WAKE UP: Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5786

All my life, I’ve struggled with paying attention. I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in my early 20’s, but before that time, my lack of focus was more than just a nuisance and an academic impediment — it could be dangerous. As a teenager and young adult, I got into more than a few car accidents because my attention wandered from the road – distracted by my stereo, the phone, or a funny billboard that caught my eye while I was driving. 

Today, thank God, I can confidently report that I’m much safer behind the wheel. In part, that’s because I now understand and treat my ADHD. But it’s also due to the magic of modern technology. See, now, my car has a sensor that keeps track of my eyes. If I look away from the road for more than a couple seconds, an alarm sounds and a warning light flashes on the dashboard with the words, “Stay Alert!” in big, bold, letters, along with an image of a large, red, wide-open eye. It’s jarring, but effective – and doubtlessly life-saving.

What it would look like for such an alarm to exist for the rest of our lives — a flashing light, a loud siren, jolting us awake and alert whenever our focus starts to drift, whenever we avert our eyes from what we ought to be paying attention to.

It strikes me that this is precisely the point of the High Holy Day season writ large. The High Holy Days are designed to function as a kind of moral and spiritual driver-attention alert system. The basic discipline of these days is teshuvah. Usually translated as repentance, teshuvah more literally means “turning” or “returning.” 

Traditionally, teshuvah involves acknowledging wrongdoing, rejecting hurtful behavior, seeking forgiveness, and returning to a path of righteousness. The work of teshuvah is thus predicated on awareness. If we want to chart a different course, we have to pay attention: seeing how we’ve gone astray, facing facts that we often, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes deliberately, tend – or perhaps pretend – not to notice. After all, we can’t fix what we can’t face. 

It is therefore little wonder that the central symbol and core ritual of Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar. As a matter of fact, the Torah never calls this day “Rosh Hashanah.” Instead, the Torah refers to the holiday as “yom t’ruah,” the day of the shofar blast. 

According to tradition, the shofar is effectively the ancient version of my car’s driver-attention alert system; its piercing sound is meant to jolt us awake, shake us from distraction, and demand that we look clearly at where we’ve been, and where we’re going. 

In his Laws of Repentance, Maimonides explains that the blaring blasts of the shofar which punctuate and permeate Rosh Hashanah worship are intended to be an alarm, waking us up and calling us to attention: “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep!” Maimonides interprets the shofar as saying; “You slumberers, rouse yourselves from your slumber! Examine your deeds, remember your Creator, and turn in repentance…look to your souls, improve your ways, abandon your harmful paths and thoughts” (Laws of Repentance 3:4).

And to this understanding of the shofar’s role in the process of teshuvah, Maimonides adds something even more striking. He says that we should imagine ourselves always standing on a precipice — equally balanced between merit and sin; the entire world teetering on the edge between salvation and destruction. One sin, Maimonides asserts, tips the balance toward guilt and destruction; whereas one righteous deed tips the balance toward merit and redemption. 

If one good deed can redeem the world, and one wrongdoing can destroy it, we had better be paying very careful and constant attention to our behavior, because every single deed matters. The shofar, Maimonides teaches, is meant to jolt us awake to the reality that the stakes are enormous, and that our choices — to notice or not, to act or not — can tip the scales not only for us, but for everyone.

Yet most of the time, we don’t pay such careful attention. We allow ourselves to drift off course. We sleepwalk through our lives, forgetting that our every deed carries moral weight. 

I don’t think that most of us fail to pay this kind of attention because we’re bad people. Perpetual and total awareness is extremely hard, maybe impossible, for any human being to maintain – even if we wanted to. 

But if we’re honest with ourselves, many of us deliberately avert our eyes. Again, not because we’re bad people. Perhaps we do so because we are afraid of discovering uncomfortable truths if we look too carefully and clearly, or because noticing our faults and failures can produce painful feelings of guilt or shame, or might make us feel compelled to change course – and change can be hard and scary. Perhaps we do so simply because constant vigilance can be physically and emotionally exhausting. 

Whatever the reason, we prefer sleep to wakefulness, and consequently, we choose to stay asleep, resisting efforts to rouse us, rebelling against the voices calling us to care, instead all-too-readily embracing, exalting, the forces arrayed against awakening. 

These days, it seems as though the forces arrayed against awakening are ascendant.

We are living through cascading crises: hostages still languishing in captivity; war and its toll on innocents; democracy under siege. And those are only the struggles we share. Each of us carries private burdens as well: illness or grief, strained relationships, financial worries. Between the personal and the public, I know I am not alone in finding life these days overwhelming. It is understandable to want to look away. It is exhausting to live with so much outrage and sorrow.

As a result, many of us – myself, I am ashamed to admit – choose not to look. We avert our eyes from what is painful, avoid the hard conversations, and scroll past the headlines. We tune out the news or change the channel, preferring the comfort of voices that echo what we already think. We curate the content we consume so that it aligns with our interests, interpreting reality in ways that confirm our preconceptions. We retreat into ideological silos, surrounding ourselves only with those who agree with us. We give ourselves over to algorithms that hijack our attention by feeding our fear and fury, and endlessly anesthetize ourselves with consumption and pleasures and entertainments. 

Meanwhile, loud and influential voices in our public life insist that looking away is a virtue — that “wokeness” itself is the problem. But it’s worth remembering that the word woke was not always so controversial. For nearly a century, especially within Black communities, it has simply meant awareness of injustice. And yet this very wakefulness is now dismissed, derided, even outlawed in some places. Books are banned, museums scrubbed, truth treated as an existential threat.

This is a timeless strategy of oppression: blunt awareness, and blur reality. As the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire observed, “what oppressors want is for people not to think.” And as Voltaire warned long ago, “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” When falsehood becomes normal, the unimaginable becomes thinkable, and even the monstrous begins to appear acceptable — at least to those who have chosen not to see.

Tragically, many of us have embraced this rejection of wakefulness — not out of cruelty, but out of fatigue. We are exhausted, stretched thin, worn down by the endless demands of life. To keep our eyes open to suffering, to stay attuned to injustice, can feel like more than we can bear. So we close our eyes, preferring sleep to wakefulness. And when voices try to rouse us, we resist — even rebel — embracing instead those who tell us it is a virtue to look away.

True, our national ethos has long been forward-facing, optimistic, relentlessly future-oriented. That outlook has produced extraordinary accomplishments. But it also comes at a cost.

The United States on the eve of the Civil War provides a powerful and instructive example. I am not the first to hear haunting echoes of that previous era of destructive national division in our current moment. But to me, the most striking parallel between then and now is not only the pernicious prevalence of political violence, but the readiness of ordinary people to retreat into indifference while injustice festered and democracy decayed. As the historian Jon Grinspan notes, by the late 1850’s, slavery had become increasingly unpopular, particularly in the North. Growing numbers of Americans had come to regard its “incalculable toll of murder, rape, torture, family separation, and ceaseless theft” as an unqualified moral evil. Moreover, fewer than 2 percent of Americans actually owned slaves. There were more people walking the streets of Philadelphia or New York on any given day than there were enslavers in the entire nation. You’d think the sheer numbers alone — the 87 percent of Americans who were neither enslavers nor enslaved — would have, should have, spelled slavery’s doom.

And yet, despite northerners’ moral objections to slavery, they chose, by and large, to ignore it, rather than press for its abolition. 

Many were willing to turn a blind eye because they financially benefitted from slavery. An economy of interstate trade built on forced labor tied the whole nation to slavery’s fortunes, even in the North. Others refrained from speaking out against slavery because they were afraid: criticizing slavery became increasingly dangerous. Critics were literally bludgeoned into silence, with vigilante violence from pro-slavery mobs growing more and more common. Ultimately, most people  — even those who personally disliked slavery — just wanted to make a living and mind their own business. So they kept quiet, shrugging and saying, as Lincoln described the attitude, “I don’t care.”

The Torah understands these all-too-human tendencies within us, going out of its way to legislate paying attention: In the book of Deuteronomy, we encounter the following commandment:

“If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it; you must certainly take it back to your fellow. If your fellow does not live near you or you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it home and it shall remain with you until your fellow claims it; then you shall give it back to them. You shall do the same with their donkey; you shall do the same with their garment; and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses and you find: you must not remain indifferent.” (Deut. 22:1–4)

Undergirding this commandment is the recognition that losing a valuable object is distressing. We all know how it feels to lose something of value. Thus, finding a lost object should arouse our compassion and move us to want to help.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire coined a term to describe this dynamic: conscientização, usually rendered in English as “conscientization.” Conscientization is the awakening that comes from proximity to, and encounter with, those on the margins; an awareness of the systemic forces that perpetuate suffering; and the movement from mere abstract concern to compassion, responsibility, and solidarity. Conscientization looks like going out of our way to see and hear from – to encounter, witness the equal humanity of, and feel pained out outraged over the suffering of – people we are otherwise able to ignore. To become conscientized is to move from the capacity to care to the “readiness to care,” in the words of my colleague and teacher Rabbi Harold Kravitz. 

The alarm-like quality of the shofar is meant to compel this type of awareness. Our tradition teaches that its broken notes mimic the sobbing of a woman in anguish, or the whimpers of the distressed — a reminder that we must attune ourselves to the cries of suffering in our midst. To hear the shofar is to be forced out of distraction, out of numbness, out of sleep — and to be awakened to the pain around us.

Yet the Torah also recognizes that it doesn’t always work that way. Returning a lost object may be difficult or inconvenient – it may require great effort, expense, or even risk of harm. 

That may seem like a big responsibility to assume just because we noticed a lost object and felt bad for its owner. Many of us balk at the burdens imposed by conscientization. So we try to evade responsibility by pretending not to notice. We insulate ourselves from others’ pain so we can ignore it. We may even make excuses, convincing ourselves that people lose things all the time; why must their tough luck be my problem? We may even blame the victim: Maybe they were forgetful or careless. If they cared so much about this lost item, they should have been more careful. Our proximity bias makes it harder to imagine that those we do not encounter face to face are equally God’s children, equally worthy of thriving. And that failure of imagination justifies our selfish thinking.

That’s precisely why the Torah adds lo tukhal l’hitalem — you are not allowed to look away. To turn a blind eye – to shrug and say “not my problem” – to another’s suffering is to become a party to their pain. Indifference is itself a form of harm. Just as we are forbidden from actively causing suffering, we are forbidden from averting our eyes when we see it. 

Indeed, the willful blindness to slavery on the part of the vast majority of Americans before the Civil War – what Grinspan calls the “Don’t Care” caucus – not only perpetuated the horrors of slavery, but also enabled a tiny proslavery minority to set the course for the entire nation – shaping, distorting, and dismantling American democracy itself; ensuring the unnatural survival of slavery and the unnatural power of the enslavers.

And yet, even in those dark and drowsy years, some people began to awaken. In 1860, right here in Connecticut, a group of young people, fired up from attending an anti-slavery rally in Hartford, decided to organize themselves into a political movement – alert, vigilant, and unwilling to be lulled into complacency about slavery. As one of them remarked, “steady old Connecticut was stirring — this is no time to sleep.” From that night, they called themselves the Wide Awakes.

If you’re anything like me, you may not have learned about the Wide Awakes. Yet in his recent book, Wide Awake, Grinspan argues that the Wide Awakes were instrumental in electing Lincoln in 1860, galvanizing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, and ultimately spurring the war that would end slavery once and for all. The Wide Awakes marched through city streets by torchlight, their cloaks painted with giant, lidless eyes, proclaiming that they would not shut their eyes to slavery’s horrors, nor let their neighbors sleep through the crisis of the republic. They understood what Lincoln himself had named: the “don’t care” policy was fatal. One could not be neutral about slavery. To look away and remain silent was to be complicit. “Steady old Connecticut” was where our country finally started to wake up.

The story of the Wide Awakes is not just a quirky footnote in American history. It is a reminder that even when the temptation to sleep is overwhelming, even when indifference seems like the safest option, it is always possible to open our eyes — and that when we do, we can change everything. A small group of young people, ordinary citizens without wealth or power, simply decided they would no longer close their eyes. They put on their cloaks and marched into the night to proclaim, with their bodies and in their actions, that they would not look away. And their wakefulness spread. Their vigilance helped tip the scales of history.

And so could ours. What would it look like if, once again, we here in Connecticut, in the year 5786, committed to being – and remaining – wide awake in the year to come.

The booming and broken blasts of the shofar call us to wake up and notice the brokenness within ourselves and all around us; its cries demand that we not look away from pain or injustice, reminding us that even one act of wakefulness, one decision to care, can reverberate outward and change the world.

The trouble, of course, is that the shofar sounds only once a year. Once its reverberations fade, how will we remember to stay awake?

Put simply: live Jewishly. The architecture of Jewish life is designed as a daily, weekly, yearly system of wake-up calls — a toolkit for walking through the world wide awake. 

Daily practices like prayer and study call us, again and again, to remember who we are and what we are here to do. Kashrut cultivates our compassion for all living things and compels us to eat with intention, imbuing each bite with sanctity. Shabbat interrupts our weekly routines to remind us that people matter more than profits, relationships more than productivity. Holidays force us to reckon with our history, to remember both our ancestors’ oppression and their resilience, so we cannot delude ourselves into thinking suffering is someone else’s problem. The mitzvot train us to notice — to see the stranger, the neighbor, the widow, the orphan, the worker, the poor — and to respond with love, compassion, and justice.

At the same time, Jewish religious practice disciplines the mind as well as the heart. The traditional Jewish approach to learning trains us to engage the world with a discerning eye: to seek truth, to question authority, to analyze and argue with rigor and respect. It insists that baseless falsehoods and cruelty are out of bounds, and that through constructive, respectful conversation — even, and especially, with those with whom we disagree — we can draw closer to what is right and true.

This vigilance is not for its own sake, but for the sake of saving the world. To live Jewishly is to be awake to the Divine image in every human being, awake to the cries of the vulnerable, awake to the disparities between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. And to live Jewishly is to refuse to look away until those disparities are repaired. That is why the Torah commands us: tzedek, tzedek tirdof — justice, justice shall you pursue. Because justice is not inevitable. It prevails only through the persistent efforts and perpetual wakefulness of those committed to its cause.

My dear friends, I know that so many of us enter this new year fearful, frustrated, enraged – even mired in despair. All we want to do is look away, close our eyes, and go back to sleep. This is all so understandable. I’ve felt many of these same emotions myself. But our tradition insists, and this season reminds us, that each and all of us have the ability – and responsibility – to change the world. Our tradition insists, and this season reminds us, that every act, no matter how large or small, has the potential to tip the world’s scales. One deed can plunge the world deeper into darkness, or it can help bring about the light. And if so, we must wake up. And we must strive to live wide awake.

The cries of the shofar are meant to wake us up today. But eventually, its echoes, like all things, will fade. And the question before us will be: will we choose to stay awake in the coming year – to cultivate the courage to face hard truths, to train our hearts to see the Divine image in every person and refuse to look away from suffering; to recognize that every deed matters?

If enough of us do this — if enough of us resist the temptation to sleep, if enough of us refuse the false comfort of indifference, if enough of us choose to stay wide awake — then we just might bring this broken world a little closer to the wholeness God dreams for it, and for us.

So, in the words of our High Holy Day mahzor: 

May the cry of the shofar shatter our complacency. 

May the cry of the shofar penetrate our souls. 

May the cry of the shofar break the bonds of all that enslaves us. 

May the cry of the shofar destroy the idols we have placed at the forefront of our lives.

May the cry of the shofar awaken us to how we have sinned. 

May the cry of the shofar summon us to a life of responsibility. 

May the cry of the shofar elicit the response, "Here I am." 

May the cry of the shofar remind us that we can be instruments of redemption. 

May the cry of the shofar penetrate our hearts. 

May the cry of the shofar bring blessing to us, the people who hear its call.

Let its cries echo in our ears when we are tempted to retreat into silence,

Let them ring in our hearts when we feel weary, 

Let them rouse us again and again whenever we are tempted to look away.

And may the Holy One grant us strength to stay awake, wisdom to discern truth from falsehood, courage to act even when it is costly, compassion to widen the circle of our concern, and faith to believe that the light of justice is stronger than the shadows of despair.

Then, when the book of this new year is written, it will tell the story of a people who did not close their eyes, who did not slumber, who did not give in to despair, but who chose to wake up and live wide awake — and by doing so, helped awaken the dawn of a world redeemed.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.