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Ben Hartmann is a graduating senior who wrote the following reflections of this past Rosh Hashanah for his college entrance essay.
 

“Adonai, s’fatai tiftach, ufi yagid t’hilatecha.” This is an opening prayer, one I’ve heard many times before, yet as light can hit across a raindrop in different ways, words can either glance off a person or pierce their heart.

For the longest time, when I looked at myself, I saw Ben Hartmann; a piano player, a math lover, a runner, a Jew. I never really gave it thought, It’s just how I was born; my own genesis was infused with Judaism. Just as people are born with blue eyes, I was born with my sfatayim, my lips, singing God’s praise. I was raised a Reform Jew, standing in a synagogue of mitzvah. When I went to Sunday School, my teacher would pass around a cup for tzedaka (charity). I didn’t think about it, it was part of Sunday School, I never realized just how fundamentally profound an act this was.

At this point, I had gone through my fair share of services (my mother had to force me to get into suits), and I’d heard the shofar. Tekiah: the horn blasted. T’ruah, the horn blasted. I sat and watched. Rosh Hashanah represents the coming of a new year, but I was a child. To me, the words Rosh Hashanah meant apples and honey, getting in a suit for synagogue, listening to prayers of song, songs of prayers, and the shofar. When the shofar is blasted, there is silence. Time has frozen on the verge of years, on the verge of change.

During Rosh Hashanah services this year, I was able to go in person, as the pandemic had waned to allow. I knew coming in that this year was different from so many other years, I was looking for something.

Recently, I had decided on my own that I didn’t believe in God. My sfatayim were to say my own words, and yet I still felt apprehensive, which I allocated to not wanting to disappoint my father. His genuine love for both the religion and me both did not go unnoticed by me, after all. I needed to prove who I was, to both God and me. It had been over a year since I had stepped into this synagogue. For the High Holidays, my Temple sets up a large metal statue behind the bimah, an abstract, mangled, serene shape. I never knew what it was supposed to be, but when I looked up, I recognized a single shape: an eye. After our prayer, T’filah started, and soon later, the time for the shofar came. I could talk for hours about the mangled mess of abstractions that were going through my mind through the songs, my ire, my guilt, my joy, my sorrow, but then the Shofar blew its cry. Tekiah. I was a kid again. T’ruah. I looked at the eye in the middle of the metal sculpture and I saw nothing. But then I looked around at the people gathered here. This is what I had come to face, I was scared of losing this. I was a kid again. I was scared to not exist here anymore, in this Temple for a God I didn’t believe in, but just as God makes his home in the lips of his people, I had long since made my home in this Synagogue.

In the end, I don’t think God exists, but I hope he heard the blast of the Shofar that day.