By Rabbi Joey Haber

The “highlight,” so-to-speak, of the Rosh Hashanah prayers is the sounding of the shofar. In all, 100 sounds are blown over the course of the prayer service on Rosh Hashanah.

What is the meaning and significance of this mitzvah, and what should we be thinking and feeling when we hear the shofar sound?

To introduce the answer, let’s consider an analogy to a very common situation: a mother comes home and sees a big mess in the house. She turns to her kids and asks them to spend a few minutes straightening up. She goes upstairs to change.

When she comes back down, she sees the exact same mess, and the kids sitting in the exact same places where they were beforehand. They completely ignored her request, as though she did not even exist. This simple scenario helps us understand the concept of teshuvah, repentance, which is what the shofar blowing is all about.

Whenever we sin, whenever we do something wrong, we are, in effect, ignoring Hashem. We’re acting as though Hashem is not here with us, as though He is not part of our lives. After all, if we made Him part of our lives, if we were aware of His presence, then we would never have dared to do something He told us not to do. So, each time we commit a sin, we are pushing Hashem out of our lives a little more.

Teshuvah is the desire to bring Hashem back into our lives. It is a fierce, desperate longing to restore that relationship, the feeling that we cannot live without Him, that we need Him with us.

This explains the Gemara’s famous teaching that when a person performs teshuvah sincerely, his sins are not just erased but transformed into merits. This is astonishing – our sins can become mitzvot if we perform teshuvah properly.

We actually receive reward for the sins! How does this work?

The answer is that when we perform teshuvah, the distance created by the sin makes us long for closeness with Hashem even more. We feel disconnected from Him, and this makes our yearning much stronger.

It thus turns out that the sin led to a strengthening of the person’s bond with Hashem, and so it is transformed into a mitzvah.

The sound of the shofar has no words. It is a cry from the innermost depths of our souls. We are crying out for closeness with Hashem. We are yearning for a stronger relationship. When we hear the shofar sound, we should be thinking about how much we want and need Hashem in our lives, and how much we regret driving Him out of our lives through our mistaken behavior. This isn’t about being sad; it’s about longing and yearning, a desperate feeling of needing someone whom we had pushed away. If we can experience this longing on Rosh Hashanah, then we will transform our misdeeds into great sources of merit, and, no less importantly, we will put ourselves in a position to make this coming year much better than the previous year, a year when we avoid many of the mistakes we’ve made in the past, and when we truly live with Hashem each and every day.