Blow the Shofar When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat? Halachic and Spiritual Approaches

Rabbi Brian Field, When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat: Sound the Shofar? (ALEPH Canada)
So here we are. Today is Rosh HaShanah, the day of the creation of the world, and it’s also Shabbat, the day of resting from creation. It’s the Day of Judgment, and it’s the day when lovingkindness transcends judgment. It’s the day when we’re reminded how far we have to go, and it’s the day when we get a taste of the world to come. What do we do? Which party do we go to? Which holy day do we celebrate?

Rabbi Brian Field, When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat: Sound the Shofar? (ALEPH Canada)
Shabbat is also something that occurs weekly. The practice of Rosh HaShanah by itself leads us to see Judaism the way we see anniversaries, birthdays, vacations – as a series of singular events. But life and time itself is not so much about particular events but rather about flow and movement. The practice of Shabbat “trumps” Rosh HaShanah, as Reb Zalman put it to me, because Judaism wants to emphasize time not as a series of snapshots but as a movie, less as discrete events and moments and more a moving canvas throughout the year.
Keeping and celebrating Shabbat is, and always has been, a heroic act of cultural resistance. Shabbat provided the rationale for the first job action in recorded history – which is why on Friday night our kiddush calls Shabbat zaycher lee-tsee’aht mitsrahyim / a reminder of the going out from Egypt. Secular culture always wants us to keep working, to keep doing, to keep making. Never to stop.

It’s one thing to take a day or two for a special holiday. That’s counter-cultural enough, particularly when it occurs during the week when we’re supposed to be working. But society in its own way supports the observance of special days. It even marks them on our calendars and daytimers so everyone knows when it’s Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. But one day every week? There’s no social support for that. We can’t. We are all in Egypt and Pharaoh is making us work.

Rabbi Brian Field, When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat: Sound the Shofar? (ALEPH Canada)
The destruction of the Temple by the Romans over 1900 years ago caused some permanent structural changes in the practice of Judaism. A land-based spiritual practice focused on a central shrine became a decentralized word-based practice: instead of animals and grains, we offer words – words in prayer and words of Torah study. Shabbat itself in Rabbinic Judaism assumed much of the role the Temple played in Biblical Judaism. The head of the household assumed the role of the priest. The kitchen table was seen as representing the altar. And most interestingly, the m’lahchot / the categories of work that the rabbis defined as the kind of work that should be avoided on Shabbat, were the very categories that went into the building of the Temple. What we did to create the Temple, holiness in space, now is to be avoided to make Shabbat, holiness in time.
So it may not be so simple as to say: “We sounded the shofar at the Temple on Shabbat and therefore we should do so now.” Because now there is no Temple. And as a result, the nature of Shabbat, the role of Shabbat has been changed dramatically ever since.
So our investigation is really about what the nature of Shabbat is in post-Temple Judaism. As Reb Zalman [Schachter-Shalomi] put it – what is the power and role of Shabbat such that in terms of shofar, the practice of Shabbat trumps the practice of Rosh HaShanah? Or as some of my other colleagues put it, when Rosh HaShanah falls on Shabbat, the spiritual work of Rosh HaShanah doesn’t require the shofar, in fact, the shofar gets in the way.

Rabbi Daniel Siegel, When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat: Sound the Shofar? (ALEPH Canada)
It makes sense that the shofar was originally blown only in the temple, where most of the laws of Shabbat were violated. We burned sacrifices, cooked, and played other musical instruments in the temple, so of course we blew the shofar as well. And since we didn’t do any of those things outside the temple, it also made sense not to blow the shofar anywhere else. But what happened when the temple was destroyed? Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai believed that its sanctity was transferred at least to Yavneh and maybe to every place which had a permanent court. Other rabbis believed that the sanctity of Jerusalem even increased, allowing for the blowing of the shofar on Shabbat anywhere in the city itself and anywhere in its immediate environs. And, as the exile deepened, the rabbis began to re-evaluate this position, wondering whether or not we now need to view ourselves as essentially a nation in exile, not only from its land, but also from the fullness of its intimate relationship with God. Are we now become a people of tears (“the gates of tears are never closed”) or are we the same people with the same relationship, only now defined in a decentralized way? For example, for Ashkenazic Jews, the main course of the seder meal can be any meat other than lamb, the animal which was the Paschal sacrifice. For S’fardim, the main course is still only lamb, in order to fulfill every mitsvah possible, even while in exile. The crucial element here is that discussions about menu, about hearing or not hearing the shofar on Shabbat, on whether prohibitions are more important than positive commandments, these are precisely the way we Jews have talked about the essential questions of identity, meaning, relationship, and status. When the Reform movement says, “Let’s have only one day of a holiday instead of two,” this is not intended to say that we want to make Judaism easier; it says that we no longer view ourselves primarily as a nation in exile. When we say that we should hear the shofar on Shabbat, we are saying that we no longer feel that our services in this chapel are taking place because we are guests in someone else’s country, but that the world has changed and we embrace individual citizenship and the concept that one can be a dual citizen with loyalty both to the United States and to the Jewish people at the same time.

Rabbi Brian Field, When Rosh Hashana Falls on Shabbat: Sound the Shofar? (ALEPH Canada)
There is a story from another tradition that speaks of a long held ritual of pointing to the moon where people are fighting over which finger and whose finger with which to point to the moon, and in the process of the struggle, forgetting that it’s not about the finger but it’s about the moon. The shofar is like the pointing finger. Most of the time we use it to point to the moon. On Shabbat we don’t. We point to the moon in another way. But the moon is unchanged.
There is another story I first heard in a Zen context. Two monks, a teacher and a student, are on a journey and come to a river. At the river’s edge is a woman, afraid to cross. The older monk lifts up the woman and carries her across safely, sets her down, accepts her thanks, and then the two monks resume their journey. After a while of walking in silence, the younger monk turns to his teacher and says: “Master, do not our vows explicitly prohibit us from touching, let alone carrying a woman?” The older monk replied. “I set her down once we got to the other side of the river. It seems to me that you are still carrying her.”

It seems to me that one of the deep teachings of the High Holy Days is non-attachment. One of the things that get in the way of personal change and growth is our attachment to what we’re used to. One of the obstacles to forgiving each other is our attachment to our past hurts and grudges. Forgiveness is not possible without detaching ourselves from the pain caused and betrayal felt by another person’s action. Our continued suffering is a product of our continued attachment to those feelings. Perhaps this Rosh HaShanah-Shabbat-shofar business we’re wrestling with is ultimately about cultivating the non-attachment so necessary for the transformative work of these Days of Awe. We have a ritual that is so beloved, so central, so symbolic of the holiday themselves, that it must get transcended from time to time!

Options Blowing the Shofar on Shabbat

1. Make sure to bring the shofar before shabbat
2. Covene a Court/Beit Din
3. Blow the Shofar after Torah reading but not during Musaf
4. Have a non-Jew blow shofar (based on Rambam)

Other Times to Blow Shofar
1. Before candle lighting on Friday afternoon
2. After Havdallah on Saturday night
3. One Sunday, Second Day of Rosh Hashana
4. During Slichot earlier in the week

Alternatives to Blowing Shofar on Shabbat
1. Silent blowing -- call out the Shofar blasts and meditate on the silence
2. Vocal shofar/primal scream -- use our voices to create the shofar blasts
3. Contort our bodies into the shapes of a shofar
4. Move out bodies into the Hebrew letter shapes corresponding to the shofar blasts
5. Visualize the sounds of the shofar (like how the sounds of the shofar were visible on Mount Sinai)