Walking Tours of Jerusalem bulletin 90 Sat. 4th Oct 08

Shalom everyone,

Judaism regards New Year as the time when God created the universe. The festival is celebrated by blowing 100 blasts on the ram's horn. According to Maimonides the purpose of this blowing is to call human beings to repent (Laws of repentance 3:4)

In order to find out the purpose of repentance we need to go back to the story of creation to find out how the blowing of the ram's horn and repentance are connected to creation and the prayers on the New Year.

Obviously at the time of creation human beings were intended to live in the Garden of Eden.

As long as human beings didn't sin they could live in the Garden of Eden without a care, completely protected by God; men didn't labor for their food and any thing else they possessed and women never suffered the pangs of giving birth..

Man chose to have the ability to sin by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. By making this choice he became the arbiter of good and evil. In this way he would be responsible to decide the fate of the world; he could protect it if he wanted by doing good and he could destroy it if he wanted by doing evil and the choice would be completely in his own hands.

The sin which caused human beings to be expelled from the Garden of Eden was the sin of usurping God's task of protecting the earth. .

Despite his sin, however, of acquiring the ability to do evil, man yearned to return to the Garden of Eden, the time when he could do only good and God's blessings showered on him continuously.

It must have been clear to him that if he had the ability to sin he also had the ability to repent his sin; if sin meant expulsion from the Garden of Eden then surely repentance meant return to the garden?

Every time a person repented he virtually returned to the Garden of Eden, but human beings are natural sinners, so life is a continuous process of going in and out of the Garden of Eden.

As long as we repent there's no limit to the number of times we can virtually enter the Garden. We just can't achieve permanence there because no human being can be so perfect that he continuously does good and never sins.

Remember that the angels guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden use a double edged sword which really means they had a turnstile gate, which revolves continuously meaning that a person goes in and immediately goes out again.

Part of man's punishment was that he would eat his bread by the sweat of his brow so it's only natural that the way to achieve repentance and go back into the garden is by making a sacrifice of something which is the fruit of a person's own labor, not the fruit of somebody else's labor or something which God had provided as was the case with Cane.

Abel had labored to produce the animal which he sacrificed. Cane had simply taken from whatever was available which he hadn't labored to produce.

God's acceptance of Abel's sacrifice of the labor of his own hands had momentarily brought him back to that wonderful time in the Garden of Eden.

Obviously there's a limit to what constitutes the labor of one's own hands. This limit is demonstrated in the story of Abraham where God provides the offering, the ram in the thicket, which wasn't the fruit of Abraham's labor, instead of a sacrifice of his own son, who was the fruit of his labor and Sara's travail. This story, where God provides the sacrifice, shows the limit of what a human being may sacrifice. Sacrificing a person's own flesh and blood was going beyond the requirement of sacrificing an object of one's own labor.

Father Abraham is the archetype of all human beings who want to return to the Garden of Eden. Like father Abraham people are so desperate to return even momentarily to the Garden of Eden that they are ready to sacrifice the most precious object of our labor, their own flesh and blood.

The two concepts, repentance and sacrifice are clearly connected; each has the same effect of returning the human being to the Garden of Eden. Since sin is such a continuous characteristic of human beings it was necessary to make continuous sacrifices as it is necessary to always repent.

This is the reason why, eventually the temple was built on Mt. Moriah, the same mountain where Abraham had sacrificed the ram in the thicket.

The temple became the place of continuous, universal sacrifice. Priests made sacrifices at least three times daily and, as a result God's protecting holiness showered down on all mankind as it did before human beings were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It was a place where human beings could come whenever they wanted to return to the Garden of Eden.

The daily priestly sacrifices were times of holiness. The festivals when human beings visited the temple became interludes of holiness in an otherwise mundane, secular world of hard labor and suffering. As long as the temple stood and the priests performed sacrifices God protected the world from destruction.

Judaism sees human beings as responsible for God's continued protection. That responsibility is carried out by behaving morally, in other words observing the laws of the Torah. Sacrifice forms an important part of these laws and plays a role in the task of maintaining the existence of the world.

R. Abbahu in the (Talmudic tractate Rosh Hashana page16a) considered that a shofar of ram's horn was used on Rosh ha-Shanah because it called to mind the of Isaac (Gen. 22:13) when father Abraham sacrificed a ram instead of his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah.

In other words the blowing of the shofar is to remind us that sacrifice is the way to repent, but since the destruction of the temple sacrifice is forbidden in Judaism and the rabbis ordered that prayer will take the place of sacrifice.

Without the temple Judaism saw that it was vitally necessary to find a new way, instead of sacrifices, to ensure the continuity of God's blessings. The situation of the world without the temple was precarious.

Without the temple and without sacrifices the Jews saw danger of the imminent destruction of the universe. Without blessings, brought down by sacrifices, the world was without protection. This was an intolerable situation.

The new way was prayer. The Jewish nation invented communal prayer; Just as there used to be 3 daily sacrifices in the temple they believed that after the destruction of the temple 3 daily communal prayers could take the place of sacrifice and as long as a Jew attended the daily communal prayers God's blessings would shower down on him as if he was still in the Garden of Eden.

Just as the priests made three daily sacrifices in the temple so every Jew is required to pray three times a day. A man is required to perform the daily prayers with a congregation of at least 10 members who are all over the age of 13.

Therefore blowing the ram's horn reminds us of the importance of prayer; it can bring the individual to repentance and virtually returns him, albeit momentarily, back to the Garden of Eden.

When we say that God answers prayer we mean that every time a person prays God sends His blessings down to earth as He did when human beings never sinned and lived under the continuous blessings of God that showered on them in the Garden of Eden.

Wishing you a great no news day and a New Year of continuous prayer and repentance.

Yours truly

Leon Gork