T’kiah
This is a Yemenite kudu horn. It is one variety of horn that can be used as a Shofar, which this one is. A shofar is more typically a ram’s horn but these are kosher (ritually approved) and look cool, so I got one. They’re only played on two holidays a year but it is commanded that we hear it. Those holidays, ten days apart, are Rosh Hashanah (head of the year, even though it does not occur at the beginning of the Hebrew calendar) and Yom Kippur (day of atonement).
When the shofar is played, there are three kinds of blasts. They are called by someone and the player then plays the proper blast for each call. The first one is called T’kiah, one long blast. The sequence of calls ends with T’kiah Gadola, literally big T’kiah, meaning you hold the blast as long as you can. At a Temple I belonged to many years ago, I watched a young man get to around forty seconds. That is an eternity.
I have called once. My father was in a hospital in Wheaton, MD during Rosh Hashanah. I was visiting him. It was, incidentally, a Catholic hospital, and my father had a roommate. My father belonged to a sort of congregation that had no rabbi but instead a lay leader. I think that guy’s still doing it. So he shows up in the room with a briefcase, opens it up, pulls out some yarmulkes, hands me a Machzor, a High Holiday (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) prayer book, turns to a page, pulls out a shofar and says “call.” So I do. The sequence takes maybe two minutes, but we are commanded to hear it and the lay leader was determined that Dad be able to. We finished, he collected his stuff, closed his briefcase, and left. I have no idea what Dad’s roommate thought.
Someone I know online wished me a happy Rosh Hashanah. Actually, it’s not a happy holiday. It is the anniversary of the creation of the world and it begins the period called the Days of Awe in which we repent for whatever we’ve done bad the previous year and we try to change to a more positive direction. Ostensibly our fate for the coming year is decided by the end of the period. The last day of the period is Yom Kippur and on that day, I guess mainly to prove our sincerity, we fast. Twenty-four hours plus, no intake. No food, no water, no brushing teeth, unless you’re sick, in which case you’re obligated to eat and drink. Judaism is like that. We do, however, wish each other a happy new year, by which we mean a good year, a healthy year, a prosperous year. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life. We say that and other things to each other and I am saying it to you.
When I grew up one person played the shofar at services. Now at some temples there is something called a shofar choir. A leader plays what’s called, then everyone who brings a shofar and wants to participate plays what’s called simultaneously. It’s quite cacophonous to the point of being a bit comical.
This year, service are different. It’s all online. So my Temple in North Carolina, which I still maintain a connection with and with whom I now attend online Torah study on Saturday mornings (I find it intellectually engaging) put their service on YouTube, getting their choir to record various songs outside, mostly with masks on, and rabbis giving lessons, sermons, whatever. We got to the shofar service just before the end of the whole service, so I blew shofar. That way I could hear it, and my family could hear it, other than online.
You can’t play tunes on this thing. Well, maybe someone can; I haven’t heard it done. You just get a couple of notes.
But the shofar didn’t originally exist for the High Holy Days. It existed as a sort of ancient siren, a call to action, often with military applications. We can be reasonably sure these are the horns the walls of Jericho story is about.
And, right now, as our politics have such intensely moral imperatives and such potentially immoral consequences, a call to action is exactly what’s called for.
T’kiah
09/20/2020 @ 10:15 am
I didn’t know you were such a pintele yid. I have a very similar shofar of my own purchased in Israel in 1979. I haven’t even tried to play it in years. Don’t have the wind. Mine doesn’t have any finger holes for notes. You achieve the notes by varying the amount air you push through it. I spent some time hanging out with a kabbalistic congregation which was a strange admixture of traditional Judaism and stuff that I suspect they made up as they went along.
It has been many years now since I set foot in any religious establishment. There are many people who don’t understand how you can be an atheist and a devout Jew at the same time. I think it is more about a sense of belonging to a tribe than believing in the fables, no matter low entrancing the fables might be.
May we both be entered in the book of life for another year on this mortal coil
09/20/2020 @ 11:13 am
Once again,
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
L’Chaim
לחיים
09/20/2020 @ 11:25 am
If you drill holes it becomes treif. I got a ram’s horn in Tsfat a few years ago but it had an odor, someone I knew suggested I soak the mouth end in hydrogen peroxide, and after that it was unplayable, I can’t figure out why, so I got rid of it and replaced it. This was my Fathers’ Day present. My ram’s horn was louder. I’ve been in Israel twice, once in 1980 and once in 2016. (Or maybe 2015, I don’t remember and I’d have to look it up.)
The way I explain the atheist/devout Jew thing is that we’re a people who can be joined through our religion. We became a people so long ago that back then most peoples had their own religion.
I’m not active in local Temple. The place depresses my wife and Torah study there isn’t that good. We belonged to a Temple in Greensboro, where we lived from 2006 to 2016, that was great, and COVID has meant that Torah study is online so I participate.
My own relationship with Judaism changed a lot at one point. I grew up with a pair of Orthodox immigrant grandparents and a pair of basically non observant grandparents. My father, the first generation American, grew up keeping kosher but stopped when he married my completely non observant mother. We were nominally Conservative and that’s where I went to Hebrew school, which was a bit weird because what was done in school was not done in my home. We didn’t light Shabbes candles, for example, though we didn’t eat chumetz on Pesach. I ended up with a strong Jewish identity (as, somehow, did my younger sister) but a bit dislocated.
I married a girl I met in college who grew up Methodist but reasoned herself out of Christianity. I wanted a Jewish household and Jewish children. She said she could never be Jewish ethnically so it would have to be religiously or nothing, and we would do nothing “for the kids;” we already did it or we wouldn’t do it. I loved that idea and she took some adult ed for us to be married by a rabbi, which I took with her. She converted many years later – it would have been sooner but Judaism isn’t always welcoming and we ran into some idiotic roadblocks before Greensboro. We eventually joined a nondenominational congregation in Columbia, MD that turned Reconstructionist when we moved to Lafayette, IN for my wife to teach at Purdue, then we joined Reform Temples where we lived. Reform when I was a kid was very church wannabe, it isn’t any more, so it became palatable. My son was born while we lived in Maryland and we moved two years later.
Lafayette didn’t have many Jews. My son was less of a minority in his middle school as a kid in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy than he was as a Jewish kid. The thing about growing up in New York (Rockland County) was that you could sort of be Jewish by osmosis. In Lafayette you can’t; you have to get active to do it. So I became active in Temple, particularly musically, which has been true in all my congregations. I was called on to teach a class to teenagers that was a sort of survey class of Judaism, I took some adult ed, and I taught a one-session class called Why Be Jewish?
While in Lafayette, I got involved in a chatroom: AOL Beliefs Judaism. That’s where I met Jon Wolfman and how I later started blogging. There’s a lot I don’t like about chat but I was exposed to a lot of Christians trying to convert us and to Jews who knew how to answer. I also spent time with a cousin-in-law of my wife’s, a very bright guy and musician heavily involved in Calvary Chapel, which is kind of fundamentalist. Through these I learned a lot about the borders of Judaism, about what differentiates it from Christianity, and I learned that from a philosophical standpoint I was very lucky to have been born into Judaism. It makes sense to me in ways that Christianity doesn’t. So I learned about Judaism first from the inside and then from an outsider’s perspective. As such, I can explain Judaism better to a Christian in ten minutes than they’ll be able to get in a week elsewhere because I know what they assume and as a result won’t ask. That more than anything has taught me that addressing assumptions is way more important than addressing questions.
That’s me and Judaism in a sort of nutshell. Most Friday nights we do Shabbat dinner with challah, candles, and wine and I bless my wife and remaining child with Yivarechecha, the priestly blessing. I did not do Shabbat dinner growing up unless I was visiting my grandparents. My sister, who works at a Conservative shul, also does it. One reason I do Yivarechecha is because of its age. There was a time when the earliest known Hebrew writing was a set of rolled up pieces of silver from before the Babylonian conquest, when the first Temple still stood, and they have Yivarechecha engraved on them. I have seen them in the Israel Museum. I am saying a blessing that has been passed down without interruption for at least two and a half millenia, I say at least because there is no evidence that the blessings were new when the silver was engraved. That is continuity that most people never experience. Culturally, they have no idea what may be that old in their background. Christianity is over five hundred years younger than those pieces of silver and Islam over a thousand years younger.
09/20/2020 @ 4:32 pm
l’ shanah tovah
09/20/2020 @ 5:21 pm
To you too