עֵ֣ת לַחֲשׁ֔וֹת וְעֵ֖ת לְדַבֵּֽר
“A time to be silent and a time to speak” (Kohelet 3:7)
There is a moment on Rosh HaShana when the synagogue goes completely silent. The ba’al toqea, the one who will blow the shofar, lifts it after saying the berakha, and nobody moves or speaks. Many close their eyes, bracing for one of the most solemn moments of the day, maybe of the year.
While they listen to the shofar, some ask for health, or for parnasa, a decent livelihood, or for a shidukh, someone to marry. But asking for things while we listen to the shofar is not what we are supposed to be doing.
This is not anyone’s fault. People pray at that moment because that is what they have always done, or what they were taught, or what feels natural. Somewhere along the way we picked up a bad habit: the moment we feel close to God, the first thing we do is ask Him for something. But the mitsva of the Shofar is not about asking God for anything. The berakha, blessing, we say before we hear the shofar says it plainly. Our obligation is lishmoa qol shofar, to hear the voice of the shofar. In silence. And the halakha reinforces it: from the moment the berakha is recited until the last sound of the shofar is finished, we avoid speaking or interrupting unnecessarily.
The shofar is not a moment for talking to God. It is the one moment in the year when our job is to be quiet. And listen.
So what are we supposed to hear? What is the shofar saying? The answer is in the name the Torah gives this day: Yom Teru’a. And in the explanation of our Sages that Rosh HaShana is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. Let us take this apart step by step.
The sound of uncertainty
The Hebrew word teru’a is rendered by Onqelos as yebaba. And what is a yebaba? It is a human sound of distress. But it is not weeping. The Torah has other words for weeping (bekhi), for mourning (nehi), for a cry for help (ze’aqa). The yebaba is something else: a sigh, a whimper, a sound that appears in one very specific situation. It comes when, in a moment of existential uncertainty, a person starts to picture that things may end badly.
An example from ordinary life. More than twenty years ago, one of our children, five years old at the time, got lost in a shopping mall. For the first few minutes, you search with concern. Where is he? He must be around here. He got distracted. We split up and started looking. But what happens when twenty minutes have gone by, and he still has not turned up? That is when the terrible thoughts start. What if somebody took him? What if he was kidnapped? What if we never see him again, chas veshalom?
At that moment, in that kind of existential uncertainty, we do not cry yet, because we do not know that anything bad has actually happened. But we sigh in anguish just from imagining it. We start to break emotionally, whimpering, anticipating, God forbid, a horrible ending. Do not worry. Barukh HaShem, we found our son after the thirty hardest minutes of our lives, happily entertained and distracted in the video arcade.
Back to the yebaba. Those sighs, that whimper of dread that comes out of a person imagining that something terrible may have happened, are what the Torah calls teru’a. That is the voice of the shofar.
Modern psychology has identified something very close to this. Specialists distinguish between fear of a danger that is present and anticipatory anxiety, which shows up when we still do not know what is going on but have begun to consider that something bad might happen. That uncertainty does not stay in the mind. It changes the way we breathe. Breathing turns irregular. There are sighs, small moans, a broken sort of crying. The yebaba is the bodily sound of anticipatory anxiety. We are not weeping over a tragedy that already happened. We are sighing and breaking over something bad that could happen.
The mother of Sisera
The Sages (Rosh HaShana 33b) explain the meaning of yebaba from a very unusual verse in Tanakh. Sisera was the general of King Yabin of Canaan. For twenty years he had oppressed Israel at the head of a powerful army with nine hundred iron chariots (Shofetim 4:3, 13). He looked invincible. That day he went out to fight Debora and Baraq, lost, and was killed. Then the biblical text does something extraordinary. It takes us behind enemy lines, into Sisera’s house. His mother is there, waiting for him as she had so many times before. Her son was going to come home with the spoils, with prisoners, with the applause of victory, and surely with gifts for her. But the chariot does not arrive. Too much time has passed. The mother begins to suspect the worst.
The text shows her at the window, more anxious by the minute:
בְּעַד֩ הַחַלּ֨וֹן נִשְׁקְפָ֧ה וַתְּיַבֵּ֛ב אֵ֥ם סִֽיסְרָ֖א בְּעַ֣ד הָאֶשְׁנָ֑ב מַדּ֗וּעַ בֹּשֵׁ֤שׁ רִכְבּוֹ֙ לָב֔וֹא מַדּ֣וּעַ אֶֽחֱר֔וּ פַּעֲמֵ֖י מַרְכְּבוֹתָֽיו
“Through the window she looks out and moans, the mother of Sisera, through the lattice: why is his chariot so long in coming? Why do the hoofbeats of his chariots delay?” (Shofetim 5:28)
Her servants also realized Sisera is taking too long, and they try to calm her down. “He must be delayed dividing the spoils, which must be enormous” (5:29-30).
Notice one crucial detail. When the text describes the mother’s reaction, it does not say she wept. It says vateyabeb, using the very word yebaba, which gets translated as “moaned” only because there is no closer word for it. It is not quite the same thing. She could not yet cry, because she did not know her son had died in battle. Her mind was full of anxiety, suspended between his possible return and his possible end. For the first time, she began to consider that he might never come back. And she made that sound of premonitory grief.
The yebaba is not the cry of someone who has already been told the worst. It is the sound of someone who has just taken in that the worst is possible. Think of a person who has been tested for a terminal illness and is waiting for the results. Nothing has happened yet. Nothing has been ruled out either. That is the sound the Torah calls teru’a: what comes out of a person at the moment mortality enters his mind.
The Sages then discuss how to produce that sound with a ram’s horn: Is it a long, broken sigh? A short, repeated whimper? Or both together, the sigh first and then the whimper? That is where shebarim, teru’a, and the combination of the two come from.
Rosh HaShana is Yom HaDin
And that is exactly what the voices of the shofar come to remind us: today is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. Who is being judged? I am. And what is at stake? My own life.
Our Sages expressed this idea, which is really about our own mortality, with great delicacy, through a beautiful metaphor. On Rosh HaShana, they said, the books of life and of death are opened. God judges our actions of the past year and determines our future. He writes us into one of the two books. And we cannot be sure which book carries our name. Did we do everything we could this past year to deserve being written again in the Book of Life? We do not know.
This uncertainty is what the Shofar is meant to awaken in us. The shofar invites us to stand, for a few moments, at the same window where Sisera’s mother stood. The Torah wants us, for at least a few minutes a year, to stop treating our life as an entitlement and see it again for what it is: a conditional gift from the Creator that has to be earned. And to get us into that state of mind, the shofar makes us aware that we are mortal.
The rest of the year we almost never think about it. While we are healthy, while the family is fine and nothing essential is missing, we live with an extraordinary sense of predictability. We assume tomorrow will be more or less like today, that next month will arrive on schedule, that next year will pass much like the ones before it.
Maimonides describes this state, in which we deny our own mortality, as sleep. And he explains that the shofar comes to wake us: “Wake up, you who are asleep, from your slumber… you who forget the truth in the vanities of time” (Hilkhot Teshuba 3:4).
And what is that truth we forget while we are distracted? It is not a complicated philosophical idea. It is probably the one thing about our future that we know with absolute certainty: we are not invincible, and we are not eternal. Nobody is guaranteed another year.
When predictability collapses
The yebaba of Sisera’s mother is exactly the moment the illusion of safety or immortality cracks. Until then she was sure her son would come back, the way he had come back so many times. And suddenly she is not so sure.
The shofar reproduces that instant so that something similar happens in us. So that for a few minutes we feel fragile, vulnerable, and above all dependent on the Creator. So that we can actually feel that we are being judged, and that our life is not something to take for granted.
That message needs time to sink in. You cannot half receive it while doing something else. That is why, while we listen to the shofar, it is not the time to ask for things or to pray, and not even the time to list our sins, say the Viduy and regret each bad thing we did. That comes later.
During those few sublime moments, what we need to recover is the awareness of our mortality: to listen, absorb, feel vulnerable, and accept how fragile we are.
זִֽבְחֵ֣י אֱלֹ-הִים֮ ר֤וּחַ נִשְׁבָּ֫רָ֥ה לֵב־נִשְׁבָּ֥ר וְנִדְכֶּ֑ה אֱלֹ-הִ֗ים לֹ֣א תִבְזֶֽה
“A broken and fragile heart, God does not ignore” (Tehilim 51:19).
What matters is the process
Recovering the awareness of our mortality is NOT a morbid exercise. Just the opposite. It is the first step of Teshuba. The shofar is not Teshuba itself. It is the psychological and spiritual preparation that makes Teshuba possible. First it breaks our sense of invulnerability and makes us humbler. Then come hakarat hachet, recognizing our failures, the Viduy, asking forgiveness, repairing what we did wrong, and finally, changing.
This is why Rosh HaShana opens the Ten Days of Teshuba with uncertainty. We have been judged, but we do not yet know the verdict. We stop assuming that next year is guaranteed and start asking what we need to change in order to deserve another year of life.
And here is one of the most extraordinary ideas of the Yamim Noraim: the uncertain verdict of Rosh HaShana can be appealed. In the metaphor of the Book of Life, God has written us in, but the verdict is not yet sealed. We have ten days to do Teshuba, to pray, to ask forgiveness, to repair what we did, and to show that we can be different. The final verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur.
So while we listen to the shofar, it is still not the time to ask, to confess, or to enumerate our sins. Not because those things do not matter, but because they belong to the next stages. And the stages should not be skipped. First we let the shofar do its work: wake us up and make us feel fragile and dependent on our Creator.
Then comes the time to act. Humility will let us say the words “I was wrong.” Ask forgiveness from the people we hurt. Repair relationships. Say Viduy. Change.
Rosh HaShana begins in uncertainty. But that uncertainty is part of a deliberate process, one that pushes us to use the days left until Yom Kippur to do everything in our power and appeal the verdict. And when Yom Kippur ends, we trust that our Teshuba was accepted, that any negative decree was revoked, and that the people we love and we have been sealed in the Book of Life.
