How a Shofar is Unlike an Oreo

When you want an Oreo cookie, you buy a package and you’re pretty much 100% sure that, when you tear into the cellophane, you’re going to get an Oreo cookie that’s exactly like the last Oreo cookie you had. And the one before that.

 

A shofar blower, on the other hand, isn’t always sure of what sound is going to come out. Even experienced shofar blowers sometimes fail to coax the sound they want to make from their shofars.

 

Indeed, unlike the Oreo factory, the shofar is an imprecise tool. Its very imprecision teaches us a valuable Jewish lesson.

Greek playwright Sophocles said, “Success is dependent on effort.” Self-help author Robert Collier said, “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” This attitude informs Western culture, where there is a real tendency to connect effort and result. We have nice things because we work hard. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and we succeed. The assumption underlying these ideas is that we can be assured of results, if only we work hard enough.

The shofar comes to teach us a different lesson. The shofar teaches us that we are required to make an effort. The Hebrew word for effort is hishtadlut. Whatever we want to accomplish, we are required to make an effort, even a valiant effort. In Jewish thought, it is not sufficient to merely think of the tekiah sound of the shofar. You must actually pick up the shofar, put it to your lips and blow.

There is a well-known phrase that comes from the Talmud (Avot 5:26) - L'fum tzara agra – "according to the effort is the reward." At first blush, this sounds a lot like the “success is dependent on effort,” thinking of Sophocles. But it’s actually very different.

In Jewish thought, it is not success, but spiritual reward, that comes from the effort to do a mitzvah. We are promised that efforts we make to do a mitzvah are rewarded, even if we are not successful in accomplishing the mitzvah in the end. So if we lit Shabbat candles and a wind came and blew them out, we are credited with having lit the Shabbat candles. And if we are dressed and ready to go to synagogue and we open our front door to six feet of snow, we are credited with having gone to synagogue.

The ba’al tokea, the master shofar blower, knows that skill and experience only account for part of the sound that comes from the wide end of the shofar. The shofar is an imprecise instrument precisely so that we come to understand that the result is in God’s Hands.

 

Side by side with our willingness to make an effort, even to exert ourselves with the effort, we must let go of the idea that we control the results. The results of our efforts belong in God’s realm.

 

This is the lesson of the shofar.