Paint Me Tears of Shofar

In preparation for, G!d willing, many a Yom Kipur to come, I'm going to lay out a pallette of ideas here. Over time I'd like to use it for the synthesis of a comprehensive, integrated, and precise accounting of the Days of Awe ritual program. Please comment on where this collection of thoughts leads you, and gmar chatimah tovah!

Rosh HaShanah is known literally as either a day of "remembrance" (zikaron) or a day of "crying" (truah). What is to be remembered? How is it related to crying, and crying of what sort?

The Hebrew truah -- which describes the stoccato, sobbing shofar blowing pattern associated with the individual who is "torn" (Rosh Hashanah 16b) -- seems to derive from the fascinating shoresh (Hebrew root) reysh-ayin, which signifies both "evil" and "fellowship." (See also Leviticus 19:18: "love your fellow" / "love your evil...") This shoresh makes another significant appearance in the Machzor in the closing refrain of the Unetane Tokef: "Return, prayer, and righteous-giving will elide the evil (of the) decree." The "evil" is roa (reysh-ayin).

See also these threads re: truah and/or roa:
Danya Ruttenberg: The Unetane Tokef and Collective Responsibility
Linda Hirschhorn: The Shofar Calls

The Torah and Haftarah readings for Rosh HaShanah all involve crying of various sorts. (The differences between these various sorts and situations of crying are surely significant.) The apparent exception is the second-day R"H Torah reading of the Akeydah, where the crying is found in two midrashim: (1) Rashi on Genesis 27:1 ascribes Yitchak's blindness to tears of angels shed into his eyes upon the altar -- in other words, the Akeydah is significant precisely because Yitzchak doesn't cry; and (2) Leviticus Rabba on Genesis 23:1-2 describes Sarah's death at learning of the Akeydah by way of "six cries, corresponding to the six blasts of the shofar." (How do we get six shofar blasts here?)

(See also R' Gafni's Tears on the Holy Days and Tears, if you can bear teaching from this teacher.)

The Talmud associates Rosh HaShanah's shofar-blowing ritual specifically with the weeping of Sisera's mother. Sisera's mother, and our crying-ritual "remembrance" of her, is striking in a number of ways: She is anonymous, newly bereft of her identity's sole point of reference, Sisera. She is our (the Jews', the Universal Other's) perfect Other, the nameless mother of our harshest enemy. She is a tragic victim of war, of that enmity itself, and of our triumph -- staged conflict having submersed her individual human identity in that of a camp, and then our triumph having obliterated that camp in addition to taking her very own son. She is also, not incidentally, the progenitor of the "teachers of Jerusalem's youth" (Gittin 57b).

More on Sisera's mother and shofar:
R' Melanie Aron: Sounds of the Shofar
Ohr Somayach: Blast It!
R' Alex Israel: Shofar – Facing Uncertainty

I have long suspected that we tend not to comprehend adequately the basic tenent of Jewish faith that G!d rewards and punishes. It seems it is most often used as a foil for our human desire to reward and punish each other. Read not, "it is G!d who rewards and punishes," but rather, "G!d rewards and punishes, so I can too." Such facile theological thinking has produced innumerable callous declarations -- by Jews, Christians, and Muslims -- amounting to, "my homophobia justifies the destruction by Hurricane Katrina," and the like, which really is just me using G!d as a semantic proxy for the punishment of my supposed enemies. I find it more intellectually honest, and humble, to presume that one can't possibly imagine the justification for any suffering, violence, or death. Possibly even, as Marshall Rosenberg might argue, the very idea of reward and punishment, at least insofar as we can comprehend it, is simpleminded and morally corrosive. Better probably to say that, if I'm tempted to think of something as being or warranting a reward or punishment, then I'm referring to something in G!d's domain, which I don't fully understand, so it isn't really my business. I should instead content myself to know that, in this comprehensively holistic Creation, every action or expression has consequences both foreseeable and unforeseeable. Really, that ought to be enough.

What I'm arguing for is a cosmology of something like Karma, and I do so because I think it opens the possiblity for a deep reading of High Holy Days ritual in terms simultaneously of individual and of collective narrative. In particular, there is something we have to remember (we're supposed to spend Elul on this) about our threads of relationship into the world, and then there is a kind of spiritual release, drawn upon that remembrance, whose effectiveness somehow determines the fate of life in the year to come. Simplistically, this could mean that, if I remain enslaved to my grudges and my enmity, then there may be violent consequences in the world this year, that could alternately be transformed if I instead embrace the tears that unify the experiences of my mother Sarah, my enemy's mother Sisera, and me.

More on Tears and Rosh HaShanah:
Dr. Elie Wiesel: Let Us Collect the Tears
Shifra Hendrie: Rosh HaShanah: From Tears to Transformation