My dear friend and colleague, Shira Schechter, and I were catching up as we walked into the office this morning, and I think many of you can relate to what came up.
Shira mentioned that today, for the first time since the Jewish month of Elul began a week and a half ago, the timing of her family’s morning drop off routine finally allowed her to make it to synagogue in time to hear the shofar, the ram’s horn, sounded during weekday morning prayers. I have not had even that kind of luck. My own drop off schedule does not leave room to squeeze in synagogue services. What I do have is a synagogue behind my apartment building, and if I strain hard enough, I can just catch the sound of the shofar through my bedroom window. I call this social distancing shofar.
Here is what you need to know about the shofar. Throughout the month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is less than three weeks away, Jewish communities sound the shofar every morning. There is no Biblical obligation for every individual to hear it daily. It is not required of Shira or of me. But we both crave it. The shofar is not a gentle sound. It is dissonant. Piercing. Full and raw all at once. It does something to the soul that words cannot quite manage on their own.
And yet neither of us has managed to hear it the way we picture in our minds when we think of what this season is supposed to feel like. Shira caught it once in a week and a half. I catch fragments of it through glass and screen, and the sounds of my household waking up. This is not really a story about being busy mothers, though we are that too. It is a story about how differently the soul receives its wake up calls, depending on the day, the season of life, and of course, the person being called.
This is exactly what King David captures in Psalm 27, Le David Hashem Ori Ve Yishi, which observant Jews recite twice daily from the first of Elul through the end of the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe that stretch from Rosh Hashanah through Sukkot. The psalm opens with the kind of confidence that sounds almost invincible:
David goes on to declare that even a besieging army could not shake him. That is the voice of a man standing at the peak of trust, fully certain that God is near.
But the psalm does not stay there. A few verses later, that certainty starts to wobble. David shifts from declaration to request: “One thing I ask of the Lord, that is what I shall seek, that I dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of my life.” The confidence of the opening lines gives way to longing, to the quiet fear that this closeness with God will not last forever. And by the final section of the psalm, David is pleading outright: “Do not hide Your face from me. Do not abandon me. Do not forsake me.” He describes feeling surrounded by enemies, even forsaken by his own parents. The man who opened the psalm afraid of nothing is now afraid of everything.
Commentators have wrestled for centuries with how one psalm can hold both of these moods. Some suggested David wrote two separate poems that were later stitched together. But the more compelling reading is that David wrote exactly one psalm, because a single human being genuinely moves through all of these states. Trust. Doubt. Crisis. Sometimes within the same week. Sometimes within the same morning.
That is what Shira and I were really talking about this morning. Neither of us is failing at Elul because we are not standing in synagogue every morning with the shofar blast filling the room. Some mornings we catch it. Some mornings we do not catch it at all. David’s psalm does not describe a fading signal either. It describes something harder: real fear that God has turned away entirely. “Do not hide Your face from me… my father and mother have forsaken me.” David is not managing a weak connection. He is staring down the possibility of no connection at all.
And still, he does not end the psalm in that fear. He ends it by commanding himself to act: chazak, strengthen yourself, take courage. The strengthening does not depend on how clearly he can currently sense God’s presence. It happens regardless.
I keep wanting to call this a spiritual alarm clock, and I keep stopping myself, because an alarm clock only works if you set it on purpose, and you can always hit snooze. David’s chazak is not a response to a sound at all. It is a decision to hold onto hope in the moments when he cannot sense God’s presence at all, when the fear is not that the connection is weak but that it might be gone.
So here is the question I would leave with you this week. Whatever silence or distance you’re facing this season, are you waiting for it to lift before you strengthen yourself, or are you willing to strengthen yourself first, before you feel anything at all? David suggests the second order. The hope comes from the decision, not from evidence that God is close.
“Hope to the Lord. Strengthen yourself and He will give you courage, and hope to the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14)
Want to go deeper into Psalm 27? Bible Plus is Israel365’s video Bible study platform, where you can explore the Psalms verse by verse alongside a growing library of teachings on the Hebrew Bible. Come study Psalm 27 with us, and discover the rest of what Bible Plus has to offer.
