Hebrew Voices #146 – The Trumpet: Yom Teruah 2021

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Nehemia: Yehovah!

Keith: Welcome to Yom Teruah! I am Keith Johnson, with my dear friend Nehemia Gordon. But let’s get down to the bedrock of the matter; what is Yom Teruah? Come on, there’s got to be people asking that question, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah, for sure.

Keith: What is this word, teruah? Is it the same as Rosh Hashanah? Is it something different? We’re going to get to the bedrock. But before we do that…

Nehemia: So…

Keith: No! It’s not your turn just yet! Not yet! I want to stop; I want to stop. And I think you’ll appreciate this. The first time I ever had a chance to celebrate Yom Teruah, I was invited by Michael Rood to Albuquerque, New Mexico, along with Nehemia Gordon, and we were doing the Open Door Series. And in the same way how this kind of happened; it wasn’t planned in advance. “We’re going to do these three things.” We were literally dealing with, I think, the moving of the cloud; the cloud moved, and we moved with the cloud. And Michael said, “Hey, we’re going to go to New Mexico,” and we had an amazing time doing Yom Teruah. Do you remember that?

Nehemia: Absolutely. It was incredible.

Keith: We got a chance to share about what this is all about. And I’ll tell you something; I think as a result of opening the book and getting to the bedrock, we’re going to give an explanation for people that they will really appreciate. Can we start from the beginning?

Nehemia: Do you realise it’s been ten years, actually, since the Open Door Series?

Keith: No, no, no, no.

Nehemia: This is the tenth anniversary of the Open Door Series.

Keith: Are you kidding me?

Nehemia: No.

Keith: Ten years!

Nehemia: It was in 2011, and we’re now in 2021.

Keith: Wow, wow.

Nehemia: So, ten years. And guys, to this day Open Door Series is one of the most powerful teachings I've ever done. I think it's one of the most powerful you've ever done.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Eighteen-and-a-half hours of teaching we have. People can go and get the video and watch that online.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: It’s incredible stuff.

Keith: But let me just… I think we want to say this. We just want to say, Michael, I know that you're listening, you are an amazing matador of the movement, and the fact that you've invited us back to do this is humbling for us. We thank you and Anna Lil, and the entire A Rood Awakening crew. Let's get to the foundation here.

Nehemia: So, let's start with the… you know, when you do archaeology, you start with the top layer.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: And you have to peel that off.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: So, the top layer is, in Judaism today of the 21st century, most people know this holiday as Rosh Hashanah.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: Rosh Hashanah is Hebrew for "new year". And this goes back to the Mishnah, which says there's four new years in the Hebrew year. Most people say, “Four new years! We only just know about one year. What's the four?”

Keith: Yeah, right!

Nehemia: And they're for different things - there's a new year of the trees, there's new year for kings, there's a new year of the months. New years of the months is… we have the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or Passover, in the first month. In Leviticus 23 and Exodus 12 it says, “In the first month,” so no one disputes that the first of the months is the month in which you have The Feast of Unleavened Bread; that’s Passover. This feast, Rosh Hashanah, or as it's known in the Torah, Yom Teruah, is in the seventh month, the first day of the seventh month.

Now, you mentioned how you first celebrated this in a big public gathering 10 years ago, and you were telling me before, your first time was 19 years ago, when you first heard about Yom Teruah. Keith, I learned about Yom Teruah growing up. I mean for me; I always knew about it.

Keith: But wait…

Nehemia: But it was called Rosh Hashanah.

Keith: I was going to say, now did it say…

Nehemia: Now, we were taught that in the Torah it's called by two other names, Yom Teruah, and Zichron Teruah.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: Yom Teruah is the day of shouting, or the day of teruah, we’ll define teruah in a minute.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: And Zichron Teruah, we were told, is the commemoration of teruah, but it actually means something else that hopefully we’ll get to.

Keith: What do you mean hopefully?

Nehemia: Because zichron is more than that.

Keith: Let me say something! If you’ve been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, it takes us one hour to do one verse! It’s not going to be that way. We are going to get through… none of this, “Maybe we'll get to it.” No, we’re going to get to everything!

Nehemia: Well, I hope we do.

…and Zichron Teruah, so let's look at the passage, Leviticus 23 verses 23 to 25.

Keith: I love that passage.

Nehemia: “And Yehovah spoke to Moses saying: Speak to the children of Israel, saying: In the seventh month of the first day of the month, shall be for you a shabbaton,” a day of rest, “zichron teruah mikra kodesh.”

Zichron Teruah is a commemoration of Teruah, or actually, it means a mentioning Teruah. What is a mentioning Teruah? We’ll get back to that. “It's a holy convocation, no work should be done in it, you shall offer a fire offering to Yehovah.” That’s 23-25, and that's all it says.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then Numbers 29, verses 1 through 6, “In the seventh month, the first of the month shall be a holy convocation for you, no work shall be done in it. It shall be a day of teruah for you.” And then there's sacrifices that come with it, verses 2 through 6. People go read that; we're not going to go into it.

But you have these two references in the entire Tanakh for Yom Teruah, and we know very little about it. And it's kind of shocking because if you look at all the other feasts, all the other holy days, appointed times, we have three of what are called pilgrimage feasts. Three pilgrimage feasts, the Feast of Unleavened Bread – commonly known as Passover - the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, Shavuot, and the Feast of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths. So those are the three pilgrimage feasts, the days in which're commanded to come up to the Temple, or originally the Tabernacle, to appear before Yehovah.

And then we have these two other days, Yom Teruah and Yom Kippur. So, you could say we have five holidays throughout the year, and I'm talking about in the Torah. Later after the Torah we have these other days.

We have these fast days in the Book of Zachariah, in which we're actually told not to fast, but they're fasting anyway. We have Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, those are post-Torah.

Keith: Purim?

Nehemia: We have Purim, which is in the Book of Esther, it’s in the Tanakh but not in the Torah. These are days that yeah, you can celebrate, but they're not commanded by God for you to celebrate. So, God has five commandments, Yehovah has five days that are commandments to celebrate, or five holidays, because the Feast of Unleavened Bread is seven days, Sukkot is seven or eight, meaning there’s the eighth day, but it’s not part of the seven.

So, you've got these five holidays, and three of the holidays have both an agricultural function and a historical function. So, what are the agricultural functions of the three pilgrimage feasts? Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread is the barley harvest. Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, is the wheat harvest, and Sukkot is the in-gathering of the produce before it starts to rain in Israel. They also have an historical aspect to them, and by historical, I mean from the history of ancient Israel. So, Passover is the Exodus, Shavuot is the revelation at Sinai, and Sukkot is the wandering in the desert; they dwelt in booths.

What about Yom Kippur? Yom Kippur is its own kind of thing, the Day of Atonement, there is a historical event that took place at Yom Kippur - or it's associated with Yom Kippur - and that's the deaths of the two sons of Aaron. The two sons of Aaron wanted to worship God, and they said, “Yeah, He gave us all these commandments, but we're going to do our own thing, we’re going to make up our own way of worshiping Him.” And they brought what was called esh zarah, a strange fire, and they were burned up by fire that came forth from God.

So, for all four of those main holidays - and then the fifth one is Yom Teruah - for four of those holidays, we have a historical event, and we have something else as well, atonement, barley harvest, wheat harvest, in-gathering of produce… what about Yom Teruah? What's the historical event? And what's some other aspect that we have associated with it? And the answer is we have neither a historical event, nor anything else that is explicitly stated in the entire Tanakh. And you're left with, what on earth is this holiday?

Keith: And this is why I love it!

Nehemia: What's it for?

Keith: This is why I love it!

Nehemia: Why are we doing Yom Teruah? And we just read everything there is in the Torah about it. We didn't read the specific sacrifices, but they're not going to add any information. The first month everyone agrees, no question, is the feast of Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And so, the rabbis come along in the Mishnah and say, “Well there's four new years’; there’s a new year for trees and there's a new year for the sabbatical cycle.” And the new year for the sabbatical cycle, that is what they call Rosh Hashanah, and this is just a tradition; it wasn't commanded anywhere in the Torah. We’ll talk in a minute about where the tradition came from. But this was a tradition, and because the Torah didn't tell us what we were supposed to do on Yom Teruah in a way that people could understand throughout the generations, this tradition filled in that vacuum to the point where you tell somebody today in Israel that Rosh Hashanah is actually Yom Teruah, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I was told that once maybe, I think I remember something about that.”

Keith: But isn't it interesting, Nehemia? That you said that this is the one where there's a vacuum, so there's a lot of room for… can I say it? There's a lot of room for creativity.

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Keith: And there is a lot of creativity.

Nehemia: Oh, wow, is their creativity! So, for example, here's the creativity I grew up with. Rosh Hashanah means literally “head of the year”. So, what do you do? You have the head of a fish, and we were told if you eat the eyes, it’s a blessing. And I had four sisters, this was always a challenge, who would eat the eyes. I never did it! But we literally had this fish head on our table, because the head, and the "head of the year", there's all the symbolism that comes in. And you take a pomegranate, and the pomegranate is supposed to have 613 seeds in it, for the 613 commandments. And every year we would try to count them, and we never got past 50, and we just started eating it!

But there’s all these traditions that have grown up around Yom Teruah that have nothing to do with anything in the Torah.

Keith: How old were you until you started asking questions? How old were you when you finally said, “Why are we eating the fish head?” How old were you?

Nehemia: I think it was when I got to a certain age, I was around 11 or 12. I was told, “You think you're right, you know better than your rabbis. Who do you think you are? You have to follow what the rabbis have told you even if you think you know better.” And at a certain point I said, “No I'm going to read and see what God has to say.”

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: And then I realized I’d been given bits and pieces. I was given bits and pieces when we did the weekly Torah portion, but it was always through a film, through this filter of - what did Rashi say? What did rabbi so and so… what did Maimonides say about it? What did Ramban, Nachmanides, say about it? I said, “I'm going to read the Torah without any commentary and see what it says.”

And I got to Yom Teruah, and I said, “Where’s the new year? It’s not there!” So, I realized, “Okay, well what is God telling us?” And I struggled with this for years. I struggled with the question, “What is the purpose of this holiday?” And even today I can tell you, I don't know entirely for sure, but I think I have a pretty good clue, and we'll get to that. But I want to talk about this word, teruah.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: Teruah, I was told means blowing a shofar. But when I studied it in the Tanakh for myself, I saw that teruah does mean blowing a shofar, which is the name of the holiday, Yom Teruah - the day of the shofar blowing. And then in English they'll translate it as the Day of Trumpets. So where do they get that from?

So, if you read in Numbers 10, it talks about two silver trumpets they had in the Temple - or in the Tabernacle, originally, later the Temple - and those two silver trumpets, they would blow on them. And there's two types of blowing; there's one called tekiya, and the other is called teruah. And I'm going to have you demonstrate if you're willing to. But tekiya and teruah are two types of blasts of blowing of shofar… not the shofar in that case, in that case it's the silver trumpets, but they're terms that are also used for the shofar. So, you have it for the shofar, you have it for silver trumpets; you also have the same term used to describe people shouting.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: For example, when they’re surrounding Jericho.

Keith: Amen!

Nehemia: For seven days they're blowing shofars, and then it says, “The people shouted a great shout,” and that word is teruah.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, Yom Teruah can be blowing a shofar, it could be shouting to God in prayer.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: And to me, that's a key clue of what I think the purpose may be of Yom Teruah. And again, God didn't say this explicitly, but maybe it's inferred, and the inference here is, the first time it appears it’s not called the day of Teruah, it's called Zichron Teruah! And Zichron Teruah is usually translated… here I have the JPS, it says, “A sacred occasion commemorated with loud blasts.” But zichron has another meaning, that root, zachar, is “to explicitly mention something”.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: You could be mentioning it with your lips, it could also be something you remember with your mind; and hence you're summoning it up in your mind, and that's how it's connected to mentioning with your lips. So zichron, as mentioning something with the lips, may be referring here to… and you tell me, when it says zachar in the Tanakh, what's the common word, or the common thing that's being mentioned, that it’s associated with?

Keith: The name.

Nehemia: The name of Yehovah.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: And let's look at a verse where it talks about that. So, in Exodus 23, it talks about every place… it’s one of our favorite verses!

Keith: That’s a favorite verse!

Nehemia: I know I say that for everything! It says, “Every place I cause My name to be mentioned,” in Exodus 23, “and there I will come and bless you,” it says. So, the word there is zachar, it’s the same word. So Zichron Teruah, rather than a commemoration by a blast, or commemoration by shouting, may actually mean, and I think it does mean, to mention God's name in a shout.

In other words, it could be to blow the shofar, and I think it's also blowing the shofar, but I think it's also a day where we shout out the name of Yehovah. And so, what does it look like to do Yom Teruah? Is it just blowing the shofar? And again, I think it’s also blowing the shofar, because we see that as one of the meanings, but Zichron Teruah is to say, “Yehovah! Yehovah!” And there's different ways of doing that, and this comes to the meaning of teruah versus tekiya.

Keith: Get your Bible, and I want you to go to Leviticus in whatever translation you have, 25:9, and I'm going to first, if it would be alright, Nehemia?

Nehemia: Yes.

Keith: Here's what it says in the NASB, “You shall then sound a ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement, you shall sound a horn all through your land.” Can you read Leviticus 25:9 in Hebrew?

Nehemia: It says, “And you shall cause to pass a shofar of teruah,” a shofar is a ram’s horn, or a horn of an animal used to blow, we’ll talk about that, “a shofar of shouting, of teruah, of noise-making, in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month on the day of Yom Kippur,” the Day of Atonement, “you will cause a shofar to be passed throughout your land.”

Keith: Amen. Now do me a second favor, go to Joshua 6:5. You already talked about it, but I want to just… I'm going to ask a question, Joshua chapter 6 verse 5.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Real quick and read that. You’re so much faster with the computer than I am with…

Nehemia: Yeah, I found it instantaneously. “And it shall come to pass when the horn of the jubilee,” is literally what it says. And here in JPS it says, “And when a long blast is sounded on the horn,” that's completely ambiguous - what kind of horn?

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, shofar is a general term, I don't know if everybody can see these different things we have here, and I actually brought the animals, we'll get to that in a minute.

Keith: In a second.

Nehemia: “And it shall come to pass when the horn of the jubilee is elongated, and when you hear the sound of the shofar, all the people will shout a great teruah.”

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: “They’ll teruah a great teruah,” is what it says, “They’ll shout a great teruah and the wall of the city shall fall in its place.”

Keith: Let me read the English. “And it shall be that when,” again Joshua chapter 6 verse 5, “and it shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat and the people will go every man straight ahead.” Before we go to the money verse here…

Nehemia: Yeah?

Keith: I’m going to ask you a question.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Keith: Nehemia, you're in the group. Joshua says, “Hey, we're going to go over and we're going to march around this place.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: And he says to you, “Now when you get around there you're going to shout.” What do you think they shouted?

Nehemia: “Yehovah!”

Keith: I think they shouted God’s name!

Nehemia: I think they did!

Keith: Absolutely! Can I go to the money verse here?

Nehemia: Please, go ahead!

Keith: Before we go to the next one. Are you having fun?

Nehemia: I’m having a great time!

Keith: Folks, let me tell you what happened. Nehemia and I were planning on coming, and yesterday he calls me, and he says, “Keith, my plane has been cancelled.” I said, “What do you mean your plane has been cancelled? What are you talking about?” He says, “My plane has been cancelled.” I said, “Nehemia, what are you going to do?” And he says, “Well, I'm going to go to a different place, and I'm going to get on a different plane.”

Nehemia: I went to a different airport!

Keith: He went to a different airport! But let me tell you what he did. He sent me a message, and I said, “What did you do?” And he say’s “Well Lynell and I have gone from Dallas…

Nehemia: From DFW to Love Field.

Keith: Okay, and why was it cancelled?

Nehemia: Weather.

Keith: No, what was the weather?

Nehemia: Oh, it was tornadoes and lightning storms.

Keith: Yeah! And he didn't get the fact it was like thunder, when we first hear the word, the shofar blowing! The thunder! The thunder! Of course, now I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, he's going to get the message! He's going to get the message!”

Nehemia: I didn’t get the message.

Keith: He didn’t get the message!

Nehemia: It’s Dallas, there's thunder and lightning all the time.

Keith: Okay, so what did you do? You went from DFW to…

Nehemia: Love Field.

Keith: Come on, somebody! And who did you go with?

Nehemia: Lynell, my love.

Keith: Amen! I thought it was a revelation. Anyway!

Nehemia: There we go.

Keith: Psalms chapter 98:6, can you read it? I'm going to read it real quick, Psalms 98:6. But here's the reason I brought that up, Nehemia. You were excited about coming here, and I want to ask you a question while I'm looking. Why would you be so excited that you're willing to… who knows if you're going to get the money back on the other… I mean, you just basically told me they cancelled it. And you said, “I’ve got to get there!” You said, “I’ve got to get… we’ve got to get there!” What was the excitement?

Nehemia: What I didn't know was, am I even going to get a refund?

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because what they do when they cancel it is they give you another flight. Well, with that other flight I wouldn’t have gotten here in time to do this program!

Keith: Exactly!

Nehemia: So, I'm like, “Forget the first flight, I don’t know if I'm getting a refund on that,” and I went online and ordered another ticket, a different airline, a different airport, because I’ve got to get there.

Keith: Yeah. Here's where I want to stop you. Nehemia…

Nehemia: Yeah?

Keith: For those who don't know.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Nehemia, you’re a Karaite Jew.

Nehemia: Yes, sir.

Keith: You’re part of a ministry right now, today, A Rood Awakening, restoring the 1st century Hebrew roots of the Christian faith. Why would you be so… I mean you could have been… it was your way out! “Hey guys, my planes cancelled. I can't get there.” But what did you do? You didn't even care about the refund! You switched to another flight, and you got here. And I asked myself, and I’m going to make you answer the question, why would you be so excited to come? Other than seeing me, of course!

Nehemia: Of course, it was to see you! No, do you know why I was excited? Here we have… it's true, A Rood Awakening, they’re coming from a New Testament perspective; I'm a Karaite Jew, I come from a Tanakh perspective. But what I love is we can meet on the common ground. That's what I've loved about Michael Rood for so many years.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: I met him… I'm going to tell the story; I've told it before I think. So, the first time I met Michael, we were sitting, I think it was called Second Cup, in Jerusalem, in a place called Nahalat Ha’Shiva, off from the midrachov in Jerusalem. And we’re sitting at this little café, and Michael and I are talking about our different perspectives; we're coming from different perspectives, and Michael, I could see he immediately, he just got it.

And he got up to go to the bathroom, and I was sitting there with this other person he was traveling with at the time, and the guy starts making fun of me. He says, “If you don't believe in Yeshua, then we're just wasting our time with you.” And then Michael came back - and I had never told Michael, it was probably 15 years before I told Michael about that conversation - because this was someone who he was, at least at the time, close to. Michael came back, and he completely understood where I was coming from, and I understood where he was coming from. We were meeting together on this common ground and had this fruitful interaction and exchange, because he could come at what I was teaching without saying, “We've got to convert Nehemia.” And he could see that I was coming to hear what he had to say, and share what I had to share without saying, “I've got to convert Michael.” But rather just meet on this common ground.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: Loving the word of God.

Keith: Amen!

Nehemia: Loving what we can share in common and try to understand to the best of our ability. And that's why I said, “Okay, the flight was cancelled, but I'm still going!” And I actually said to Lynell, “Well, if we don't get there, we're going to get in the car and drive all night.” It’s about 20 hours from Dallas, or 17 hours from Dallas, but we're going to get there! We’re going to make it! Thankfully, going through the other airline, and the other airport worked.

But I want to share with people this incredible exchange that we can have by coming together on the common ground, Jew and non-Jew, coming together, just loving the word of God. Now, you have a beautiful thing that I'm going to ask you to do which I love; I hope you're willing to do it, which is you combine teruah, with calling on the name Yehovah. Because Yehovah could be, “Yehovah!” Which is tekyia. Or, it could be “Yehovahahah!” That’s teruah, or shevarim. You do it on the shofar. Would you do it?

Keith: I will do it.

Nehemia: Oh, I love this!

Keith: And I want to say something. I actually went to a Lutheran Church, and the pastor said to me, “There's only one thing I ask that you bring,” and I thought he was going to make me wear a tie. He had his assistant call, and he said, “Please bring your shofar.” And I went there, and I told them, I said, “You know we’re at a place of watching, warning, or war?” That pastor dipped his toe into the Hebrew roots of faith and stood against the legislative political issues of the present-day church, and he ended up leaving that Lutheran Church. And I believe that right now, as I blow the shofar, honestly, I really believe that during Yom Teruah, we're at that place where we’ve got to make a decision. Are we at watch phase? Are we at warn phase? Are we at war phase? I’ll tell you Nehemia, eventually we're at the place where the King is going to come.

Nehemia: He’s coming.

Keith: So, this for me is creativity; I'm sure that the traditionalists would say, “That's not the way you blow the shofar!” But what it is, it's the blast of the shofar, and then Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nehemia: Yehovah!

Keith: Hallelujah!

Nehemia: Yehovah!

Keith: May it be that as we celebrate today, we're going to get a chance to continue talking to people. We're going to have a wrap up; we get to do some more sharing. Folks, stay with us, we are having such a good time here. Thank you again to A Rood Awakening, Michael…

Nehemia: Thank you to Michael.

Keith: All of you that put your hands to the plow, may this be a Yom Teruah for the ages. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen!

Keith: Amen! Can we take a moment, would you to like to say a prayer?

Nehemia: Yehovah, Avinu she’ba’shamayim, Yehovah, our Father in heaven, thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to come here and share. I ask that You put Your healing and Your blessing upon Michael John Rood who is struggling with health issues. You are the healer, El na refah na. O Yehovah, You are the healer, Yehovah, rofeino, Yehovah, our healer! Yehovah! Amen.

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