A Call to Consciousness - editor's title (1964)
The special significance of the Shofar, or ram’s horn, which will be sounded during services these next two days of Rosh Hashanah, was explained by Maimonides as follows: Uru yeshenim mi-shenatkhem, “You who are asleep, wake up! You who are slumbering, arise! Search your deeds and repent. Remember your Creator, you who forget the truth in vanities of the times…. Improve your ways, and abandon your evil deeds and thoughts.” (Hil. Teshuvah, 3:4). What kind of sleep is it that Shofar seeks to rouse us from? A moral slumber, of course – a spiritual stupor in which our sensitivities are silenced and the soul sleeps. It is a diminishing consciousness, when God calls – as indeed the sound of the shofar accompanied God’s revelation at Mt. Sinai – but man fails to answer; when we are where we are because we are – unaware; unaware of God, unaware of fellow man, unaware even of our real selves. Do you recall the aftermath of Jacob’s lofty dream of angels ascending and descending the ladder that reached from earth to heaven? He woke up in a dreadful fright, because, as the Bible tells us, “indeed the Lord is in this place, v’anokhi lo yadati, and I did not know” (Gen. 28:16-17). Jacob was shocked at his own capacity for not being aware; for standing in the presence of his Creator, and yet making his bed thoughtlessly; for finding himself in a place of high holiness, and going to sleep calmly and unperturbed. “And I did not know” – this is the self-accusation of the father of the Jewish people, and it is the challenge of the Shofar to all people at the beginning of the Jewish New Year.How urgent that stirring call is for us today! Most of us are rarely knowingly malicious; we are, rather, neglectful. We suffer not from bad intention, but from inattention. Our failure is not so much of conscience as of consciousness. We are, too often, blind to the sublime in life, insensitive to the holy, indifferent to the opportunities for noble achievement. The fault of so many of us is that…
