Yom Yevava​
: Whole, Broken, Whole Again.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5776 | Temple Shir Tikva
Rabbi Jen Gubitz
The golden sands swirled. The air was thick with sadness. She hoped they would return soon.
But three days had since passed. And no word. Yet. She forced herself to stand and drawing the
crimson cord of a tent flap, she opened it. She looked out. But all that was there were the
golden sands swirling and an ever thickening sadness.
And our matriarch, Sarah, cried. In agony, she wailed. She beat her chest. Where was Abraham?
And where was Isaac? God gave me Isaac as my joy, my laughter, she recalled between her
tears. And for a moment a smile creeped into the corners of her mouth - recalling the laughter
in her belly that there would finally be a baby in her belly… But then Sarah remembered her
grief, her smile retreated and she cried out, and she sobbed.
Yom Yevava​
- it was a day of sobbing. 1
Can you hear her cries? The anguish of a parent fearing for a child’s wellbeing?
*
The gravel and stones of the city swirled as her footsteps to the House of God in Shiloh were
weighted with sadness. Each year Hannah would return to God and yearn for a child. But many
years had since passed. And no word. No sign. No change. And no child. Yet. She forced herself
to eat and to drink, though there was bitterness in her soul.
And she wept. In her tears, she prayed. Her lips moved; No sound came out. Hannah’s sadness
thickened as her heart wailed. Standing before the Holy One, Hannah’s heart sobbed.
Yom Yevava ​
- it was a day of sobbing.
Can you hear her cries? The anguish of an adult wishing to become a parent!
*
A mother cries for her child as Sarah wails, the midrash teaches us in connection to our Rosh
Hashanah Torah reading. Sarah wails upon learning that Abraham has bound Isaac
upon an alter…
1
​
Based on ​
Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, 32
1 Can you hear her cries?
The anguish of a parent fearing for a child’s wellbeing?
And another cries for a child as Hannah prays, the Rosh Hashanah Haftarah teaches, through
her tears yearning for a child…
Can you hear her cries?
The anguish of an adult, wishing to become a parent!
Sarah and Hannah sob and cry, and wail and weep, and whimper and sigh: for fear of loss,
and to fill a loss in their interminable waiting. Will Isaac come back, Sarah bewails? Will I ever
have a child, Hannah begs?
For each, it is ​
Yom Yevava​
- a day of sobbing.
In your own life, have you ever known such a day?
*
If you have or have not known such a day, according to the Talmud, today​
is​
such a day.
In Aramaic, the language of the Talmud, today is also known as​
Yom Yevava ​
- that day of
2
sobbing, “a day of drawing a long sigh, and uttering short piercing cries.”
But wait, what? Rosh Hashanah - a day of sobbing?
How? This is a day of apples and honey and family dinners! This is a day of pomegranates and
promise and potential! ​
HaYom Harat Olam​
- this is the day the world was created! ​
Yom
Yevava​
? A day of sobbing? Impossible!
On a day like today, what could possibly bring us to tears?
**
The Talmudic tractate named and about Rosh Hashanah zeroes in on this particular word Yevava​
- in a discussion about the qualities of the sounds of the shofar’s blasts.
The conversation is rooted in the Torah text that speaks of this day:
2
Talmud Bavli Rosh Hashanah 33a-b
2 ​
‫ִהיֶה ָל ֶכם‬
ְ ‫ י‬,‫תּרוּ ָעה‬
ְ ‫יוֹם‬
Yom Teruah Yihieh Lachem
“It is a day of ​
Teruah​
to you.”
Today​
is Yom Teruah ​
- one of the more common names by which Rosh Hashanah is known.
Yom Teruah​
- a day of blowing the horn or shofar. And we know ​
this​
word from the shofar calls
[Chanted] ​
Teruah​
! It is the call made up of 9 successive staccato blasts… [Chanted] ​
Teruah​
!
[with 9 vocalized blasts]
But what does the voice of the shofar, the quality of ​
Teruah​
, really sound like, the rabbis of the
Talmud wonder? And of what should it remind us?
Possible answers hinge on the different types of Hebrew of our sacred texts, the nuances of
which grow and change throughout history.
In fact, a very small debate ensues in the Gemara, the rabbinic analysis of the core mishnaic
text, as the rabbis try to understand how each set of calls is distinct from the others and what
they could mean to us.
[Yes,] Rabbi Abbahu summarizes there is a difference of opinion. [When] it is written, “It shall
be a day of ​
Teruah​
unto you,” we translate it in Aramaic, a day of ​
Yevava​
. One authority
thought this [word] means drawing a long sigh, and the other [thought] that it means uttering
short piercing cries.” For clarity, the rabbis point us to another moment where the word ​
Yevava
occurs - so we might understand what the ​
Teruah​
call of the Shofar must really sound like.
They direct us from this arcane word in Aramaic ​
-Yevava​
- to its counterpart in biblical poetry in
the Song of Devorah in the Book of Judges. They share with us the story of an unnamed woman
who is the mother of Sisera who has just been killed. As she waits longingly for his return and
realizes that he will not, Sisera’s mother cries and moans and wails
‫ַבּב ֵאם סִי ְסרָא‬
ֵ ‫ַתּי‬
ְ ‫ִשׁ ְקפָה ו‬
ְ ‫ְבּ ַעד ַה ַחלּוֹן נ‬
“Through the window she looked forth,
vat’ya’bayv
and cried out,”3
The mother of Sisera, wailed, says some translations: “Why does his chariot delay? Why do the
sounds of his chariot tarry?”
Yom Yevava​
- a day of sobbing, wailing, and uncontrollable weeping.
3
The Gemara and Jastrow disagree with Rashi and JPS on the translation of this word​
.
3 Can you hear her cries? The anguish one feels crying out for a loved one?
Thus, the rabbis urge us to consider: the sound of the shofar “is a complex sound” like the
sound of a person crying - “beginning with sobbing then developing into uncontrollable
weeping. This sound is the combination we hear every Rosh Hashanah as ​
shevarim-teruah​
.”4
[Chant] ​
Shevarim​
,​
Teruah​
- the sound of a person sobbing, wailing, weeping, whimpering, and
sighing…
*
Though aspects of the scriptural readings highlighted from Rosh Hashanah focus on women, of
course, it is not only women who cry throughout our sacred texts. There are the tears of Jacob
and Esau, once angry rivals, who both cry when coming face to face years later; and the tears
of Joseph that cry out from Egypt who after years of intentional abandonment by his brothers
sheds tears of joy upon their reunification; and King David cries out in sadness at the loss of his
best friend Jonathan. Throughout our texts, the nuances of language offer us different verbs to
express their tears, but little is lost in translation and the sound of tears is universal.
And not only people cry in our sacred texts. The angels cry at the destruction of the Holy
Temple and God cries with them. But most especially, a midrash teaches, [that] “when [people]
are afflicted, God cries, such that “if the world ever heard God’s weeping, and realized the
extent of God’s grief, it would explode. Even a spark of God’s suffering would be more than the
world can bear.”5
*
And somehow, thank God (even as or perhaps because God cries) we have arrived once more
to Rosh Hashanah. A New Year - where even though the suffering in God’s world, where even
though the tears and the sobs and the wailing from brokenness of the world is more than each
of us could ever truly bear alone - somehow we have made it together. We have another
opportunity, we have another year, another ​
shana​
, to change, ​
l’shoneh​
, what breaks, and to
heal and fix, ​
l’taken​
, what cries out to us.
On a day like today, the birthing of a world anew, what could possibly bring us to tears?
​
Rabbah Sara Hurwitz, A D’var Torah for Rosh Hashanah, Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance
Tree of Souls: the Mythology of Judaism, Howard Ginsburg. Sourced from ​
B. Berakhot ​
3a; ​
B. Hagigah ​
5b; ​
Eikhah Zuta
7; ​
Yalkut Shim’oni​
,​
Eicha ​
1009; ​
Esh Kadosh​
, from a ​
derashah ​
delivered by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira on
February 14, 1942.
4
5
4 Perhaps the news, these days, most days, brings you to tears…
Perhaps your life these days, brings you to tears…
Or perhaps you have so much joy these days, that you also feel wetness welling in the corner of
your eyes…
Perhaps you are so grateful for what you have that you, too, are overcome with tears of joy...
Perhaps some days you cry in grief and some days you cry in joy.
And some days you experience both…
at the same time.
Don’t we all enter this sanctuary over these days holding a little bit of both? Just as at our birth
when we enter into the world in the same way. Even for those who needed a little slap on the
back, we came in with a wail, a sob, a scream - a red-faced desire to turn back - all the while
held in the arms of possibility and potential. Every day of creation comes with some sense of
loss. At every birthday, every wedding, every new year, something new is created, something
that once was is no more. And like little ones we cry and we scream and - ​
Yevava​
- we sob in
cathartic release until eventually soothed by the joy and possibility of what is to come…
Tears and Joy. They come together. The mystical Zohar teaches, in fact, that "weeping is lodged
in one side of my heart, and joy is lodged in the other."6
The shofar’s cries echo each of our days and in the chambers of each of our hearts. And
somehow the simplest of sounds from a seemingly unsophisticated instrument have such great
power to rouse us!
When we hear the shofar’s blast, may we to take to heart in the champers that weep and in the
chambers that hold joy this teaching from the Chassidic Master, Rabbi Aharon of Karlin:
“Tekiah!
We start with a full, uninterrupted blast - TEKIAH!
‘We are whole!’ the shofar sings!
6
Zohar II, 255a; III, 75a
5 “Shevarim!
A 3-part blast - SHEVARIM - whose name means ‘broken.
The shofar says to us:
‘I was whole, but now I am broken.’
“Teruah​
!
The third set of blasts - ​
TERUAH​
a staccato series of short blasts even more broken than the previous set.
Its message is ​
Yevava​
our weeping and sobbing
‘I was broken, now I'm smashed to pieces.’
But every final blast in each series of the shofar’s song ends with TEKIAH - the uninterrupted
blast. Even though there is brokenness and destruction, the promise of wholeness endures.
We are required to sound at least 100 blasts during Rosh Hashanah.
100 times the shofar brings us this message:
"You were whole once; then you were broken;
you may even have been smashed and ground to pieces.
But soon we shall be whole once more.”
And for those of us who are not yet there - for whom the broken wails of ​
Shevarim​
and ​
Teruah
resonate most profoundly: may those around us who hasten to ​
Kol Shofar​
, the voice of the
shofar, hear our cries and hear our sobs, cradling us, no matter how long it takes, as we journey
from the ​
Yevava​
sobs of brokenness to ​
Tekiah Gedola​
- the enduring, uninterrupted, rousing
and stirring sounds of ​
shleimut​
and ​
shalom​
, wholeness and peace.
6