This High Holy Day season we speak of Jewish secrets that add meaning to our lives.

What are the hidden meanings in the sounds of the Shofar and what do the mystics tell us about their meaning for us?

Secrets: The Shofar

Rosh HaShanah Eve, 5768
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Rabbi Naftali of Ropschitz was a Hasidic master of the nineteenth century known for his wisdom and for his sense of humor. Ropschitz was a village. In Reb Naftali's time, there were perhaps a few hundred Jews living there, and a dozen or more were his students. But on the holy days and festivals, hundreds of his followers would converge on Ropschitz to be near their rebbe, to feast with him or fast with him, to pray with him and dance with him, to drink with him and to drink in his every utterance.

As the number of his loyal Hasidim increased, rooms were added to his little house so that large numbers of his visitors could stay with him. Reb Naftali's shack grew until it resembled nothing less than a ramshackle Motel 6. Reb Naftali was always there, keeping the light on.

His loyal Hasidim spoke of him. "Have you ever met an angel?" they would say, and continue, "Come and meet the holy Reb Naftali!" And, as if he were really an angel, it was a quirk of Reb Naftali that he always wore white cloth trousers. And that is where the story really begins.

Reb Naftali had one student who fixated on the rebbe's white trousers. The white pants became an obsession with him. He yearned, he burned, whenever he saw these white trousers. At last, he could restrain himself no longer. Brazenly, he came before Reb Naftali and asked, "Why do you always wear white trousers?" The rabbi answered, "That is the one thing I cannot tell you. It is a vital secret."

"Secret!" Now there is an intoxicating word! At once, the student was energized. Nothing would do but that he would learn the vital secret of the white trousers. Like a stalker, he haunted the rebbe, always pleading that the rebbe would share the secret. One day, Reb Naftali had enough of this. He turned to the student and confided, "This great secret you wish to learn can only be told to someone who fasts for six straight days."

Now the secret became a challenge for the student. Obviously, it was a potent secret if it required a commitment like fasting for six days. It had to be a "ginormous" secret, a momentous secret, a sacred secret. The student's heart and soul was set on nothing else.

Every Jew knows that it is forbidden to fast on Shabbat since God commanded that Shabbat must be a day of delight. So the student began his fasting on Sunday and he fasted from sunup to sundown for six days--right up to the beginning of the next Sabbath. Then he came before Reb Naftali.

When Reb Naftali saw that the student had actually fasted for six days, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Okay, so now I will tell you. But first you must promise not to betray the secret to anybody so long as you live."

"On my life," the student promised, "You can trust me."

So Reb Naftali led the student into a room filled floor to ceiling with books. In the middle of the room was a single chair with a small table beside it. There was nothing on the table but a lamp.

From that room, Reb Naftali led the student to a second room also filled with bookcases. In the middle of this room was a small table with chairs all around it. And the table was also piled high with books.

From that room, Reb Naftali led the student to a third room where there were no books. The walls were bare. There was only a couch, a rocking chair, and two standing lamps. The rabbi said, "Wait here."

Then Reb Naftali went back to each room to be certain that the doors were well closed so that no one could overhear what he was about to reveal to the student.

By now, the student was transfixed. He was about to learn a great secret. He alone would be trusted with it. A potent secret ... from the great Reb Naftali! It was too much to be believed.

Reb Naftali returned to the third room and gazed intently at his student. Finally, he bent down and whispered in his ear. "Know this," he said. "The reason I wear white cloth trousers is because they are the cheapest trousers I can buy."

The student groaned in agony. "That's all?" he cried. "Is that the secret I fasted six days to learn? Why make such a secret of that?"

Reb Naftali replied, "Do you not understand? If other people knew my secret, they would want this sort of trousers, too, and in no time white cloth trousers would be too expensive for me to afford. Now, don't forget your promise. Do not tell anyone, so long as you live!"

* * *

Since my days at college, I have been wearing Texas boots and bolo ties, just waiting for someone to ask, "What is the secret reason that you wear boots and bolos?" I can't wait to lead that person into some small room--I suppose we could use my office here at CJCN--lock the door and whisper. "The secret is that I have always liked Texas boots and bolo ties. But, please, do not tell anyone. What if everyone wore them? What would I wear then to set me apart?"

But think of it this way: the holy Rabbi Naftali of Ropschitz possessed many truly important secrets. But the student was not driven to discover any of these. The student focused entirely on the external--what the rebbe wore. He neglected to learn what the rebbe knew. It was the student who turned the white cloth trousers into a deep dark secret.

As the poet Robert Frost once wrote: "We dance round in a ring and suppose, / While the secret sits in the middle and knows." Everyone has secrets, but if something has never been told, it is not really a "secret." Call it a concealed fact and leave it at that. Call it a dark hole in the center of a person's history or deep in the unconscious of a psyche and leave it at that. If a concealed fact comes out in therapy, or comes out by choice, it only becomes a secret if it is shared in confidence with another person.

Sometimes you share a secret with another person simply for the delight of sharing it, or for its shock value. You may elicit a promise that the secret should never be passed on, but you should not expect too much. After all, if it was a delight for you to share it, it will be a delight for the person you shared it with to pass it on, perhaps with another pledge that it will never be told. Once a secret has passed your lips, the breeze and the walls and the little birds do the rest. No secret, once revealed, is beyond knowing. Even if it only circulates as a rumor, it is less than a secret. As the poet said, "We dance round in a ring and suppose, / While the secret sits in the middle and knows."

But there is a kind of secret that is meant to be known, even if only by a select few people. Examples of this include secrets of mystery religions, initiations, secret societies, formulas, and even recipes. These secrets are a kind of trust. The information is secret to guard it from the general public or from adversaries or enemies. But if these secrets are not carefully passed on, they may be lost.

Throughout history people have tried to preserve secrets by recording them in writing. From the ancient world we have stone inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, parchments and papyruses showing that the Egyptians, Hebrews, Babylonians, and Assyrians all devised cryptographic systems both to deny secrets to the uninitiated and to enhance the significance of the secrets when they were revealed.

The imminent danger has always been the possible loss of the secret when the cipher is lost or the chain of secrecy is broken. I am not speaking of theoretical things here. Losing an important secret can affect you very personally. To give you an idea, consider the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew name for God we use whenever we pray--yod, hey, vav, hey. Though the tetragrammaton appears in the Bible and the prayer book thousands of times, it is always encrypted. It is written using the vowels for the word Adonai, which means "my rulers." And the word Adonai also contains a secret because it refers back to God's name Elohim, the plural word we use to call the One God "our every God." So each time you pronounce the four letters, yod, hey, vav, hey, you are speaking a secret: saying Adonai while you conceal the true pronunciation of the four-letter name of God.

But the original secret itself is lost. For most Hebrew words, pronunciation is clear because Hebrew is entirely phonetic. There are no tricks of pronunciation as there are in non-phonetic languages like English, with words like "pneumonia," "knife," and "psychology." But the four Hebrew letters of God's personal name--yod, hey, vav, hey--pose a special difficulty because they are all vowel letters. They do not spell out anything easily pronounced in Hebrew. Yet we know the tetragrammaton was originally pronounced both by priests and Israelites.

It was only from the sixth century bce on that the pronunciation of God's four-letter name was intentionally made into a secret, to be passed down from one High Priest to the next. The High Priest pronounced it only once each year when he entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur. Over hundreds of years, the four-letter name fell out of all popular use and, after the destruction of the Temple, the pronunciation was lost along with the High Priesthood. Nowadays, every time you pray, you encounter a secret to which the key has been lost. And it is an important secret, a major secret, a great secret, a sacred secret, a secret that far outweighs the reason that Reb Naftali always wore white cloth trousers.

Jewish mystics face the same problem with their secret knowledge. On the one hand, they want to keep their secrets because knowledge is power and their knowledge could be dangerous to people who do not know how to understand and use it. Long ago, Jewish mystics decided on a rating system: They gave their secrets an "L" rating--only for learned persons above the age of forty. The process of passing on the secrets was called Kabbalah, "that which is received." Nevertheless, some mystics argued that passing mystical secrets by word of mouth over many years could result in loss, just as in the case of the pronunciation of the tetragrammaton. Many mystics put their secrets in writing. Some used secret alphabets, so that only the code would have to be memorized. But what if the code was lost? Today, we possess a few mystical writings in a secret Hebrew alphabet to which we have lost the key. The author said he learned the alphabet from the angels, but no angel has recently appeared to help us decipher it.

Still, writing down the mystical knowledge was a good idea. It made it possible to pass on more information than any single student could possibly memorize. So most mystics reached a compromise: Let ordinary language hide the power behind the words. They wrote down the secrets they guarded, but in language that was purposely difficult to understand.

I am not talking about the kind of dime store mysticism that sells you red bracelets or water blessed by mystics, or computer programs that find codes supposedly hidden by God in the Bible, or those who offer healing by the dollar. Commercial mysticism is fascinating marketplace, but a new T-shirt that says "God is coming on December 12th, 5769" will only cost you money, not bring you wisdom. And I am not talking about the feel-good mystics who bring you in with sappy stories and then teach you that you should set aside centuries of human progress, ignore science, rely on faith alone, and put women back in the kitchen where they belong. You have to work hard to tell a phony mystic from a guardian of real mystical secrets. One way to tell is that real mystics do not advertise and they do not proselytize.

Authentic Jewish mysticism is the soul of the Jewish religion. It reveals a special kind of Jewish wisdom. Jewish philosophers organize religion in logical ways. Jewish rituals organize religion in meaningful events--events that create sacred moments in time through the holy days and through life cycle ceremonies. Jewish law organizes religion in instructions for the proper way of observing rituals and the ways a Jew should behave ethically in the world. But Jewish mystical teachings alert our souls to the connections between heaven and earth. Jewish mysticism gives us the secret "whys" that make Jewish "how's" come to life.

Real mysticism is not distant, it is just hidden, like the kernel inside a seed. Before we eat together, we say, HaMotzi, "Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth." Blessings thank God, praise God, and make us more aware of God. That is enough for most Jews to know and appreciate. But there are inner secrets here. One belongs to every blessing we say: they all begin by addressing God in a personal way--"Blessed are You"--but end in an impersonal way, in the third person, saying "who does this or does that"? Not only does this make every blessing non-grammatical even in Hebrew, it does not seem to make sense. That is, until we examine the secret in the blessing. Take out the word "You" and the blessing becomes grammatical and sensible: "Blessed be Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth." The rabbis ignored grammar when they insisted that the word "You" should be inserted to make you aware that every Jew speaks directly to God, without any intermediary, without any need for a priest, without any interruption. A sacrifice of grammar was small price to pay for you to realize that there is never any break in the connection between you and heaven. So the next time you say Baruch atah Adonai, "Blessed are You, Adonai..." meditate on the kind of royalty that God represents: royalty with a throne room where you are always welcome to enter and always heard when you speak.

* * *

Each of my sermons this High Holy Day season is designed to reveal the kernel inside the seed, mystical secrets hidden in Jewish things that you and I ordinarily take for granted. My prayer is that you will care about these secrets and pass them on so they will not be lost. At the same time, I am also speaking to your soul, giving your soul wisdom to strengthen your connection with Adonai. I am less concerned with the external you right now--I do not care if you wear boots, bolo ties, or white cloth trousers. I am sincerely concerned with your soul. If even one secret inspires your soul, you may thirst for more secrets, and every new secret will tie you closer to heaven.

The most important thing to know is that every map has a legend. The legend is the key to using the map. One secret behind every ritual is its legend--the legend tells how the ritual began, how to use the ritual, or how the ritual will end. You could spend your whole life taking part in a Jewish ritual without ever knowing its secret legend. But, as the mystics say, once you know it, your soul will grasp the power.

Of course, the shofar has a primitive power of its own. It was used from ancient times to raise an alarm, to muster troops for war, to signal a charge in battle, or to announce the coronation of a king. The shofar was also blown in the temple to announce the beginning of each new month--especially Tishrei, when the beginning of the month is also Rosh HaShanah, which the Bible specifically calls Yom Teruah, the "day of sounding teruah [on the shofar]." It is therefore a commandment: On the High Holy Days, every Jew must hear the shofar.

Now the legend begins, the first secret is revealed: The shofar we blow in the synagogue on the High Holy Days can be the horn of a sheep, goat, mountain goat, antelope, or gazelle--but it cannot be the horn of a bull or cow. While we are seeking God's mercy to save us for another year, blowing a cow's horn or a bull horn might remind God of how our ancestors sinned by worshipping the Golden Calf.

Maimonides gives a rational explanation for what the sound of the shofar should mean to us. He says that it calls the congregation with the following words: "Awake, awake, O sleepers, from your sleep! You who slumber, arouse yourself from your slumbers! Examine your deeds; return in repentance; and remember your Creator. ... Improve your evil ways and works. Abandon your evil course and wayward thoughts."

You know that the shofar we usually blow is made of a ram's horn. You probably also know that the shofar reminds us of when God sent Abraham a ram to substitute as a sacrifice for Isaac. But there is a deeper secret, a much more personal secret. According to the mystics, God is speaking to us, saying: "Sound the ram's horn before Me so that for your sake I will remember the binding of Isaac and account it to you as if you had bound yourselves on the altar before Me." The secret is that when you hear the ram's horn, your life is dangling by a thread. The shofar reminds you that the ram can save you, but only if you are ready to bind yourself up and place yourself on the altar, only if you are brave enough to give your life for God. So you become Isaac when you hear the shofar sound, you give up yourself and think only of what God requires.

When God hears the sound of the shofar, God knows the people of Israel are in trouble. It is the sound of alarm, the sound of battle, and our cry for help. In heaven, the mystics say, God moves from the throne of Justice, where every judgment that is rendered is harsh and exact, and moves to the throne of Mercy, where God rules with forgiveness and compassion [Pesikta de Rav Kahana 23]. If it were not for the shofar, God would judge us only as we deserve. But the sound calls on God to be lenient with us in our time of need.

It is unthinkable that we could force God to move from one throne to another simply by blowing the shofar. It is not within our human power to force God to do anything. So the legend must go further. The secret is that God built this power into the sounds of the shofar.

When God commanded that tekiah and teruah be sounded on the shofar, God established the pattern of the sounds that we use every year. We must not use any other pattern because these are not musical sounds to God, they are a language that God created specifically for the shofar. As the ram's horn calls out its notes, God hears not the noise but the meaning of the notes. They are a secret language known only to God and the Jewish people. None of the angels can understand the meaning of the notes, especially not Satan, the angel who has been appointed in heaven to accuse us of all the sins we have committed in our lives. Not only can Satan, the Accuser, not understand the meaning of the sounds of the shofar, but the very language of the shofar causes confusion to the Accuser, so that our prayers rise with the language of the shofar and are not intercepted by Satan. If the shofar sounds were not present, Satan would not be confused, and we would stand accused even before we could enter our plea for mercy. It is only the shofar and its language that stands between us and death as God decides our fate on the High Holy Days. Therefore, the legend says, you must place all your hopes in the shofar and its language, for this is the critical moment for your soul's salvation [B. Rosh ha-Shanah 16a-b; Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 23; Zohar 3:231a-b; Tiferet Uziel].

There is one more secret in the shofar legend. Those who are righteous, those who do good from one Rosh HaShanah to the next and from one Yom Kippur to the next, heed the language of the shofar in their hearts and in their souls. Inside of them there burns a light--not the light of the sun and the stars, but the sacred light that God created on the first day before the sun and the stars existed. The psalms call this "the light sown for the righteous." The magic of this light is such that whenever we see a righteous person, we see light shining out of him or her. We recognize the righteous who are magical in themselves because they bring God's light into our world.

Now that you know these secrets--now that you can read the legend that comes with the map--now that you know the kernel of wisdom that lies deep inside the ritual of the shofar--the rest is up to you. You could choose to continue seeking earthly secrets--asking about white trousers, Texas boots, and bolos. Or you can choose to use the secrets that connect you with heaven, just as the righteous always do.

In your soul, you know that you could choose to be one of the righteous. In your soul, you know that you could turn your ways from evil to good; and you could find God's light warming you from the inside and reflecting from you on the world around you. You could see your family and friends smile when you come near and feel their souls warm and glow just because you are close by. You could choose to turn away from thoughts that are weak and destructive. You could choose to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. You could choose to turn toward God's light and become one with it. You could choose to understand the language of the shofar that confounds evil and sets aside evil decrees, the language of God that replaces harsh justice with divine mercy. If you choose righteousness today, you choose life. And let us say: Amen.