Who am I? What are the most important things in my life? What do I want to be remembered for? If, as a purely hypothetical exercise, I were to imagine reading my own obituary, what would I want it to say? These are the questions Rosh Hashanah urges us to ask ourselves. As we pray to G-d to write us in the book of life, G-d asks us what we intend to do with this, His most precious gift. How do we use our time?
The shofar of Rosh Hashanah reminds us of many things. It recalls the binding of Isaac, when G-d told Abraham to stop and offer up, instead, a ram that had been caught by its horn in a bush. It reminds us of the Torah, given at Mount Sinai, when “the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the shofar grew louder and louder.” It was blown to mark the Jubilee, the 50th year, when freedom was proclaimed throughout the land.
The shofar was the sound of victory at Jericho. It was blown in celebration when King David brought the Ark to Jerusalem. Jeremiah calls it the sound of war. Amos called it the sound of danger: “When the shofar sounds in a city, do not the people tremble?” Joel called it the sound of the End of Days. One of the psalms we say on Friday night calls it the herald proclaiming the arrival of the King: “With trumpets and the blast of the shofar, shout for joy before the Lord, the King.”
Maimonides, though, calls the shofar of Rosh Hashanah a wake-up call. He says that without such a call, we can sleepwalk through life, caring about trivialities. The sound of the shofar wakes us up and makes us conscious of the fragility of life. Who knows how much time we have left? None of us will live forever. So how do we use our time?
Much recent research on happiness yields surprising conclusions. We can spend our days in pursuit of wealth, yet beyond a certain comfort zone where we do not have to worry, greater wealth is not correlated with higher levels of happiness. The status of a particular job has less to do with happiness than the fulfillment we receive from a job well done.
The sources of happiness lie all around us: our family, our friends, the work we do voluntarily, the sense we have of being part of a community, the feeling we have that we are part of something worthwhile. A whole series of medical research projects has shown that faith, prayer and regular attendance at a house of worship actually have an effect on health and life expectancy. Not always, for surely we all know of deeply spiritual people who die tragically young. But for the most part, faith gives us an anchor in the storm, a compass as we navigate the future, a shelter when we are buffeted by the winds of circumstance.
Often in the highly charged debates between atheists and religious believers, it seems as if all religion is, is a set of beliefs. It surely is, but that is not all it is. Judaism is a way of life, a code of conduct, a calendar. It shapes our experience of time into a kind of rhythm. Three times daily prayer, Shabbat, the festivals and the Days of Awe function like paragraph- and chapter-breaks in the story of our lives.