What is Rosh Hashanah?

A day of repentance? Perhaps, but is that role not also filled by Yom Kippur — the day of atonement?

The start of a new year? True in a literal sense — but how do the commandments of the day, the prayers, the blasts of the shofar, connect to a new year?

The Chasidic masters teach, that Creation can not continue without desire. It is the desire that G-d has to create a world, to make a place where the essence of the Creator can be felt and revealed in the most mundane settings, that allows the world to continue to exist.

It is our expression of desire in G-d that in return arouses in G-d a desire in us.

But how do we express this desire? Not through words, though we pray with heartfelt words. Not with song, though we may sing.

Rather, we turn to the Shofar, the most primitive of instruments, to express the most primal of sounds.

The Baal Shem Tov compared the call of the shofar to the primal scream within each and every one of us.

We can not find the words to express the essence of our souls, the essence of our being. Like a son in pain calling out to his father, the complexity of thought and intricacies of complex ideas no longer matter. It is the raw unvarnished voice, unshackled and unfettered, that the father hears.

Using emoji for those two days I noticed something. Perhaps a call back to far older ways of expressing thought, emoji were a poor tool in expressing complex ideas. It’s hard to debate anyone with emoji.

What they were good for was showing simple ideas — emotions, needs and objects — all abstracted to their most basic parts. They are the digital, if inane, analog of the shofar. Pure, raw, uncomplicated by words or complexity, yet utterly complex in their ability to show a share emotion and thought.

The call of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is that primordial scream, the eternal voiceless call of the soul expressing its desire to return to its Creator.

“I am a Jew. I am here,” it sayd. “I don’t want to hide or conceal my essence any more.”

Later we can find words for that call, but now all I can do is cry out — and then the king, our father, will come to us. We will be united and renewed for a year of sweetness and blessings.