Rabbi Harold Schulweis shares a beautiful lesson about the shofar that was taught to him by Natan Sharansky, the famous refusenik who later immigrated to Israel and became a member of parliament and then head of the Jewish agency. Sharansky noted that the ram’s horn is narrow at one end and wide at the other. No sound is made if you try to blow the shofar through the wide end. But if you blow into the narrow end, the call of the shofar rings loud and true. Sharansky sees in this a lesson about Jewish identity.
It’s through the narrow opening which represents particularism, our Jewish selves, that we can make our voices heard more broadly, more universally. As Sharansky puts it: “Only those who understand their own identity and have already become free people can work effectively for the human rights of others.” We don’t have to choose between being a Jew or being a human being. It is through our particularism that we come to understand fully what it means to be human.
— Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback
