Tuesday, March 31, 2026
The Sound That Cannot Be Named: Shofar Blasts, Sukkah Walls, and the Architecture of Uncertainty
Shofar, Sukkah, vLulav 3-5|Sefer Zemanim
Hook
The Forgotten Sound
There is something extraordinary buried in the opening lines of the Rambam's third chapter on shofar. He tells us that over the course of the centuries, through the many exiles, something has been lost. We no longer know what the teru'ah actually sounds like. Is it the short staccato cry of women weeping? Is it the long shuddering sigh of a person overwhelmed by grief? Or is it both—the sigh collapsing into the sob, the way it happens in life when you don't know whether you're breaking down or barely holding together?
The Rambam doesn't choose. He says: do all of them. Sound every possible version. Cover every interpretation. Because we have forgotten.
Think about that for a moment. The most precise legal mind in Jewish history—a man who codified the entirety of the Oral Torah into clean, crystalline categories—begins his discussion of the shofar by admitting that the tradition itself has a hole in it. That something was lost in exile. That we are, in the most literal sense, guessing.
The Halacha
Chapter 3: Sounding the Unknown
The Torah requires nine shofar blasts on Rosh Hashanah. The word teru'ah appears three times, and each teru'ah must be flanked by a simple blast—a teki'ah—on either side. Three sets of three. Nine total. That much is clear.
But the teru'ah itself is the mystery. The Rambam explains that the doubt has generated three possible sounds: the shevarim, three medium groans; the teru'ah proper, nine or more rapid staccato beats; and a combination of both, the shevarim-teru'ah, the groan dissolving into weeping. Since we cannot know which one the Torah intended, we perform all three. What should have been nine blasts becomes thirty. The uncertainty multiplied our obligation.
The Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, taught in the Tanya that the shofar blast corresponds to a cry from the deepest part of the soul—a place beyond articulation. The conscious mind cannot name it. Language cannot contain it. The fact that we have forgotten what it sounds like is not a failure of transmission. It is the sound itself refusing to be captured. A cry from the essence of a person does not hold still long enough to be catalogued.
The Rambam then moves into the Mussaf service structure, and here the precision returns. Three blessings—Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot—each containing ten verses from Scripture. Each set of ten must include verses from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. Each must end with a verse from the Torah. The shofar is sounded after each blessing. The structure is meticulous, exacting, almost architectural.
And yet the whole thing rests on a foundation of not-knowing. The very sound that triggers the entire liturgical structure is the one sound we are not sure about. The Rambam builds an entire cathedral of law on top of a question mark.
Chapter 4: The Walls That Aren't There
From the shofar we move to the sukkah, and the same pattern appears—only now the uncertainty is structural rather than sonic.
The Rambam lays out the measurements: no shorter than ten handbreadths, no taller than twenty cubits, no smaller than seven by seven handbreadths. These are precise, rigid, non-negotiable. A sukkah one fraction below ten handbreadths is invalid. A sukkah one fraction above twenty cubits is invalid. The law draws hard lines.
But then comes the astonishing legal fiction. A sukkah needs three walls—but it doesn't really need three walls. Two complete walls arranged in an L shape, plus a third wall that is barely more than a handbreadth wide and placed within three handbreadths of one of the existing walls—that counts. The law treats that sliver of wall as if it were a full wall. You also need "the likeness of an entrance," a symbolic doorway made from a pole across the top of the opening. A doorway that is not a doorway. A wall that is not a wall.
The Rambam continues with even more daring fictions. If you build a sukkah on top of a building, the existing walls of the building below can be considered to extend upward to meet the s'chach. If you implant four poles at the corners of a roof and lay s'chach on them, the walls of the building below are considered to "ascend" and complete the enclosure. This is called gud asik—the legal principle that walls can be imagined upward.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that every physical structure in Torah corresponds to a structure in the soul. A wall represents a boundary of identity, a limit of self. The sukkah asks you to sit inside a structure that is barely there—walls that aren't complete, a roof you can see through, an enclosure that doesn't fully enclose. You are surrounded and exposed at the same time.
The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, explained in Likkutei Sichos that the sukkah represents the makifim—the encompassing lights of the divine that surround a person but cannot be internalized. You sit inside them. You don't understand them. You don't absorb them. They surround you with a presence that your intellect cannot grasp, the way a wall that isn't there still somehow makes a room.
Chapter 5: What Grows and What Lets Go
The s'chach—the roofing of the sukkah—has its own elegant logic. It must grow from the ground, must be detached from the ground, and must not be susceptible to ritual impurity. These three conditions form a kind of philosophical statement about what can serve as a covering for a human being.
Something that grows from the ground: the covering must come from life, from the organic world, from things that once participated in growth. Not metal, not plastic, not anything manufactured beyond recognition of its origins. Something that has been detached: you cannot use a living tree as your roof. The covering must have been separated from its source. It must have undergone a kind of death, a severing, before it can shelter you. And something that is not susceptible to impurity: it cannot be a vessel, a tool, something that has been shaped by human intention into an object with a function.
The Rambam is drawing a portrait of what shelter actually means. True shelter is something alive that has let go of its source. Something natural that has not been turned into an instrument. Something organic that remains in a state of simplicity. The moment you turn the branch into a board, the moment you shape the reed into a mat with a rim, it becomes susceptible to impurity and can no longer serve as your sky.
The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, taught that s'chach represents faith. Faith is not something you manufacture. It grows from the ground of experience, it must be detached from certainty, and it cannot be turned into a tool. The moment you try to use faith as an instrument—to get something, to prove something, to win something—it loses its capacity to shelter you. It must remain in its natural state: a branch, a leaf, a palm frond. Broken from the tree but still remembering the sun.
The Rambam adds a remarkable detail: a sukkah made for any purpose whatsoever is valid, as long as it was made for shade. Even a sukkah built for animals. Even a sukkah built by a non-Jew. The intention doesn't need to be sacred. It just needs to be about shelter. But a sukkah that came about on its own—branches that fell and happened to create a covering—is invalid, because no one intended it to be shade. Purpose is the minimum. Not holiness, not piety, not devotion. Just the bare human act of deciding: this will be a shelter.
The shofar's sound was forgotten, so we sound them all. The sukkah's walls are incomplete, so we imagine them whole. The s'chach must come from life and let go of its source. At every turn, the Rambam is teaching us that the sacred is built not from certainty but from the willingness to live inside what we do not fully understand.
The Unifying Principle
Uncertainty as Architecture
These three chapters share a startling common thread: each one builds something sacred out of something incomplete.
The shofar service is built on a forgotten sound. We don't know what the Torah meant by teru'ah, so we sound every possibility—and in doing so, we produce something richer and more complex than any single interpretation could have been. The sukkah is built with walls that aren't fully there. Legal fictions extend imaginary walls upward, treat slivers of partition as complete enclosures, and ask us to sit inside a structure that is more suggestion than certainty. The s'chach is built from things that have been severed from their source—alive once, now detached, sheltering precisely because they are no longer growing.
Maimonides is not embarrassed by any of this. He doesn't apologize for the doubt about the shofar sound. He doesn't lament the legal fictions of the sukkah walls. He presents them as law—as reality—because in the Rambam's world, the structure of holiness is not built from knowing. It is built from responding to not-knowing with care, precision, and commitment.
The Tzemach Tzedek wrote in Derech Mitzvosecha that the sukkah and the shofar share a common root in the sefirah of Binah, the divine attribute of understanding. But Binah is not certainty. It is the capacity to hold a question long enough for it to become a dwelling place. The shofar's cry is a question the soul asks and cannot answer. The sukkah is a home built from the willingness to be exposed. The s'chach is a sky made from letting go.
Modern Applications
Living Inside the Question
We live in an age that worships certainty. Every question must have an answer. Every problem must have a solution. Every space must be fully enclosed, climate-controlled, insured. We want walls that are walls and sounds that are named and coverings that are engineered.
The Rambam offers a radical alternative. He says: the holiest sound you will hear this year is one whose meaning has been lost. The holiest space you will sit in is one whose walls barely exist. The holiest covering above your head is a bunch of branches that still have gaps where the stars show through.
This is not a failure of the system. This is the system. Holiness is not built from resolution. It is built from the willingness to sit inside the unresolved—to blow the shofar even though you're not sure which cry the Torah meant, to sit in a sukkah whose walls are legal fictions, to look up through s'chach that was once alive and is now giving you shade precisely because it let go.
Maybe that's what the Rambam has been trying to teach us all along. Not that the law removes uncertainty, but that the law teaches you how to inhabit uncertainty. How to build it into a structure. How to sound it like a horn. How to sit under it like a roof that lets the rain in but still, somehow, impossibly, counts as home.