard this story with the names of actual people, I would never have believed it. But Franny Weissman shared with me the following tale which, in fact, began more than 100 years ago:

"I came on aliyah from the United States and got married to Evyatar, a native Israeli whose grandmother's parents, along with two of her siblings, were murdered in Auschwitz. Ten of her siblings survived and nine of them decided to make aliyah together, but one sister settled in the United States, never revealing to anyone that she was Jewish. She announced that after the Holocaust she would not bring children into the world, and eventually she married a non-Jew. She did not reveal her identity even to him.

“When her family tried to connect with her, she ignored them. Over and over again I heard the story of Aunt Adelle. There are more than 350 family members now in Israel, four generations, but she has always been the one piece missing from the puzzle.

'Hitler is gone. The war is over.'

“Two years ago, I was asked to travel to the United States to recruit girls for an educational program in Israel. My husband encouraged me to agree to the mission and said, ‘Even if you bring just one soul to Israel, it will be a great success.' They scheduled a lecture tour for me across the United States, and one of the lectures was in Florida. As it turned out, I was just five minutes from the home of Aunt Adelle. I couldn’t believe it. I knocked on the door, and asked for Adelle Schwartz. The housekeeper said that there was no one there by that name, but I realized that she had changed her name. I entered and saw someone who looked a lot like her siblings. I connected them through a video chat and they began to converse in Hungarian. Soon they were crying and sobbing. Even the housekeeper cried.

“Before we parted, I took her hand and said, ‘Adelle, Hitler is gone. The war is over. You have a large family now. You are not alone. No matter how far away you may be, you can always come back. Don’t let Hitler win. At the very least, come to Israel to be buried.’

“We parted with great emotion and stayed in touch. Recently, we received word from an American attorney that Adelle had passed away at the age of 102. We then learned that she had changed her mind: instead of being cremated, she wanted a Jewish funeral.

“We did everything we could to bring her to Israel — the country she had kept at a distance for most of her life. Her funeral was held at Moshav Nir Etzion, and she was buried in the family plot. We were all there, and it was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

“We saw with our own eyes the meaning of the verse: ‘Even if your exiles are at the end of the heavens, the Lord, your God, will gather you from there, and He will take you from there’ (Deuteronomy 30:4).

“As my husband had told me, ‘If you bring even one soul to Israel, it will have been a great success.’”

Translated by Yehoshua Siskin and Janine Muller Sherr

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