A Book Like No Other

S6 Ep. 1: The Secret Message in the Sound of the Shofar

• Aleph Beta • Season 6 • Episode 1

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You sit in shul. The shofar blows. What do you feel? You may not want to admit it, but for many of us the answer is: nothing. For a long time, that’s how Imu felt also. Until a chance observation, one historic Erev Rosh Hashana, sparked a conversation with Rabbi David Fohrman that would change everything. 

Come along on this deep dive through the Torah, revealing a hidden story from the Burning Bush to Mount Sinai to the walls of Jericho—that will finally make the shofar blast truly meaningful. 

In this first episode of the new season, we begin that journey of discovery with a first look at the origins of the shofar in the Torah text.

For the Rosh Hashana course Rabbi Fohrman and Imu discuss in this episode, click here. 

We love to hear from you! Click here to share your thoughts, insights, questions, and reactions by voice note, or send us an email at info@alephbeta.org.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta, and made possible through the generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. Aleph Beta is a Torah media company dedicated to spreading the joy and love of meaningful Torah learning worldwide.

SPEAKER_01:

What do you think about when you hear the blast of the chauffeur? What exactly are we supposed to make of this wordless cry? What might we be trying to say to God? And what might God perhaps be communicating to us? These are some of the questions we're going to be exploring this season. And while they are perfect for Rosh Hashanah, we didn't pick them for that reason. As a matter of fact, they kind of picked us. Let me tell you the story. The idea for this season came out of a conversation between me and Rabbi Foreman on Erev Rosh Hashanah last year in 2024. Erev Rosh Hashanah last year was a very stressful Erev Rosh Hashanah, not just for cooking and cleaning, but because Iran had just launched around 200 ballistic missiles at Israel. And this was, of course, nothing compared to what would unfold over the coming year, but at the time it was truly unprecedented. We have friends and family in Israel. So there I was, sitting on pins and needles, refreshing the news, refreshing Twitter, nervously waiting to hear what would happen. And as I sat there, something struck me. There were sirens blaring all over Israel, just hours before a different but equally piercing kind of siren would sound all over Israel as well. The sound of the chauffeur. Sirens and chauffeurs. This eerie coincidence sent me down a rabbit hole. Was this just a coincidence? Or is there something about the chauffeur that's supposed to sound like a siren? Honestly, at the time I was mostly searching for a distraction, but as these ideas were turning in my head, I decided to call Rabbi Forman. And Rabbi Forman and I discussed it for a while. We'd looked at the chauffros in Jericho, and really we just talked out different themes and ideas. I thought we were done, Raiforman and I hung up, but little did I know that Urbai Foreman was far from done thinking about these ideas when he put that phone down. It seemed that they were bouncing around in his mind throughout Rosh Hashanah, and while he turned away from the issues of sirens and missiles, he turned even deeper to the idea of the shofar itself. In typical Urbai Forman fashion, he called me just a few weeks after Rosh Hashanah and told me that he had prepared an entirely new season on Rosh Hashanah, shofar, and a whole bunch of unexpected themes that had sprouted from the little seeds planted in that fateful conversation. And now I am thrilled to share all of that with you. Hi, I'm Emu Shalev, and this is a brand new season of Aleph Beta's A Book Like No Other, generously sponsored by Sherry and Nathan Lindenbaum. One housekeeping note, right now you're listening to the free feed of A Book Like No Other, and we'll continue sharing all new seasons here. But if you love this show, if you really want to support us, then I want to invite you to become an Olive Beta member. When you become a member, you get access to the entire Olive Beta library, including the full archive of the Book Like No Other seasons. And you're gonna get bonus content. Plus, if you'd rather keep listening on your favorite podcast player, well, we're gonna send you an exclusive RSS link so you can do just that. This feed will have all the seasons coming out here on the free feed, as well as the extras of bonus content, all in one place. Now, if you're already a member, it's possible you're already following both feeds, and you might actually be noticing two a book like no other thumbnails popping up. If that's you and you find that confusing and you don't like it, here's what to do. Just unfollow this feed, the one with the blue thumbnail, and make sure you're following the feed with the green exclusive thumbnail. And again, if you're not a member yet, what are you waiting for? Come join us on the exclusive feed. That's where all the cool people are. We have a seven-day free trial, so you really have nothing to lose. Okay, back to the show.

SPEAKER_03:

So, what I want to do is kind of share with you a couple of questions that came up for me as I was pondering this little distraction of yours. It was Rosh Hashanah night, and I was saying Shemona Esray, and I noticed something, and that is that we say in our Shemona Esray that Rosh Hashanah, like other Moadim, is Zecharlitz Yat Mitzraim. It is a remembrance of the exodus from Egypt. And I was thinking as I said that, like, one second, like, how is that even true? How am I supposed to say that with a straight face? We say a lot of things about Rosh Hashanah, but the one thing that you never learned in school is that it's actually Zecharlitz Mitzraim, that it reminds you of the exodus. I understand why Pesach is Zeichalitz Heit Mitzraim. I get that, obviously, it's Passover. And I get why Sukhot is Zeichlitz, but Rosh Hashanah seems pretty far removed from Zeichalitz Mitzraim. What do we even mean when we say this? Question number two has to do with the notion of memory on Rosh Hashanah. Memory is a big deal in Rosh Hashanah, it shows up in one of the three main categories of verses in our Shemana Sray and Musa on Rosh Hashanah. We have Malchid, Zacharod, and Shofra. We have verses dedicated to the theme of God's kingship, the theme of memory, and the theme of shofar. And the rabbis, in a famous saying in tractate Rosh Hashanah, give expression to where Malchid, Zachronod, and Shofrod coming from. They say, Imru Lafane Malchiod, say verses of Malchyod of kingship for me. Kadesh Taml Khuni Aleichem. So in Rosh Hashanah, you should accept me as king over you. Then you should say Zikronod, you should say verses of memory. Why? Kadesh Ya'ala Zikronchem Alai Latova. So that your Zikharon, that your memory should go up before me, before God Latova, for good. Ubameh, and how should it go up for good? Bashofar through the blast of a shofar. So it's kind of a strange thing that on the one hand, we should say verses as a way of sort of jogging God's memory about us, and that the shofar is a way in which this memory is made manifest somehow also. There's some relationship between those verses and shofar. But whatever the case is, if I would say, Emu, what is the role of memory on Rosh Hashanah, right? And you were just thinking of this thing that the sages said. What's the role of memory?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it says right there what you just quoted is that God should remember us for good.

SPEAKER_03:

That's right. God should remember us for good. And so the question is great, the rabbis say that. Great, that's the way they organize Rashimon S, right? But where in the world the rabbis see that from in the biblical text? And tantalizingly, the biblical text, which is very, very sparse when it comes to Rosh Hashanah, sparsest of any major Jewish holiday, two words are dedicated to what Rosh Hashanah is all about. One of those words is actually memory. So it is there in the biblical text, but it's not there the way the rabbis have it. Right. What do we hear in Rosh Hashanah about memory? We hear that Rosh Hashanah is called a Zichron Trua, a remembering the blast of the shofar. There it is, memory. But if you were just reading the verses and you weren't relating to what the rabbis said, and I said, What role does memory play in Rosh Hashanah?

SPEAKER_01:

You would tell me that we are supposed to remember blasts. Zichron Trua, that's what that means.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. So it's a day in which we do the remembering, and what do we remember? We remember cries of the shofar. Now we can argue about what those cries of the shofar were. We could try to clarify that, but it's pretty clear that it's a day that's meant for us to recall the cries of the shofar. So then why is it that the rabbis are coming along and they flip the script and they say, No, no, no, it's not really we're doing the remembering. We want God to be doing the remembering, and what he's remembering isn't the shofar, what he's remembering is us, and he should remember our Zikaran for good. So, like, what is this? The rabbis, where are they coming from? It seems to land completely out of the blue. And the rabbis sort of made it even more complicated because if you actually look in the Shmon Esray and you look at the blessing at the end of Zichronod, we say, Baruch Hata Hashem, blessed are you, O God, Zocher Habrit, the rememberer of the covenant. And then I think, oh, well, one second, that's something new. It's not just that you're supposed to remember us for good, but you're actually supposed to remember a covenant that you had with us. Where does that come from, the verse? I thought we're supposed to remember the shofar, but now God is not just supposed to remember us for good, he's also supposed to remember a covenant that he had with us. And then you have to put that together with the idea of shofar because the sages do say, Uba meh ba shofar. How is this memory that God has of us supposed to go up for us with a shofar? Now the shofar is supposed to somehow deliver this memory of us for good. And we're supposed to somehow reconcile that with the way the Torah describes Rosh Hashanah, which is a day when we remember the shofar. It all sounds hopelessly confusing, and you want to just throw up your hands and say, I don't know, what do I even make of it? So, so how do we make sense of how the sages comport with the verses, what we're really remembering, how it fits with shofar?

SPEAKER_02:

It just would feel really good to be certain about what exactly we're doing on a big, big day and how this all fits together.

SPEAKER_03:

It's not like the stakes don't matter, right? The stakes matter. This is this is the big day. So I want to describe to you a little bit of a journey that I took as a way of piecing this together. We started down a little bit of this path on Eravish Hashanah. You know, Eravashana is always a busy day when you called me to share some of the thoughts and struggles that you were having, and I'd hurt my hand, and I had a physical therapist working in my hand, and I've got emu in my ear.

SPEAKER_02:

What happened to your hand?

SPEAKER_03:

I don't know. I hurt my hand. Didn't know what to do with it, and so I went to the physical therapist and he started doing these magical manipulations with my hand and started feeling all the better. So that you caught me in one of my sessions. I had no idea. Um, yeah. Anyway, so with that introduction, I would say that the great adventure into Rosh Hashanah for me and my explorations of Rosh Hashanah has always been the product of a tension between two verses. And these are the two verses that describe Rosh Hashanah. In Parshat Emur and the Parshat Amoadim, we have a description of Rosh Hashanah as Zikron Trua, a day of remembering the shofar. Later on in the book of Numbers, we hear that Rosh Hashanah is a Yom Trua, a day of blasting the shofar. So the fundamental tension here is: is it a day of yom trua or a day of zikron trua? Is it a day of blasting the shofar, something we do, or is it a day of something we remember that we do? We remember the blast of the shofar. And in this tension, Rosh Hashanah, as we know it, I want to suggest is born that everything that we understand about Rosh Hashanah starts here. So, for example, if we go back to the Gemara, the Gemara actually looking at this tension has a halakhic solution for this clash of Yom Shrua versus Zichran Shrua. If Rosh Hashanah falls out on a weekday, then you blast the shofar. It's a Yom Trua. But if Rosh Hashanah falls out on the Sabbath, then you don't actually blast the shofar. You're worried about carrying it. So we remember the cry of the shofar, but we don't actually blast the shofar. But that's in the world of a halakhakhdrash. It's not in the world of Pshat. So in the world of Pshat, of just trying to understand the story of Rosh Hashanah, which is it and how does it work? So that's something which we struggled with in one of our videos. I think we put it out back in 2017. And we basically came up with a theory. And the theory is that, of course, Rosh Hashanah is a day of blasting the chauffeur, but the reason why you blast the chauffeur is because you're remembering another cry of the chauffeur. You're remembering a cry of the chauffeur, which was so well known that the Torah in Parshit Emmor doesn't even have to tell you what it is because it's so patently obvious to the people who are reading this. Everyone knew it. It's engraved in the collective consciousness of the people. What great cry of the chauffeur would everyone have heard that they would know it was worth memorializing? It's the cry of the chauffeur at Sinai. The cry of the chauffeur at Sinai wasn't just one of the events that took place, but it was an event that had pride of place. It was maybe even the central aspect of revelation itself. When God revealed himself to us, he didn't reveal himself to us in the way that we might have wanted or expected. One of the little um thought experiments I like doing with people is asking them, you know, if I were to tell you that God was going to reveal himself to you in five minutes outside of your kitchen window, and you could choose to apprehend God with any one of your five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, right? Which sense would you choose? Sight. Most of us would choose sight. Want to see God. Seeing is believing. Seeing is believing. You can't compare hearing something to seeing it. Seeing it is how we human beings sense that something is really here. But lo and behold, when it comes time for seeing God, there's no God to be seen. It is, as Deuteronomy describes it, a day of chosach, anan vaarafel, a day of darkness, a day of thick fog, a day of clouds. It's almost like God set it up that you couldn't see him. Can you imagine like showing up to revelation and it's cloudy? Like, where is God?

SPEAKER_01:

I actually always love that that the metaphor in the Torah for God's imminence is it's not rays of light, you know, it's obscurity. It's in the cloud.

SPEAKER_03:

It's literally an oxymoron. Atam negleita baan kvodaka. This is what we say in Roshana. You revealed yourself in a cloud. What an oxymoron. You concealed yourself in a cloud, but now you revealed yourself in a cloud because the great extraterrestrial being knew something to be true, which terrestrial senses are optimized for being able to apprehend the world. That's what we do with our senses. But God is extraterrestrial. He's outside of the world. Who says you can apprehend him with senses? Turns out there's one sense you can apprehend him with, but it's not sight. Sight, if anything, is distracting when it comes to God. So God says, I'm shutting sight down. It's like a blind person. Once you're blind, you're able to pick up on your other senses better. Once you realize you're not going to be able to see God, you can pick up on hearing better. And God says, I'm going to reveal myself in sound, not in sight. And these are the famous words at the beginning of Deuteronomy. God says that you have to really remember carefully what it is that you experienced at Sinai, Tmuna in Chemroim. There was no visage, there was nothing you could see at Sinai, Zulati Kol. It was just sound. I came to you in sound. Now that sound eventually takes the form of words, which are the Ten Commandments. But before it takes the form of words, the Torah is very clear that it takes the form of a chauffeur blast. There was no one around going through the camp blowing the shofar. There was no human being blowing the shofar. Why are you hearing a shofar blast? The answer is you're hearing the simulation of a shofar blast. You're hearing a sound that sounds like a shofar. Koshofar, Holechfah Khazak getting louder and louder. Chazal even says the human shofar gets softer and softer because your voice starts petering out. But God's shofar gets louder and louder as if God is coming closer and closer to you. And God chose to adopt the artificial sound of the shofar as a signal or as a way of expressing his own voice. And the way I would even understand the words Moshe Yidaber, Valukim, Yanenu Bakal, Moshe would be speaking, but God was answering not with speech, but just with the untrammeled cry of the shofar without any words. And eventually the Torah says that the conversation will reach a climax. They can actually come up and perhaps encounter God at the top of the mountain. They don't ever do that, but that was the invitation. And then eventually that cry of the shofar resolves itself into words which become the Ten Commandments.

SPEAKER_01:

I remember that being very surprising and shocking that like the way in which God reveals Himself is as voice. So it really does seem that the Torah does take seriously this idea that God's encounter with humanity happens through voice. And it's at revelation we hear that that voice sounds an awful lot like a shofar.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. And we are meant to recreate that sound on Rosh Hashanah. So it's a Yom Shwa, it's a day when we blow the shofar. And that's the way we make tangible this memory of ours, of God's voice. And so we're recalling Sinai Day. You know, we think that Shavuot is the great Sinai holiday, and it is from one perspective, from the perspective of the giving of the Torah. But Rosh Hashanah is not about remembering the aspect of Sinai that was the giving of the Torah. It's about remembering an aspect of Sinai that was a predicate to the giving of the Torah, which is just the sound of God's voice before we heard his words. The words are the Torah, but the voice, that's Rosh Hashanah.

SPEAKER_01:

Honestly, I had the pleasure of learning all that with her by Foreman in the past. I had helped produce that 2017 course. But it seems that our Era of Rosh Hashanah conversation had brought those ideas back to the surface of his mind and pushed him to look deeper into these ideas than he ever had before.

SPEAKER_03:

Emu, as we began to talk as I was sitting there on that physical therapist couch and as you were running around doing errands, right? It began to kind of resolve for me, and I think for you, that there might be more to this story than just the memory of God's voice. Because, you know, one way of saying it is, well, there was just this voice of God and it took the sound of the chauffeur. But then there are some questions you can ask, which is, was God saying anything then or not? Like it could be God wasn't saying anything, it was just a voice. On the other hand, it could be that there was an intention underneath that voice. You know, we humans can't understand our babies, but when a baby cries, the baby's not just crying. The baby usually has an intention underlying that voice, and parents drive themselves bananas trying to figure out what that intention is. Was there any intention of God that was underneath that voice? And why would God, of all things, use a show for sound? Is there any meaning to God picking a show for sound? Is there an intention behind it? And what exactly is that intention? And that launched me on a little bit of a journey. And that journey has two parts. One of them I began to share with you from the therapist couch. And that was, I said, Emu, there's something I came up with like seven years ago. And it was a seven-part chiasm having to do with a chauffe being blasted seven times as people went around something, seven times. And that seven-part chiasm was what I called the Jericho chiasm. It's a chiasm that seemed to me to be newly relevant to Rosh Hashanah and to maybe shed light on the meaning of chauffeur. And again, the climax of the chiasm is these great seven times seven blasts of the shofar. So I wanted to revisit the Jericho chiasm with you. But I also wanted to revisit something that I did not discover in our conversation. But as I was thinking about the Jericho Chaiism, I began to notice in the text of the Khamesh itself leading up to Sinai. And it seems to me that there might possibly be a hidden story in the Exodus that takes us from the story of the burning bush to the story of Sinai that I had never seen. Like, how many times have we gone through those verses from the burning bush and the Exodus? These are some of the meat and potatoes of Aleph Beta Land, and we got all this great stuff and these great videos.

SPEAKER_00:

This is fresh material to me compared to the Garden of Eden. It's like a totally new destination.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, yes, Emo. I know we always go back to the Garden of Eden, right? But but looking back at the story of the Burning Bush and Exodus, it struck me that there is a kind of hidden story underneath the surface of the text, which I had never noticed before. And I want to share that story with you. So why don't we come back together next time? We'll start from the beginning of the Burning Bush, and I want to lay out the text to show you this drama that unfolds that I had never really realized was there.

SPEAKER_01:

So it had all started off with a phone call to Rabbi Foreman, an attempt to process what I was thinking and feeling on a complicated and frankly scary era of Rosh Hashanah. But what had emerged were all these questions about this auspicious day, questions about shofar and memory, about God revealing himself at Sinai through a simulated chauffeur blast, and what he may have been trying to tell us through that. But it seemed that to answer these questions, we were gonna have to go on a little trip. Our journey so far had taken us back to the revelation at Sinai. But Rabbi Foreman's first question had been how Rosh Hashanah was a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. And now that's where he was taking us. Further back in Exodus, all the way back to the Burning Bush, to uncover this secret hidden story we had never seen before. What was this story? And why was it so important to understand the chauffeur at Revelation? And ultimately Rosh Hashanah itself? Well, join us next time to find out. Until then, we want to hear from you. We actually just set up a new feature that lets you leave us a voice note. It's super easy to use, just click on the link in the show notes, hit record, and talk. Let us know your thoughts on this episode, what you liked, and even what you didn't. What do you think the Burning Bush has to do with the show far? We may even play some messages on the show in the future, so watch out for that. But above all, it's an opportunity for us to connect, to hear your voice. And I hope that you'll give it a try. This season of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Foreman and me, Himu Shalev. It was produced by Robbie Charnoff. Our audio engineer is Hilary Gutman. Our senior producer is Tikfa Hecht. A Book Like No Other is a product of Olifeta and made possible through the very generous support of Sherry and Nathan Lindenbaum. Thank you, Sherry and Nathan, and thank you all for listening.