ARCHIVE: Elul’s Shofar
As we prepare to enter the month of Elul – hodesh ha-rahamim veha-selihot – and to bring this traumatic year to a close with hopes of renewal and repentance on Rosh Hashana, we revisit a classic Elul essay in the TRADITION archives.
Thirty years ago our editor, Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, penned an “Editor’s Notebook” titled “The Shofar That Is Sounded in Elul.” He opens with an anecdote of a late summer weekday wherein a secular Jew, like the Mishnaic figure who overhears the shofar blast while walking past a synagogue, inquires what the sound was: “I am not religious—but I know it’s not Rosh Hashana yet. Why do they sound the shofar every morning around here?”
R. Feldman explained the custom of Elul’s shofar and was both pleased to share wisdom from our tradition with another Jerusalem Jew, but saddened that the fellow was so estranged from Torah that he was unaware of the tradition. The encounter was an opportunity for our editor to reflect on the Guttman Report, commissioned by the Avi Chai Foundation on the beliefs, observances, and social interactions among Israeli Jews across denominational and secular-religious lines. The report was the focus of constant discussion in those days; it put the lie to the notion of a society as divided as conventionally assumed, suggesting that “secular” Israelis are actually much more Jewishly engaged than we usually imagine.
Three decades on Israel is paradoxically both more united and more divided, in ways that R. Feldman could not have predicted in 1994 (although at the outbreak of the war he spoke with the Tradition Podcast about these and adjacent subjects). As we prepare to sound the shofar of Elul this week, we remember that R. Feldman’s insight and wisdom always have the capacity to inform and enlighten even across the decades.