By Rabbi Steve Wernick:
This Sunday morning, I will stand in the pulpit of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church and do something I rarely get to do: tell a room of Christian neighbors the Akedah—Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, the ram caught by its horns, the midrash of angels’ tears falling on a boy’s closed eyes—and watch a story most of you could recite in your sleep land on them as something entirely new. Somewhere near the end, I’ll lift my shofar and blow it inside a church. For 60 seconds, 400 people will turn to each other and try to name what they felt.
I’ve been thinking about that moment before it’s even happened, because this Shabbat we open a new parashah, Shoftim.
The Parashah opens with a command:
שֹׁפְטִים וְשֹׁטְרִים תִּתֶּן־לְךָ בְּכָל־שְׁעָרֶיךָ “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourself, in all your gates.” (Deuteronomy 16:18)
The plain sense: appoint a judiciary, city by city. But the Hasidic masters read “your gates” as something closer to home—the gates of your own body, the openings through which the world gets in: your eyes, your ears, your mouth. Before you can judge a case, appoint a judge over yourself. Before Rosh Hashanah asks you to stand in judgment, Elul asks you to become one.
That is exactly the turn from Akedah to Elul I plan to make on Sunday. Yitzhak’s question on the mountain—ayeh haseh, “where is the lamb?”—is not so different from the ones I’m asking that congregation to sit with: who have I been this year, who am I holding at arm’s length, who do I need to say hineni to before the gates close. Shoftim and shofar share more than a sound in English ears. Both are a summons to account. One appoints the judge; the other blows the alarm that court is now in session.
There’s a detail in the parashah that I love: the law of the eglah arufah, the heifer whose neck is broken when a body is found near a town and no one knows who is responsible. The elders of the nearest town wash their hands over the heifer and declare, “Our hands did not shed this blood.” It’s a strange ritual, but its logic is very Elul: sometimes we are not directly guilty, and we are still responsible. The town has to reckon with what happened at its gates, even without a confession.
That is what Elul is for. Not proving guilt—reckoning with what happened at our gates this year: what we let in, what we let go unanswered, who we failed to defend, whose tears we never let ourselves receive.
On Sunday, a room full of Christians will blow a ram’s horn with me and sit, for a moment, in that reckoning. Rev. Byassee and I share the conviction that the questions the shofar asks don’t check anyone’s papers at the door—you don’t need to be Jewish to hear them, only human.
This Shabbat, standing at our own gates, it’s our turn.
Shabbat Shalom.