Religious Committee

by Baal Tefillah Marc Lamb

What is with the month of Elul and the shofar? I understand blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah we have always done that— but why do we blow it throughout Elul? And for that matter, where did blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah come from anyway? 

I can already hear the answer: “It’s in the Torah!” But is it?

Fun fact: the Torah never tells us to blow the shofar in Elul — and it never explicitly tells us to blow it on Rosh Hashanah either. Really??? 

What is going on here?

Let’s look at the text. The Bible  gives us one word to describe Rosh Hashanah: teruah. “It shall be a day of teruah.” (Numbers 29:1)

But what exactly is teruah? And how do you have a day of it? 

In biblical Hebrew, teruah is an emotional outcry — a cry of alarm, joy, or distress. So “Day of Teruah” could literally mean a day of crying or shouting. In fact, the Karaites — who rejected Rabbinic interpretation — used to wail and cry in their synagogues instead of blowing a shofar. Their Rosh Hashanah must have sounded more like a revival meeting than anything we are used to. 

OK.. so then where did the Rabbis find shofar connected to the word  teruah?

In Leviticus 25:9, the Torah gives us the clearest link: “You shall sound the shofar of teruah on the tenth day of the seventh month…”This is the blast that announces the Jubilee year. Here, teruah is explicitly a shofar sound — a broken, crying blast that imitates a human wail.

Add to that an ancient mesorah, a longstanding tradition,  that the ram’s horn is blown on Rosh Hashanah, and the Rabbis had their foundation for tying shofar to Rosh Hashanah. 

But the Torah never defines the exact sound of teruah, so the Rabbis had to interpret it. They asked: What kind of “cry” is the shofar supposed to imitate? This led to three possibilities:

• Shevarim — three medium, sighing      cries
• Teruah — nine short, staccato      sobs
• Tekiah — a long, steady blast 

Since the Torah is ambiguous, the Rabbis instituted all three patterns to cover every possibility. That is why we blow 30 blasts — each pattern repeated three times.

Later, the Zohar added a mystical Kabbalistic layer: even if we knew exactly what teruah meant, we would still blow all three types because each serves a different spiritual purpose.

So now that we’ve found the shofar’s source in the Torah, what about Elul?

Here’s the hint: פסל לך  In Parsha Ki Tisa- it says  “Carve for yourself.”

After the sin of the Golden Calf, Moses ascended Mount Sinai a second time to carve new tablets. The Midrash teaches that this ascent began on Rosh Chodesh Elul and lasted forty days, ending on Yom Kippur, when God forgave Israel.

The Rabbis saw this as the template for our own spiritual journey. Just as Moses climbed the mountain to repair a broken relationship with God, we spend Elul climbing toward the Days of Awe to repair our own.

And because Moses’s ascent was a time of awakening and return, the Rabbis instituted the custom of blowing the shofar throughout Elul. When we hear the shofar, we are meant to hear a message: Wake up.! Begin the climb! Prepare your heart for forgiveness.

As we move closer to the High Holidays, may the shofar’s call remind us that repentance  is a journey — and like Moses’s climb, it leads us toward awareness, renewal, and the hope of a new year.