The 50th year, this week’s parsha teaches, is the holiest year. Every seven years, farmland lays fallow, debts are repaid, and things shift back to their original owners. But after seven cycles of that, the 50th year, the yovel (or Jubilee) year, is one that we are meant to mark as holy. It’s a total reset of land and slaves and money. But maybe, it’s also asking us to do our own spiritual reset.
And the Torah describes that on Yom Kippur of that year, the shofar is blown. All throughout the land, the Torah reiterates, the shofar is blown on Yom Kippur. On any other Yom Kippur, we don’t blow the shofar (except at the very end of Neilah). So there’s something here about the sound of the shofar that connects to the intense holiness of the day. The particular sound of the shofar pierces us, allowing for the reset that the yovel year asks us to make.
In the book that we are currently studying in our Lunch and Learn group (God is Here, by Toba Spitzer), this week we just read about the way that sound connects us to and can be a metaphor for God. Sound is sensory and made up of vibrations; sound hits each of us differently just like holiness does and just like God does. Intense sounds are also full experiences, like singing with a group of people, being at a concert, or listening to a thunderstorm. Sounds move through us and move us, scare us, inspire us.
I don’t always know what the sounds of holiness are. But perhaps the shofar, this primal, deep calling out, in that holiest year, the yovel, is a reminder to us that there are sounds of holiness. It’s a reminder that we need to listen for the sounds, and if we don’t attune ourselves to them, we will not hear them in those other 49 years. The sound of the shofar is meant to invite us to reevaluate the way that we connect, or to think about if we connect. Just like on Rosh Hashanah the shofar is likened to an alarm clock for repentance, maybe the shofar during the yovel year is an alarm clock for holiness.
The sounds of God or the sounds of spirituality will be different for each of us. And hopefully, we don’t have to wait for the 50th year. May we each hear the sounds of God, in whatever year we hear them. And may we each listen, knowing that those sounds are always there.
