It’s a unique experience that’s hard to describe. During the final moments of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the holiest day of the Jewish year, the entire congregation stands together. Everyone is exhausted and hungry, but the adrenaline is high. The prayers rise in intensity — voices cracking and faces pale from a full day of prayer and fasting. It’s the last few minutes before the day ends, before the gates close. And then it happens — that one long, unbroken sound of the shofar (ram’s horn) that ends the holy day with a powerful jolt of energy and holiness.
Each year, when I hear that sound, I think of another shofar blast, one that shook Jerusalem almost a century ago. During the British Mandate, in the years before Israel became an independent country, the British forbade the Jews from blowing the shofar at the Western Wall. Incredible as it seems today, it was considered a “provocation” to the Arab population to blow the shofar at the Jewish people’s holiest site. Every Yom Kippur, the British posted policemen at the Wall to enforce the ban.
On Yom Kippur of 1929, a young rabbi named Moshe Zvi Segal carried a hidden shofar to the Western Wall. He prayed the entire day at the Wall, waiting until the final moments of the holy day. When the prayers reached their peak and the crowd cried out the Shema, he lifted the shofar to his lips and blew.
The sound ripped through the air — a sound the British had tried to silence. Within seconds, the policemen seized him, dragged him away, and threw him into the Kishle Prison, an old Turkish fortress in the Old City that the British were using as their jail.
When Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook, the Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, heard that Rabbi Segal had been arrested, he announced that he would not end his fast until the prisoner was released. It didn’t take long. The British authorities backed down and freed him.
That blast began a new tradition. Each year after, brave young Jews smuggled a shofar to the Wall on Yom Kippur and blew it in defiance of the ban. They risked arrest and beatings, but the sound of the shofar rang out anyway.
When I first heard this story, I wondered why these brave young men would risk their freedom and their future to blow a single blast of the shofar. After all, there’s no Biblical command to blow the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur. The Torah commands us to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), not on Yom Kippur. The final blast at the close of the fast is a custom, not a divine obligation. Why risk prison for a custom?
Only a few days after Yom Kippur, we leave the synagogue and step into the sukkah — a simple hut made of wood and branches, open to the elements. The change feels sudden: from the intensity of Yom Kippur to the calm of Sukkot. What connects these two moments — one filled with trembling awe, the other with quiet joy?
On Yom Kippur, we confront our limits and hand our lives over to God. Once we do that, when we fully absorb God’s rule over our lives, fear loses its grip. If God is in control, what is there to be afraid of?
Sukkot is the visible proof of this faith. We leave our solid homes and sit beneath a roof of branches, exposed yet unafraid. It’s our way of declaring: we don’t need the protection of stone walls or the approval of powerful nations. God Himself is our shelter.
The sukkah declares that the Jewish people do not place their trust in fortresses, governments, or the protection of other nations. Our safety doesn’t come from concrete or diplomacy. It comes from God. To live in the sukkah is to say openly: we fear no man, for the Guardian of Israel watches over us.
That faith breeds courage. When a people truly believes that Heaven protects them, they stop trembling before empires. They stop apologizing for living proudly in their ancient homeland. The sukkah is not fragility — it’s confidence in its purest form.
This confidence was captured perfectly by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in a letter to Jewish children during Sukkot of 1983. He wrote: “Other nations parade with rifles and tanks to show their power. But in God’s army, a Jewish soldier carries a lulav and etrog. He waves them proudly, showing that our strength is not in weapons but in faith and mitzvot (commandments). Others trust in chariots and horses — we trust in the Name of God.”
When we trust in God, we become fearless. When we know that God alone governs victory and defeat, we are no longer afraid of the threats of men or the decrees of empires.
That is what Moshe Zvi Segal understood as he lifted the shofar to his lips in 1929, surrounded by British police. He blew the shofar to show the British — and his fellow Jews — that we were finished being afraid. His act was a declaration that the Jewish people, trusting fully in God, would never again bow to foreign rulers.
Segal’s shofar was a weapon of the spirit, a sword of faith. It was the sound of a nation lifting its head again after centuries of submission. The British had guns, but Segal had something stronger: the certainty that no empire can stand against a people who know that God is with them. That shofar blast was the first clear note of a people returning to itself — unbroken, unafraid, and free.
Less than twenty years later, the British were banished from the land, and the Israeli flag flew over Jerusalem. What began as a single act of defiance at the Western Wall became the spirit of an entire generation. The underground movements that rose up against the British carried that same conviction: that the Jewish people answer only to the God of Israel.
That spirit built the State of Israel. And it’s the same spirit we need now.
Before October 7, 2023, Israel was surrounded by frightening enemies on all sides. Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, Iran behind them both. There was a pervading sense of fear and foreboding. But over the last two years, since the dark day of October 7, the Jewish state has risen up and crushed its enemies. We have rediscovered what it means to stand strong, guided by faith, not fear.
But our work isn’t finished. The call of the shofar — and the message of Sukkot — demand that we break free from every form of dependence, even on our closest allies. Not even our good friend the United States can be the source of Israel’s security or confidence. That strength must come from within — from faith in God and pride in who we are as His people. The sukkah reminds us that our safety never came from walls or governments, but from Heaven itself. A nation that trusts in God alone has nothing to fear and no one to answer to but Him.
It is time for Israel to act as what it truly is — not a nation pleading for permission to exist, but a moral and spiritual leader among the nations. The world does not need another timid democracy begging for approval; it needs a fearless Israel that stands upright, guided by the God of history.
When Israel walks without fear, the world will remember Who walks with her.
