Bat Abraham/Blowing the shofar

Photo by Olve Utne

One of the mitzvot associated with Rosh Hashanah is hearing the sound of the shofar, or ram's horn. The horn represents the sound of trumpets that were blown at Mount Sinai that frightened the people of Israel camped around it (Exodus 19, 20).

It's blown repeatedly during the Rosh Hashanah service in prescribed patterns, urging people to wake up from their moral sleep, if you will -- between now an Yom Kippur, you have your last chance to get a favorable verdict in the book of life.

Blowing the shofar is also a mitzvah, and requires a certain state of mind: You clear your mind and concentrate only on performing the mitzvah of blowing the shofar. This is why you might see pictures of people blowing the shofar with their prayer shawls over their heads, and occasionally even hanging down over their eyes.

( More after the jump )

The shofar is preferably a ram's horn, but it can be made from almost any kind of horn. You can use one from a non-kosher animal (because you're not eating the horn), but not from a cow or a calf (not sure why). Some shofarot are shaped like big smoking pipes, while others are shaped in a sort of spiral or curl. Some have separate mouthpieces; others don't. Either way, they are played like a brass instrument.

People who blow the shofar during Rosh Hashanah have my respect. It is a technologically primitive instrument, an early sort of bugle. Like any wind instrument the sound you get out of it depends on your the way you hold your mouth and facial muscles while playing and how much lung power you have; and primitive instruments -- at least this is my experience with trying to play the shakuhachi, or Japanese bamboo flute -- require far more from the player than more advanced instruments. I got some kind of sound out of a shakuhachi the one time I tried it, but then again, I have a lot of experience on woodwind instruments. I tried blowing a shofar once, knowing it had to be played like a brass instrument, and I couldn't make it even say "pbbbtht." I've never been able to get much of a sound out of a trumpet, either, so I wasn't surprised.

Not only do you have to have the brute force to make the shofar sound, you need to know the different calls (links to an image of sheet music) and have the endurance to be able to repeat them over and over during the service. At the end of each group of blasts, the shofar blower has to play one last note, as long as he or she can hold it. Some say that the longer that last note is held, the better the upcoming year will be.