Something I learned this year on Rosh Hashana: The 17th century Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz taught that each group of sounds made by the shofar begins with a tekiah, a whole note and is followed by a shevarim, a broken note, divided into three parts or even to a teru’ah, an entirely fragmented sound. But each broken note is not left in its brokenness; it is followed by another tekiah, a whole sound. Rabbi Horowitz taught that when we hear the shofar, we hear this message: I started off whole, I became broken, even splintered into fragments, but I shall become whole again.”
If, as Stendhal once said, beauty is the promise of happiness, then God is the promise of wholeness, which is to say, redemption.
