בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה שׁוֹמֵֽעַ קוֹל תְּרוּעַת עַמּוֹ יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּרַחֲמִים:
Blessed are You Adonai who listens with compassion to the sounds of the splintered call of Your people Israel.
Mahzor Lev Shalem
Commentary on Shofarot
After all these many repetitions of the word "shofar," the closing b'rakhah of the service of Shofarot omits the word. Instead, we praise God as the one who hears the t'ru'ah -- the staccato call -- of the people Israel. Our collective cries have themselves become a kind of shofar.
§ The mishna continues. The length of a terua is equal to the length of three whimpers. The Gemara asks: Isn’t it taught in a baraita that the length of a terua is equal to the length of three shevarim, i.e., broken blasts, which presumably are longer than whimpers? Abaye said: In this matter, the tanna’im certainly disagree. Although the first baraita can be reconciled with the mishna, this second baraita clearly reflects a dispute. As it is written: “It is a day of sounding [terua] the shofar to you” (Numbers 29:1), and we translate this verse in Aramaic as: It is a day of yevava to you. And to define a yevava, the Gemara quotes a verse that is written about the mother of Sisera: “Through the window she looked forth and wailed [vateyabev], the mother of Sisera” (Judges 5:28). One Sage, the tanna of the baraita, holds that this means moanings, broken sighs, as in the blasts called shevarim. And one Sage, the tanna of the mishna, holds that it means whimpers, as in the short blasts called teruot. § The Sages taught in a baraita: From where is it derived that the soundings of Rosh HaShana must be performed with a shofar? The verse states: “Then you shall make proclamation with the blast of the shofar on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement you shall make proclamation with the shofar throughout all your land” (Leviticus 25:9).
(19) The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; those crushed in spirit God delivers.
Rather, from where does he derive that the broken pieces of the first set of tablets were placed in the Ark? The Gemara expounds: He derives this from that which Rav Yosef taught, as Rav Yosef taught a baraita: The verses state: “At that time the Lord said to me: Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first…and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke, and you shall put them in the Ark” (Deuteronomy 10:1–2). This teaches that both the second set of tablets and the broken pieces of the first set of tablets were placed in the Ark. The Gemara asks: And what does the other one, Rabbi Yehuda, learn from this verse? The Gemara answers: He requires it for that which Reish Lakish teaches, as Reish Lakish says: What is the meaning of that which is stated: “The first tablets, which you broke [asher shibbarta]”? These words allude to the fact that God approved of Moses’ action, as if the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: May your strength be straight [yishar koḥakha] because you broke them.
Rabbi Aryeh Ben David
Maimonides writes that the blast of the shofar comes to wake us up, a shock forcing us to engage more fully with reality. What is the shofar waking us up to? The wake-up blast – “Tekiah” – is always followed by the broken blasts of Truah or Shvarim. The shofar comes to wake up to Truah, to brokenness.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair
We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused. Repentance—tshuvah—is like the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold. You can never unbreak what you have broken. But with the sincere and deep work of transformation, acts of repair have the potential to make something new.
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Because repentance is, I believe, in part, a kind of self-care. When we do the work, we give attention to our own broken places, our own reactionary impulses, our own careless ignorance. And it’s a way of saying, “Hey, self, you need some attention. Let’s give you some help in getting to the kind of person you want to become.”