It’s important to hold onto the story of Noah, the pain of a Parent-God’s destruction, and the distance that doesn’t fully dissipate. Noah comes to repeat God’s violence, and while Noah might not have learned from God, it’s possible that God has learned from Noah. Throughout Tanakh we have examples of God learning from parents in pain, particularly mothers in pain. Humans learn from these mothers too, ascribing theological significance to the sound of their cries.
The rabbis of the Talmud connect the sound of the shofar with another sound that’s heard in the Book of Judges.[1] For twenty years, the Canaanite General Sisera oppressed us ruthlessly when we began to resist and fight back. After 20 years of horror and in one fateful battle, we overcame Sisera’s army and caused our oppressor to retreat. The bloodthirsty General Sisera sought food and shelter to rest from the battle and regain his strength for more. He happened upon the tent of Yael, who offered him food and milk and waited for him to fall asleep before driving a tent peg through his skull and saving us all from his slaughter.[2] The Rabbis of the Talmud teach us that the sound of the shofar is akin to the wail of Sisera’s mother when she learned of her son’s death.
When the shofar blasts, we aren’t meant to hear our own cries of oppression or triumphant battle trumpets or the exhale of brave Yael. We’re meant to hear a different cry, a foreign cry, a cry that we don’t witness but merely imagine. The broken cry of the shofar reminds us of the broken cry of a woman when she hears of the death of her son whom she had lovingly named Sisera. The shofar does not compel us to access our pain or our triumph or our want to be better. The Shofar compels us to access our humanity, even when it makes no sense. From the pain of their mother mourning, we learn to hear sorrow in the midst of our joy and joy in the midst of our sorrow.
It is fitting that the shofar is meant to sound the cry of a mother since Rosh Hashanah is filled with mothers weeping: Hagar weeping for Ishmael from a distance, unable to watch him die in the wilderness;[3] Hannah weeping for the child she’s always wanted and is unable to conceive;[4] Rachel weeping for her children who will be killed or dispersed when the Temple is destroyed;[5] even Shifra and Puah—while not mentioned directly on Rosh HaShanah—are midwives of moral resistance in Egypt whose names are rooted in the words “shofar” and “cry.”[6]
A lesser-known Midrash even ascribes the sound of the shofar to the cry of Sarah when she hears about the Akeidah—her husband Abraham’s intention to bind and sacrifice their only son Isaac.[7] On Rosh HaShanah morning, we read the story from Abraham’s perspective, but this midrash invites Sarah’s emotional experience into the conversation too.
Rabbi Yosi is the first to imagine Sarah’s experience, and explains that her death in the very next Parasha occured because she heard news of her husband’s willingness to sacrifice their son, and she doubts that God intervened to save him. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira takes this story even further. Rabbi Shapira was a Polish rabbi from the first half of the twentieth century who was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, and was later known as the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe. He did not survive the war, but in a radical act of hope and defiance, his sermons were buried in clay jugs. When they were discovered decades later, they were published under the name Aish Kodesh, the Holy Fire.
Rabbi Shapira disagrees with Rabbi Yosi on one crucial detail: Sarah never doubted God’s ability to intervene. Linking to Rashi’s comment on the length of Sarah’s days, Rabbi Shapira reminds us that Sarah’s faith was perfect, and because her faith was perfect, rather than die because she doubted, she died in protest. When Sarah heard what had happened to her only son, how he had been subjected to such trauma and fear, she caused herself to die in order to prove to God that God can test people to death. She didn’t die because she doubted. She died to save future mothers from the pain that God might casually cause them as a byproduct of a test of faith. She died to teach God that children should never be made into tests or experiments. Rabbi Shapira concludes that God learned from Sarah, and therefore God never again tested anyone as God had tested Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac.[8]
Sarah isn’t the only Matriarch famous for crying out to God and changing God’s course in her cry. Rachel cries out from her prophetic vision in which she sees her children as they are violently conquered by the Babylonian Army and are brutally oppressed again and again throughout history:
כה אמר יי קול ברמה נשמע נהי בכי תמרורים רחל מבכה על־בניה מאנה להנחם על־בניה כי איננו. כה אמר יי מנעי קולך מבכי ועיניך מדמעה כי יש שכר לפעלתך נאם־יי ושבו מארץ אויב.
|
Thus said the LORD: A cry is heard in Ramah—Wailing, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone. Thus said the LORD: Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears; for there is a reward for your labor—declares the LORD: They shall return from the enemy’s land. |
In her prophecy, Rachel sees the most horrific violence. She cries out and she is inconsolable. Yet God attempts to offer solace. God does not promise to spare the children of Israel their pain or humiliation, but God does promise to bring them back home. In making this promise, God understands a significant part of Rachel’s suffering. Rachel cries not just because of the pain her children will know, but because she won’t be able to protect them. In a future that will occur long after her death, her children will be too far away to comfort. They are distanced by space and time, away from her love, her protection, her maternal comfort. They are gone, and she is longing for them, longing to comfort them, and she can’t. The pain of this maternal distance opens the divine possibility of promise, and it is once again the love of a mother who teaches God what covenantal relationship means.
These mothers love so deeply and fully that their broken hearts reach out to God and affect God’s course of action. We learn from Sisera’s mother to open our hearts to the cry of the other and to let that cry call us to action. We learn from Sarah to treasure and safeguard innocence and to stand up in bold defiance to protect it. We learn from Rachel that the maternal longing to protect is the same protection we seek from God, and God sees within us our longing to come back home. We learn that the overpowering pain of motherhood is matched only by its overpowering love. We learn from these mothers that God is also learning, and by being in conversation with God, these mothers bring us all closer to the Divine we are longing for.