The Shofar as a Mekonenet, a Singer of Laments

Rebecca Cypess

As the only musical instrument used in modern Jewish liturgy, the shofar possesses a humble form. Halakhah forbids the modification of the shofar’s sound through human ingenuity: unlike trumpets, the shofar cannot have holes bored into it, since those would change the pitch of its blasts. The end of the horn that touches the mouth of the blower may not be plated with gold or any other type of metal. Even decorative plating elsewhere on the shofar runs the risk of altering the sound of the shofar and is thus generally avoided. In the words of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “For the shofar of Rosh Hashanah, whose purpose it is to rouse the purely Divine in man, no artificially constructed piece of work may be sounded. It must be an instrument in its natural form (naturally hollow), with life given to it by the breath of man, speaking to the spirit of man. For you cannot attain to God by artificial means or by artifice.”^[1]

The humble nature of the shofar’s construction is embodied in the curved shape of its physical appearance: the Talmud records the opinion that “on Rosh Hashanah, the more a person bends his mind [to show humility], the better” (Rosh Hashanah 26b). Thus, in the words of the Shulhan Arukh (586), the shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah “should ideally be bent, so that people will bend their hearts in prayer before the Holy One, Blessed is He.”

Despite its simple sound and humble appearance, the shofar holds many meanings, which have been explored in Jewish texts throughout the centuries. Some interpretations of the shofar are abstract, alluding to triumphant events from Jewish history or promises of redemption in the future. Others are more concrete: in particular, Rambam, deviating in a surprising way from the Talmud, likens the sound of the shofar to the gendered cries of women mourners, known in Tanakh as mekonenot, singers of laments. The shofar thus bears associations that range from the confident and victorious to the heartbreaking. Its nature as a musical instrument—the wordless sound that it creates—is what yields these many interpretations. On Rosh Hashanah 5785, the shofar as a mekonenet will be all too relevant.

The Shofar’s Associations with Triumph and Fear

Rav Saadia Ga’on’s list of reasons for blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, recorded in the Sefer Avuderaham,^[2] has become widely known in part because of its inclusion in the Artscroll mahzor for Rosh Hashanah. Saadia enumerates ten reasons for the mitzvah of blowing shofar. Some of these connect the shofar with past events: it recalls the merits of Abraham, whose faith was tested at the binding of Isaac, when he ultimately sacrificed a ram instead of sacrificing his son. The shofar inspires awe and fear, as it did at Mount Sinai at the giving of the Torah and when the prophets pronounced their warnings as a means of inspiring repentance. And the shofar recalls the terrible battle cries heard upon the destruction of the Temple. Saadia also suggests that the shofar should guide the emotional responses that we ought to feel when we hear it: its visceral sound should inspire an awakening that leads to repentance, and it urges us to affirm the coronation of God as King. Finally, Saadia hears the shofar’s blast as a signal of events yet to come: the final Day of Judgment, the ingathering of exiles, and the resurrection of the dead, all of which will be accompanied by the sounding of the shofar.

Rambam’s Hilkhot Teshuvah, based on the opinion in the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 16a, first states that the shofar is sounded on Rosh Hashanah simply because God decreed that it should be so (Hilkhot Teshuvah, 3:4). Nevertheless, Rambam goes on to suggest that the sound of shofar contains an allusion to a familiar sound in the world—that of a blaring alarm: “Wake up, you sleepy ones, from your sleep, and you who slumber, arise. Inspect your deeds, repent, remember your Creator.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks understood that the shofar is “God’s alarm clock”; its sounding on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur “forces us to ask the ultimate question: what did I do in my life that was worthwhile? Did I waste my time or did I share it, with my faith, with God, and with those in need?” By prompting us to confront our own mortality, the sound of the shofar invites not just awe but introspection and repentance.

The Shofar and Women’s Weeping

Oddly, Saadia’s list of reasons for blowing the shofar omits its association with weeping. This association finds its earliest articulation in Targum Onkelos on Numbers 29:1. The Hebrew commands, “It shall be a Yom Teru’ah for you,” but the meaning of “Yom Teru’ah” is obscure. In some contexts in Tanakh, “teru’ah” simply means “a sound,” as in Psalm 150: “Praise God with cymbals that may be heard; praise Him with cymbals that resound [teru’ah].” Yet in Numbers 29:1, Onkelos translates “Yom Teru’ah” as “Yom Yebavah,” a day of weeping. The Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 33b picks up on this translation, interpreting “teru’ah” as a shofar call that must onomatopoetically resemble the sound of weeping; in that passage in the Talmud, the rabbis debate how best to mimic that sound. This doubt about the meaning of “teru’ah” is how we wound up with two distinct patterns—shevarim, three “broken” sobs, and teru’ah, a series of shorter cries—that resemble different kinds of weeping.

The sound of weeping as described in the Talmud has a distinctly gendered association. Explaining the meaning of the mishnah’s word yebavah, Abaye points to a verse in Tanakh where the root Y-B-B is used—namely, in describing the weeping of the mother of Sisera, the general defeated by Barak and Deborah, in the triumphant Song of Deborah: “Through the window peered Sisera’s mother; behind the lattice she sobbed (va-teyabev)” (Judges 5:28).

Not in Hilkhot Teshuvah but in chapter 3 of his Hilkhot Shofar, Sukkah, Ve-Lulav, Rambam picks up on this gendered association. Yet instead of relying on the negative example of Sisera’s mother, he generalizes the crying represented by the shofar as belonging to more virtuous women. Summarizing the debate in the Talmud over the sound of the teru’ah, Rambam writes:

Over the passage of the years and throughout the many exiles, doubt has been raised concerning the teru’ah which the Torah mentions, to the extent that we do not know what it is: Does it resemble the wailing with which the women cry when they moan, or the sighs which a person who is distressed about a major matter will release repeatedly? (Hilkhot Shofar, Sukkah, Ve-Lulav, 3:2, emphasis added)

Who are “the women” to whom Rambam refers here? I suggest that he is not describing women’s crying in general simply because women are stereotypically understood to be emotional. Instead, I think he was pointing to a specific phenomenon in the ancient world: the role that certain women played as mourners for the entire community. This phenomenon is recorded, for example, in the book of Jeremiah:

Thus said the God of Hosts:
Listen!
Summon the women who sing laments [mekonenot], let them come;
Send for the wise women [hakhamot], let them come.
Let them quickly start a wailing for us,
That our eyes may run with tears,
Our pupils flow with water. (Jeremiah 9:16–17)

Commenting on this passage, Abarbanel explains that the mekonenot mentioned here were “women whose profession was to eulogize and lament over the dead,” and the hakhamot were “women who were wise in the poetry of eulogies and laments, who knew how to improvise verses and laments upon any bad occasion,” thus leading the community to tears. This practice is also attested in the Mishnah in Ketubot (4:4), where Rabbi Yehuda says, “Even the poorest person in Israel, when they die, their funeral should not be accompanied by fewer than two flutes and one woman singing laments [mekonenet].” As the encyclopedia Olam Ha-Tanakh points out, mekonenot were a feature of many cultures in the ancient Near East.^[3] Their inclusion in Jewish culture was apparently not negated by the Talmudic issue of kol ishah, the concern that it was improper for men to hear women singing.

The role of the mekonenot, as Abarbanel points out, was to inspire the entire community to cry. Their poetry and weeping, often accompanied by flutes, as the mishnah attests, would focus and unify the community’s mourning. It is therefore telling that the passage in Jeremiah quoted above is part of the haftarah for the Ninth of Av. By alluding to the mekonenot, Rambam may have intended to link the role of women mourners at the saddest moments of Jewish history to the weeping sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.

While the relevance of the mekonenot to Tishah B’Av might be obvious, their connection to Rosh Hashanah seems, at first glance, more surprising. Nevertheless, the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah supports this connection—in particular, the two haftarot, which are read immediately before the sounding of the shofar. The haftarah of the first day tells the story of Hannah, a barren woman who prays for a child while weeping: “And she was bitter in spirit, and she prayed to the Lord, and surely wept [u-vakhoh tivkeh]” (I Samuel, 1:10). The description of Hannah’s weeping prefigures the lament of Jeremiah upon the destruction of the Temple, which describes Jerusalem as a lone woman crying in the night: “She surely wept [bakho tivkeh] in the night” (Lamentations 1:2). Thus Hannah, an individual woman, is reinterpreted through this repeated language as the embodiment of Jerusalem. The city becomes a mekonenet who longs for her children.

The haftarah for the second day of Rosh Hashanah picks up on a similar theme. Drawn from Jeremiah, the haftarah refers to the matriarch Rachel as another archetypal woman who laments over her lost children. “So says the Lord: ‘A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be comforted for her children for they are gone’” (Jeremiah 31:14). Rachel, too, is no longer just an individual woman crying out of longing for a child. Instead, both she and Hannah are communal symbols of mourning and leaders of laments. Yet both haftarot for Rosh Hashanah end on a positive note, with God granting comfort to these mekonenot: Hannah gives birth to a son, and Rachel is assured that her children will return to her.

Hearing the Shofar at a Time of Mourning

How can we reconcile these competing and contradictory meanings of the shofar? The shofar is about awe, fear, triumph; it recollects the virtue and merit of Avraham Avinu, the Jewish people standing at Har Sinai, and it heralds the age of redemption and ultimate peace. It serves as a call to awaken and reform our behavior so that we will have the merit to be sealed in the Book of Life. At the same time, Saadia notes the shofar’s association with the sounds heard when the Temple was destroyed. The shofar represents weeping—specifically, the weeping brought about by women who lament in public for their lost children—and, in this sense, it echoes the mournful, desolate messages of Tishah B’Av.

Reconciling these contradictory meanings is not the point. The advantage of the shofar as a musical instrument is that it can capture, simultaneously, all these associations. Oscillating between the clarion call of the teki’ah and the heartbroken weeping of teru’ah, the shofar’s wordless utterances remain ambiguous and complex. The shofar invites many interpretations.

This year in particular, we will need to invoke all the shofar’s meanings and live with their contradictions. We will recall the merits of our ancestors to beg for mercy, for redemption, and for the ultimate peace. And, together with our entire people, we will cry. This year, the shofar will evoke the laments of our own, modern-day mekonenot—women like Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Einav Danino, and so many others—who have endured the unthinkable this year. The shofar itself is a mekonenet: it cries for these mothers, and it cries for all of us as we seek an end to our own Yom Yebavah, our day of weeping. 

^[1] Translated in Philip Goodman, ed., The Rosh Hashanah Anthology (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 116.

^[2] Translated in Goodman, 38–40.

^[3] See Olam Ha-Tanakh: Yirmiah [Hebrew] (Misrad Ha-Hinukh Ve-Ha-Tarbut, 1999), 67.