Category Archives: Rosh Hashana

Who By Tongue

There’s an often overlooked irony in the story of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, whose poignant tefillah “U’nesaneh Tokef, describing the Ultimate Judge’s opening the book of our deeds and deciding our fates, is solemnly recited on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. 

It is a chilling passage to recite – and the haunting melody to which it is traditionally sung only adds to its poignancy. And its final words, “But repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of the decree,” chanted loudly by the entire tzibbur, are a fount of inspiration and hope for the new year.

The story behind the composition is from the 13th century halachic work Ohr Zarua, written by Rabbi Yitzchok ben Moshe of Vienna.

Rabbi Amnon was pressured by the Archbishop of Mainz to convert to Christianity and refused, finally, as a stalling tactic, asking for three days’ time to consider the offer.

When Rabbi Amnon didn’t visit the clergyman at the end of the three days, he was forcibly taken to him and, adamant in his refusal, was tortured on the Archbishop’s orders. Rabbi Amnon’s fingers and toes were amputated one by one, and he was returned to his home with his twenty amputated limbs.

On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Amnon asked to be carried, along with his body parts, into shul, and before Kedushah, intoned U’nsaneh Tokef, dying shortly thereafter. Several days later, one Kalonymus ben Meshulam, according to the account, had a dream in which Rabbi Amnon taught him the words of the prayer.

According to the account, when Rabbi Amnon was brought before the archbishop, the rabbi told the clergyman that he wanted to be punished – not for refusing the conversion offer but rather for having given the impression that he had even considered such a thing.  “Cut out my tongue,” he told the archbishop.  The clergyman, however, seeing Rabbi Amnon’s refusal to convert as his sin, chose his own punishment for the rabbi, the one meted out.

And so the priest, while he tortured the Jew grievously, left his victim’s tongue in place.

And therein lies the irony. That tongue was what yielded us U’nsaneh Tokef.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Parshas Vayeilech – No, No, No, It Ain’t Me

A time will come, the Torah warns, when Hashem, as a result of Klal Yisrael’s actions, will seem to “abandon them and hide My countenance from them” and “many evils and troubles will befall them” (Devarim 31:17).

And “on that day,” the people will say: “Surely it is because Hashem is not in our midst that these evils have found us” (ibid).

That common translation, however, isn’t literal. What the pasuk really says is “because my Hashem is not in my midst that these evils have found me.”

The straightforward understanding of that expression of anguish is that Hashem’s “hidden face” will cause the Jewish people to doubt His love for them. The singular possessives and object would then simply be personifications of a collective feeling of abandonment.

But the use of the singular may point to a source of behavior that can lead to the “many evils and troubles,” a singularly personal attitude: Jewish individuals – as individuals – imagining that Hashem, although He is “my Hashem,” isn’t truly in me.

That, in other words, there isn’t within me inherent holiness and the attendant ability to unlock it.

And, indeed, Torah-study and mitzvos, so many Jews think, just aren’t them. They’re fine and doable, but for others.

For rabbis.

“Orthodox” ones.

And the delusion that we don’t have momentous potential isn’t limited to Jews estranged from their religious heritage. Dedicated observant Jews are vulnerable, too, to feelings of despondency born of feeling “unholy,” incapable of what they may know the Torah asks of them, but feel just “isn’t them.”

None of us, though, is “unholy.” Hashem took the trouble, so to speak, to grant each of us existence, and that means His plan includes us as essential players, capable of holiness.

Each and every single one of us.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Driving Like It’s Rosh Hashanah

Some Jews attend shul only on the Yamim Nora’aim or for a yahrtzeit. They “compartmentalize” their Judaism. It’s called on only for special occasions. And yet, as always, there’s more to be gained by not looking at others but rather inward. Our Orthodox world, after all, “knows from” compartmentalization too.


A similar compartmentalization is evident in a more observant Jew who, while he would never dream of eating food lacking a good hechsher, might nevertheless act in his business dealings, or his home life, or behind the wheel in less Torah-observant ways.


It seems part of the human condition to, while knowing Hashem and His Torah are real, relegate their presence to one’s “religious” life, not one’s mundane day-to-day living.


Some of us don’t always pause and think of what it is we’re saying when we make a brachah (or pronounce every word clearly and distinctly). We allow our observances and davening to sometimes fade into rote. I’m writing here to myself, but some readers may be able to relate.


Rosh Hashanah, the first of the Days of Repentance, is suffused with the concept of Malchus, “Kingship.” The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and the concept of malchiyus is prominent in the days’ Mussaf tefillah. What, though, has kingship to do with repentance?


By definition, a king has a kingdom, over which he exerts his rules. There is little escaping even a mortal monarch’s reach, and none of his subjects dares take any action without royal approval. All the more so, infinite times over, in the case of not a king but the King.


Kingship and compartmentalization are diametric, incompatible ideas. If Hashem is to be our Ruler, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.


Rosh Hashanah is our yearly opportunity to try to bring our lives more in line with that ideal. To better comprehend, in other words, that Hashem is as manifest when we are sitting behind a desk, driving, cooking or sending kids off to school as He is when we are reciting Shemoneh Esrei, as present on a nondescript December morning as He is during the Yamim Nora’im.

© 2021 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Parshas Nitzavim – The Role of Failure

Reflecting the time of year when we read Nitzavim, before the “Days of Awe,” the parshah’s major themes are sin and repentance.

And while much of Nitzavim concerns potential punishments for sin, there is also an undercurrent of assurance, of the possibility of teshuvah, repentance. “And you will return to Hashem, your G-d” (Devarim 30:2).

Even the parshah’s first words imply the power of teshuvah. Moshe addresses the Jews as nitzavim hayom, “standing upright today” (29:9), despite the fact that “much did you anger” Hashem over the years of wandering the desert, “yet He did not destroy you” (Rashi 29: 12).

Essential to teshuvah is charatah, regret of the sin. But charatah means just that, regret, wishing one had not sinned. It does not mean despondence, which can actually impede teshuvah.

Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, the revered Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin from 1940 into the 1970s, once wrote a letter to a student who had shared his anguish and depression over personal spiritual failures.

What makes life meaningful, the Rosh Yeshiva responded, is not basking in one’s “good inclination” but rather engaging, repeatedly, no matter the setbacks, in the battle against our inclination to sin.

“Seven times does the righteous one fall and get up,” (Mishlei, 24:16) wrote Shlomo Hamelech. That, wrote Rav Hutner, does not mean that “even after falling seven times, the righteous one manages to get up again.” What it really means, he explains, is that it is precisely through repeated falls that a person truly achieves righteousness. The struggles — including the failures — are inherent to the achievement of eventual, ultimate success.

One of the melachos of Shabbos is mocheik, or “erasing,” the sister-melachah of “writing.” And the melachos are derived from what was necessary during the construction of the mishkan.

Erasing, Rashi (Shabbos, 73a) explains, was necessary because mistakes would be made when marking the mishkan’s beams with letters indicating their placement. But only actions intrinsic to the construction of the mishkan are melachos. Apparently, mistakes were part of the process.

It’s much more than what Big Bird taught, that “everyone makes mistakes.” It’s that everyone needs to make mistakes.

Civil engineering professor Henry Petroski captured that truth in the title of one of his books: “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design.” Initial failures, he asserts, are what drive tasks to perfection.

The same is true in life. Teshuvah is accomplished with regret, not despondency.

© 2021 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Parshas Ki Seitzei — We’re All the “Beautiful Woman”

It’s edifying to compare the larger world’s celebrations of its various New Years and the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah.

The former is characterized by revelry, drunkenness and, hat tip to Auld Lang Syne, a smidgen of sentimentality. The latter, by trepidation and regret of the past year’s missteps.

Greater society’s preparation for their New Years Days consists of buying fireworks and alcohol.  Ours is Elul, the month during which, as the Eastern European folk saying has it, even the fish in the rivers tremble.

The law of the yifas to’ar, the “beautiful woman” encountered among the enemy and fallen for by a Jewish soldier in war, is a strange one.  The captive, after a month’s time during which she, shorn of her hair, is to cry over the loss of her father and mother, is permitted to be taken by the soldier as a wife.

Much has been written in explanation of the counterintuitive law. But the Zohar Chadash has a metaphorical comment. 

Seizing on the word used in the law for “month” (“yerach”), the mystical text comments, “da he archa d’Elul” — “this is the month of Elul.”

The yifas to’ar is leaving her past behind, entering a new world. According to Rabbi Akiva in the Sifri, the “father and mother” over whom she cries refer to the idolatries of her past, as per the prophet’s rebuke: “They say to the wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to the stone, ‘You bore us’ ” (Yirmiyahu 2:27). Her tears are tears of regret, for having been in idolatry’s thrall. And, perhaps, tears of joy at entering a new world, as part of the Jewish nation.

During Elul, we mourn our pasts too, and express joy (V’gilu bir’ada — rejoice in trembling -Tehillim 2:11), as we enter a new world, a new year. 

After the night’s drunken revelry, a New Year’s Eve celebrant may find himself experiencing delirium tremens, the infamous “DT’s”. 

Jews who fully embraced Elul will wake up as BT’s.

© 2021 Rabbi Avi Shafran

The Clock is Missing

Rosh Hashanah is the only holiday on the Jewish calendar occuring at the new moon, beginning on a night when the moon isn’t visible at all. That fact is hinted at in the posuk “Tik’u bachodesh shofar bakeseh liyom chageinu” (“Sound the shofar on the New Moon, at the appointed time for the day of our festival”) — Tehillim 81:4. The word bakeseh, “at the appointed time,” can be read to mean “covered.”

The moon is, famously, a symbol of Klal Yisrael.  It receives its light from the sun, as we receive our enlightenment from Hashem; it wanes but waxes again, as we do throughout history; and it is the basis of our calendar.

Various ideas lie in the oddity of Rosh Hashanah being moonless.  One that occurred to me has to do with that latter connection, that the moon is our marker of time, our clock, so to speak.  When we repent of a sin, Chazal teach, the sin can be erased from our past — even, if our teshuvah is complete and sincere, turned into a merit!

And so, we are particularly able on Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the ten days of teshuvah, to undermine time, to go back into the past and change it. 

What better symbol of that power than to remove our “clock” from the sky?

Ksiva vachasima tovah!

Who We Are

The famous early 20th century German-born American financier Otto Kahn, it is told, was once walking in New York with his friend, the humorist Marshall P. Wilder.  They must have made a strange pair, the poised, dapper Mr. Kahn and the bent-over Mr. Wilder, who suffered from a spinal deformity.

As they passed a shul on Fifth Avenue, Kahn, whose ancestry was Jewish but who had received no Jewish chinuch from his parents, turned to Wilder and said, “You know, I used to be a Jew.”

“Really?” said Wilder, straining his neck to look up at his companion. “And I used to be a hunchback.”

The story is in my head because we’re about to recite Kol Nidrei.

Kol Nidrei’s solemnity and power are known well to every Jew who has ever attended shul on the eve of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.  It is a cold soul that doesn’t send a shudder through a body when Kol Nidrei is intoned in its ancient, evocative melody.  And yet the words of the tefillah – “modaah” would be more accurate – do not overtly speak to the gravity of the day, the last of Aseres Yemei Teshuvah.

They speak instead to the annulment of nedarim, vows, specifically (according to prevailing Ashkenazi custom) to undermining vows we may inadvertently make in the coming year.

Nedarim, the Torah teaches, have deep power; they truly bind those who utter them.   And so, we rightly take pains to avoid not only solemn vows but any declarative statements of intent that could be construed as vows.  So, that Yom Kippur would be introduced by a nod to the gravity of neder-making isn’t entirely surprising.  But the poignant mournfulness of the moment is harder to understand.

It has been speculated that the somber mood of Kol Nidrei may be a legacy of distant places and times, in which Jews were coerced by social or economic pressures, or worse, to declare affiliations with other religions.  The text, in that theory, took on the cast of an anguished renunciation of any such declarations born of duress.

Most of us today face no such pressures.  To be sure, missionaries of various types seek to exploit the ignorance of some Jews about their religious heritage.  But few if any Jews today feel any compulsion to shed their Jewish identities to live and work in peace.

Still, there are other ways to be unfaithful to one’s essence.  Coercion comes in many colors.

We are all compelled, or at least strongly influenced, by any of a number of factors extrinsic to who we really are.  We make pacts – unspoken, perhaps, but not unimportant – with an assortment of mastinim: self-centeredness, jealousy, anger, desire, laziness…

Such weaknesses, though, are with us but not of us.  The Amora Rav Alexandri, the Gemara teaches (Berachos, 17a), would recite a short tefillah in which, addressing Hashem, he said: “Master of the universe, it is revealed and known to You that our will is to do Your will, and what prevents us? The ‘leaven in the loaf’ [i.e. the yetzer hora] …”  What he was saying is that, stripped of the rust we so easily attract, sanded down to our essences, we want to do and be only good.

Might Kol Nidrei carry that message no less?  Could its declared disassociation from vows reflect a renunciation of the “vows”, the unfortunate connections, we too often take upon ourselves?  If so, it would be no wonder that the recitation moves us so.

Or that it introduces Yom Kippur. 

When the Beis Hamikdosh stood, Yom Kippur saw the kiyum of the mitzvah of the Shnei Se’irim.  The Cohen Gadol would place a lot on the head of each of two goats; one read “to Hashem” and the other “to Azazel” – according to Rashi, the name of a mountain with a steep cliff in a barren desert.

As the Torah prescribes, the first goat was sacrificed as a korban; the second was taken through the desert to the cliff and cast off.

The Torah refers to “sins and iniquities” being “put upon the head” of the Azazel goat before its dispatch.  The deepest meanings of the chok, like those of all chukim in the end, are beyond human ken.  But, on a simple level, it might not be wrong to see a symbolism here, a reflection of the fact that our aveiros are, in the end, foreign to our essences, extrinsic entities, things to be “sent away,” banished by our sincere repentance.

In 1934, when Otto Kahn died, Time Magazine reported that the magnate, who had been deeply dismayed at the ascension of Hitler, ym”s, had, despite his secularist life, declared: “I was born a Jew, I am a Jew, and I shall die a Jew.”

Mr. Kahn may never have attended shul for Kol Nidrei.  But perhaps a seed planted by a hunchbacked humorist, and nourished with the bitter waters of Nazism, helped him connect to something of the declaration’s deepest meaning. 

© 2019 Hamodia