More than an Echo: Rosh Hashanah 5787

 This piece was first published on Thursday 10 September 2026 in the Hanassi Highlights. You can also read it in Hebrew here, thanks to ChatGPT.

Rosh Hashana is known in the Torah as Yom HaZikaron—the day of Remembrance. We speak of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. We recall the Akeidah. In Zichronot we ask Hashem to remember the covenant with our ancestors. Even the shofar itself recalls the ram offered by Avraham in place of Yitzchak. Yet the question can be asked: why does memory play such a central role on the day of judgement? We stand before Hashem and ask to be inscribed for another year of life. Why, at precisely that moment, do we spend so much time recalling the past and remembering those who lived thousands of years ago? Surely the question ought to be about us: Who are we? What have we done? What kind of year have we lived? 

Perhaps the answer is alluded to in a fascinating halacha concerning the shofar. The Mishna teaches that השומע קול הברה לא יצא—one who hears merely an echo of the shofar has not fulfilled the mitzvah. It is not enough to hear a distant reverberation of a sound that originated somewhere else. We must hear the voice of the shofar itself.

Illustration: 'Sounding the Shofar in Jerusalem' by Alex Levin

Maybe when it comes to the memory of our ancestors, the same lesson can be applied. The merit of our ancestors cannot simply be an echo from the distant past. We cannot stand before Hashem and rely solely upon the greatness of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov while remaining unchanged by the values for which they lived. Their merit becomes our merit when their voice continues to live through us.

That is the challenge of Jewish memory. We do not remember simply to preserve the past; we remember in order to shape the present. Avraham’s chessed, Yitzchak’s gevurah, Yaakov’s truth: these are not merely stories about our ancestors. They are part of the inheritance they entrusted to us.

Rosh Hashana therefore asks us not only what we remember, but what we will continue. Which values received from generations before us will find expression in our homes? What will our children and grandchildren see us prioritise? What kind of Jewish life are we building for those who come after us?

The shofar cuts through the noise and asks us to listen. Not to an echo, but to a living voice—one that has travelled through generations and has now reached us. Our task is always to ensure that it does not stop here.

Shabbat Shalom and Ketiva veChatima Tova!

The Ultimate Selfie

The following piece, written by Rabbi Wein zt'l in 2014, is as relevant now as it was on the day it was written.

The Torah emphasizes hat the day of Rosh Hashanah is a day of remembrance and of memory. Heaven can recall everything and everyone; human beings, less so. Human memory is selective, arbitrary and—many if not most times—faulty and inaccurate. 

People have often told me that they heard me say such-and-such in a public lecture and I have no recollection whatsoever of having ever publicly said something so inane. My memory is often faulty and betrays me when I need it. But the hearing of my listeners is often also impaired. People tend to hear whatever they wish to hear, even if the speaker never really said those words. 

All of this is part of our human condition, our frailties and our mortal nature. And it is a great and truly awesome (how I despise that word as it is used in current society!) experience on Rosh Hashanah to encounter Heaven’s perfect memory and faculty of total recall. 

It is not only that all our actions and words, thoughts and intentions are remembered and judged, but it is that they are remembered objectively and truthfully without personal prejudice or bias. That makes Rosh Hashanah the “Day of Remembrance.” There are people who are blessed with great powers of memory. But even they are fallible. Maimonides, one of the great geniuses of memory of all time, admitted that once he could not at first recall the source in the Talmud that would justify a decision that he rendered in his monumental work, his Mishneh Torah. If he could forget, then who will not also forget?! Only Heaven is not burdened with forgetfulness. 

This leads us to a basic question regarding our memories: what do we choose to remember and what do we sublimate and choose to forget? The Torah instructs us over and over again not to forget the basic principles of Jewish life:  God and the Torah revelation at Sinai, the exodus from Egypt, the sins of slander and gossip, the sanctity of the Sabbath, the continuing enmity of Amalek and much of the non-Jewish world towards the people of Israel, and finally the tendency of the Jews from the time of the Sinai desert till today to anger God by backsliding on obligations and covenantal undertakings. 

We have chosen to remember other less important things in life—foolish statements and imagined slights, unimportant statistics and false opinions, our jealousy of others and their achievements—while at the same time consigning the basic memories that should guide our lives to the dustbin of oblivion. 

Rosh Hashanah demands an accounting of our memory and our forgetfulness. The prophet long ago proclaimed that Israel was unfaithful because “I (God) was forgotten.” It is only forgetting that begets the ignorance of one’s heritage, faith and self. And it is that very ignorance that creates the climate of sin and assimilation, secularism and violence, greed and avarice that threatens our very existence as a people and a state. Woe to those who no longer remember for, without awareness of their past, their future is doomed! 

On Rosh Hashanah we read in the exalted prayers of the day that there exists, so to speak, a book of remembrances in Heaven—of memory. And in that book, each and every one of us has a page dedicated to our activities and behavior in our life on this earth. Not only that, but our signature and seal appears on that page, attesting to the veracity of what is written there. That page reminds us of what we have forgotten, and whether we willed that forgetfulness or otherwise. 

Eventually, after we have departed from this earth, our true and accurate powers of memory are restored to our souls. And, as the prayer records for us, the page literally speaks for itself, announcing the events and occurrences listed. So the ultimate day of judgment, just as the Rosh Hashanah day of judgment here on earth, is the day of memory and recollection. 

Remembering is the true catalyst for repentance and self-improvement. To put it into the current common vernacular, Rosh Hashanah should serve as one’s ultimate “selfie.” For that attitude of self-appearance is reflective of our fascination to remember and to know ourselves deeply and truly. On the day that everything is remembered in Heaven, we on earth should also strive to remember our past actions, attitudes and behavior.