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Word-filled and wordless

ROSH HASHANAH EDITION 5782
SECTION D PAGE 19

In the waning days of this Jewish calendar year, it feels like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with their themes and meaning of life and death, have arrived early.

The air is vibrating with grief as we witness military troops, soldiers, young kids really, whose very lives are our protection to live, die. There are the 13 fallen US American troops who served in a war, which, many have noted, started around the year they were born and whose age at the time of their death this past week is the same as the length of the Afghanistan war. Their tragically short human lifetimes and the war’s tragically long lifetime, one.

There is the IDF soldier, Bar-El, who these past 10 days entered the heart of the nation of Israel. In nightly prayer vigils, tens of thousands gathered below his hospital window as he lay battling for his life. These strangers yet brothers in solidarity with Bar-El arrived near his bedside as in a pilgrimage of prayer, desperately calling out, piercing the night on Bar-El’s behalf, unabated. But alas, tragically, it was not to be.

There is the powerful and eerie image of the last American soldier, a Major General, departing Kabul, striding, expressionless, and, due to the photograph taken with a night vision device, he glows in green under the cover of night.

Those visions of throngs upon throngs of the people of Afghanistan, desperate for life, rushing airplane tarmacs, as airplanes tip toward the sky, soaring upward, carrying people away from harm and toward the sanctuary of potential freedom.

It’s tangibly seeing people choose life at great risk to themselves — and all that choosing life can entail. It’s seeing humans granted life by a rescuing force.

This fateful week, defined by these visions, has been a very complex tapestry of painful and powerful expressions,a distillation of sorts, of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur themes. They play out before our very eyes.

On Facebook, in the aftermath of all the prayers for Bar-El that were laced with a desperate hope, moved by his tragic passing, there was an outpouring of impromptu piyutim-liturgical like poems.

If Claude Debussy said, “music is the space between the notes,” then the space between the words of these poems was weeping. You can almost hear the tears between the words.

Last Rosh Hashanah, like none celebrated before for our living generation, there was inspiration found in the unconventionality of a COVID Rosh Hashanah and the deep commitment that, come what may, blowing the shofar blasts and enabling people to fulfill this mitzvah, was executed with great dedication.

Hearing about the ba’alei tekiah, the shofar blowers from various shuls, roaming the streets and neighborhoods, blasting the raw shofar blasts from morning til night, publicly in parks, or visiting as many as 40 homes and apartments in one day; picturing this day where the raw wails of the shofar blasts of Rosh Hashanah pierced the air every 15 to 30 minutes, creating a shofar staccato coming from every direction — balconies, gardens, courtyards — was so very moving. Perhaps, it was thousands of shofar blasts that the average person living in a densely populated Jewish area heard last year.

It’s almost like times were so tough that hearing those extra shofar blasts floating in the ether were needed in order to fortify us and blast away whatever added walls had risen between us and the daily blessing of life we had come to expect.

But if music can be the space between the notes, and the weeping the space between the words, the shofar calls are the wordless prayers of our hearts.

There are the deep, primal, raw groans of the shofar and there is the will-o’-the-wisp, frail kol demamah dakah, still fine voice, of the shofar. So, too, there are the big thundering moments in life, and the more nuanced, almost not there, yet not still and totally gone, quiet moments.

It is times like this, in the aftermath of this past week, for both US military and IDF military, that feels like the aftermath of a symphony of both primal cries and screams but also the still fine voices, the wordless shofar sounds that, ultimately, we are left with.

For it is times like these where it feels like words fail and the cry of Rosh Hashanah’s shofar is all that there is.

So many people’s valiant battles are exposed before us right now in this particular Days of Awe season. All those Afghan people rushed onto those precious planes, now refugees. The families of these 13 young marines, who died protecting the lives of these Afghans. Never mind all the people left behind. Beloved Bar-El’s nuclear family, whom, it feels like, we came to know. Bar-El, who was killed protecting us at the Israeli border to Gaza.

In the aftermath of prayer vigils gone unanswered, it feels like there was less of a chance of a decree being reversed because there was more of a miracle the situation demanded. So the more intensely our prayers were sent up, the blow of unanswered prayers can leave one feeling deflated, like one whose wings have been clipped. As the nation of Israel collectively grieved Bar-El’s loss, that was the sense as the news of his death spread.

I am thinking intensively of the military personnel who enabled these throngs of Afghans to exit a terrorist’s territory. I am thinking of the heroes of the US military and the heroes of the the IDF, the messengers, the angels, the shelichim, whose sacrifices as guardians of the borders and whose presence in dangerous places facilitate our basic safety that we are blessed enough to have. They protect us not only with incredible courage and valor but with empathy for those with whom they are in contact and whom they help.

Watching the heroism of all the military personnel under such difficult circumstances in executing such a harrowingly historic flight operation, and the bravery of 21-year-old Bar-El, a sniper who guarded the border of Israel, preventing the infiltration of terrorists that would have brought certain bloodshed upon innocent civilians — these images and emotions of these past weeks have been the lead up to this Rosh Hashanah.

We pray to be granted life.

We have been immersed in pleading for life and the lives of others in such an intense way these past weeks. We’ve witnessed the desperation of Afghans fleeing a dark terrorist regime that spells death. We’ve witnessed airplanes lined up one by one as they soar toward the sky, lifting people out of despair. We’ve witnessed the Selichot prayers of thousands outside a hospital window by night.

So many valiant battles, exposed, visceral images, this past August, 2021. And so many unknown to the human eye.

May all of these word-filled and wordless prayers, the spaces of music and weeping, be wrapped in wings and, like the airplanes that lined the tarmac in Kabul, soar toward the heavens.

Shana tova u-metukah, dear readers! Praying for safety, healing and life for the entire Knesset Yisrael, the House of Israel, and the entire world. Amen.

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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