Shofar sounds knock down walls.  

 

Don’t believe me?  It says is right there in the book of Joshua.  And you are right, if you are already remarking that we don’t take this stuff literally.  We don’t.  It’s not literal, its figurative.  It’s not prose, it’s poetry.  It’s not history, its spirituality.  

 

Traditionally, we begin sampling the Shofar sounds each day of Elul to prepare ourselves from the full assault of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah.  We begin to sample and get ready, because – as I already stated – Shofar sounds knock down walls.  And knocking down walls is messy, dangerous and removes the barrier between what is on each side of that wall.  Walls are not bad, we benefit from them.   The boundaries they create offer us the safety and protection we need to function and live our lives.  Eventually, we find that in order to live our lives most fully, there are some walls that need to come down.  Elul (and the corresponding Shofar sounds) announce to us that it is time to get ready for some spiritual demo on our ‘inner’ walls.  

 

So, we start to ask ourselves …What is on the other side of your walls?  Which walls do you want to come down?  What walls you want to stay intact?  What walls have already started to been damaged and in spite of what you want, need to come down?   How do you get ready for the mess that comes with these kinds of demos?