The Key to Opening the Gates
In a teaching by the Ramban, Nachmanides, the shofar is not the alarm clock of Maimonides. It is not meant to startle or to scare; the call to teshuvah, the call to repentance, the call to enter the High Holy Days is an intimate invitation. Reflecting on the Torah reading before Rosh HaShanah, the same one Reform Jews will read on Yom Kippur, Nachmanides wonders what the word nitzavim means; Ramban teaches that it means that “You stand and are invited before God to stand in God’s covenant.” It is physical and metaphysical, personal and communal.
Throughout the holy days, we repeat a verse from Psalms, so redolent of this time and experience Pitchu li, sha’arei tzedek—open for me the gates of righteousness, and I will enter them, thanking God. Open for me—an asking, a plea. An invitation from us to God; these days then become God’s invitation back to us.
The gates, of course, are a unifying image of the Yamim Noraim, the High Holy Days. Gates of prayer, gates of repentance, gates of righteousness all open—and remain open through Neilah, the final service of the 10 days. We beg God to open them; perhaps God begs us to walk through.
My colleague, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, writes the following:
Instead—and here I refer back to these beautiful words of the Ramban—we need to sense that we are invited by the Holy Blessed One into something big and deep and mysterious, something that requires time, something that requires presence. That’s what today means. God needs us to be present in order for God to be present. If we are absent, God will be absent too. But if all of us bring ourselves, our full selves, to our experience, and if we open ourselves to listen and allow ourselves to be moved, we may yet hear the still small voice.
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