Shanah tovah u-metukah, a good and sweet new year 5768, from the pulpit, and from the Ronald house to your house; we welcome everyone here to the Sanctuary of Beth Israel Congregation .

As we have done since time immemorial, Jews assemble in the synagogue to listen to the haunting sounds of the shofar, in response to the mandate of the Torah of Moses, as read by the Sages of the Talmud. Our gathering this evening anticipates tomorrow morning’s concert of a solo horn. Although we may constitute but a hundred or so souls in this sacred space, each of us is a living link in tradition’s chain, which stretches beyond the horizon of memory to Mt. Sinai, where, we are taught, the people Israel actually “saw the sounds” of the shofar. (Ex. 19:19; 20:15)

Ladies and gentlemen, congregants and guests, my burden this rosh hashanah evening is to share with all of you the message of this yom hadin, this Day of Judgment, as we prepare to fulfill the positive command to hear the voice of the ram’s horn. And, as we do so, I would urge all of us in the Sanctuary to meditate on the meaning of living as a kehillah kedoshah, a sacred Jewish community in the midst of a much larger culture and a dominant, but alien, religious tradition. The purpose of my talk this New Year’s eve is to affirm the abiding value of an organic Jewish congregation thriving here in the Pee Dee during this High Holy Day Season of 2007.

As an enduring religious community, our people has listened for — and to — the ram’s horn in a wide variety of places and climes. We happen to live in the rural American South during what has been called the “Digital Age”. Driving by cotton fields or past abandoned wooden barns and farm houses, we can simultaneously listen to and watch spacecraft loft into the stratosphere from our car DVD players. Strolling around our neighborhoods, we can conduct extended conversations over cellular phones or listen to avant-garde music on MP-3 players.

This exponential explosion of sonic permutations lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, yom ha-din, the day of “din,” of noise. With its cacophony of voices, music and traffic, what must this planet sound like up in heaven? The ear of the Almighty must be full indeed---and not simply with prayers.

Yet the sounds which we Jews try to make in the Divine Presence are not merely noise; what we utter in words or blast on the shofar is not simply a racket made in God’s neighborhood, more than simply a distraction in order to snag the Eternal’s attention. To be attentive to certain sounds, to favor a particular set of tropes, is a discipline found at the heart of our prayer book and a faculty located at the very center of Jewish tradition: shema yisrael. “Hear! O, Israel!” The auditory enjoys a decided advantage over the optical in Hebrew liturgy.

Tomorrow, during the main event of the shofar service, we will recite a blessing — not to blow the ram’s horn — rather lish’mo’a kol shofar, “to hear the sound of the ram’s horn.”

As the fall of night ushers us out of the Sanctuary, I hope that everyone present this evening will leave with a renewed sense of the ties which bind us one to the other, joined together by what Lincoln termed “the mystic chords of memory”. The shofar’s resonant blast remains what it signified for our ancestors in the biblical times: a tribal muster summoning every Jew to a sacred encounter with God, Torah, Israel and Zion. When we listen with kavanah, with full intention to the teki’a, shevarim and teru’a, [the three blasts of the shofar] we will hear that the signal has at last overcome the noise.