Paul Bass Photo
Rabbi Michael Farbman at WNHH FM.
Michael Farbman let rip from a goat’s horn to awaken us to the brokenness of our world and inspire us to work toward healing it.
Farbman, the rabbi of Temple Emanuel of Greater New Haven, blew the horn Thursday during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” about the Jewish “Days of Awe,” which begin Sunday night with Rosh Hashana and conclude 10 days later with Yom Kippur.
The soul-piercing blasts of shofar blowing form climactic moments in the religious services on those holidays, which mark the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement. The 10-day connection between them forms an annual process of examining our personal and communal sins and resolving to do better in the year ahead.
Farbman noted that shofar blowing dates to biblical times. People repurposed the horns shed by rams or goats as ritual musical instruments with a spiritual mission.
“This was a very ancient way of communicating,” Farbman noted. “There is a deeper meaning [in these] sounds.”
Then he demonstrated the prescribed series of blasts shofar-blowers issue on the holiday. (You can watch him blow the shofar in the video below.)
Farbman began with the short single tekiah burst. That summons the listener to “wake up. To pay attention to the world around us.”
Then came three shorter notes — shevarim — that sound like crying. The term comes from the Hebrew word for broken. These notes serve as “a certain acknowledgement that the world around us is broken. We ourselves, perhaps, are broken. Our society, our community, our world, the war in Ukraine …”
Next up is a series of at least nine rapid blasts known as truah. That serves as the call to action.
“When you have woken up, when you open your eyes, when you have observed the brokenness of the world around us, both in the small circle and the larger world, you have to call yourselves and others to action,” Farbman noted.
Farbman’s demonstration ended with the way that shofar-blowing will end in synagogues during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: with a long single wailing note known as the tekiah gedolah (“great”). The goal, Farbman noted, is to “bring a sense of wholeness, completion, perhaps a little bit of peace, internal peace” to those who hear it.
Besides blowing shofars, rabbis like Farbman work on long sermons this time of year to deliver on the Days of Awe. That’s when attendance at services can grow five or ten times as large as at regular weekday Sabbath services.
Like many other rabbis, presumably, Farbman will speak from the pulpit about Ukraine in this year’s sermon.
He has a special connection to the war there: He grew up in the then-Soviet nation of Belarus. He lived and worked for a year and a half in Kyiv.
Since the war began, he has made two trips to use his Russian and Ukrainian language skills to volunteer at Jewish-run centers helping Ukrainian refugees. One was run in Poland by the Jewish Distribution Committee, the other in Barcelona by a reform congregation called Bet Shalom.
The refugees and others still in Ukraine have been in “the Days of Awe for seven months now,” not just for a 10-day holiday, Farbman noted.
Farbman said he plans to speak in his sermon about how “these refugees were sharing with me how coming form the uber-individualistic post-Soviet society, many of them were able to find strength in finding each other and forming community with these other strangers who have found themselves in unthinkable situations.”
“This power of a community, where you show up for each other and really support each other as the only way to make it through hell, is a powerful message.”
Click on the video to watch the full interview with Rabbi Michael Farbman, in which he dives deep into challenges of addressing both individual and communal growth and responsibility during this holiday season. He also plays guitar and sings.