rear pew mirror • doug brook
The horn section
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August 2021 • Southern Jewish Life
A familiar sound is rumbling louder underneath the din of late summer weather. Yes, there’s the sound of synagogue staffs dealing with High Holy Days planning — somewhere between stifled screams and blood-curdling bellows. Another familiar sound lurks deeper. People think they hear more car horns because school is starting and summer vacations are over. But a different kind of horn is also feeding this phonic frenzy. Every morning in the month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the shofar is sounded. Few enough people attend weekday morning minyan to hear it, so for most people it blends in with all the other horns during early morning traffic. To them, there’s no distinguishing between the horn sounds of a shofar and a chauffeur. This daily shofar sounding foreshadows the better-known shofar soundings on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When the shofar is sounded on Rosh Hashanah, the exact sequence of long and short notes translates in the ancient Morris Code into the Yiddish equivalent of “time to sneak out of services and have lunch.” The same sequence is repeated several more times in the service for those who ignored its meaning the first time, or who understood but were trying to get out of setting the table. It’s understandable that people would be confused by the exact sequence of shofar sounds. For example, take the shevareem which is three longer notes. If you do half a shevareem it would logically be one and a half. However, half of “shevareem” is “sheva” which is Hebrew for “seven.” This teaches that, according to Jewish tradition, three divided by two equals seven. This kind of math might beg the question how Jews were ever stereotyped as accountants. However, this Zoom just kind of math makes it easier to understand how on Chanukah one day’s doesn’t capture worth of oil lasted eight days, and how there are seven aliyahs to the Torah on the true crowd Shabbat but eight people have them. Science is still unable to explain how for sounds from every two rabbis there are three opinShabbat morning ions. Despite the shofar’s basic tonal qualities — the quality of which depends on who is sounding it — it isn’t known much today as a musical instrument. But it once was. The Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1822, at age 13, wrote his Concerto for Violin and Shofar in B-double-flat minor, which is so forgotten by history that all the way until his death, in 1847, Mendelssohn had never said a word to anyone, including himself, about writing it. In the second half of the Twentieth Century, a couple of groups popularized songs originally performed on the shofar. The first was originally an old Sephardic tune, whose Spanish origins help explain the adaptation first recorded by The Champs in 1958. The song, popularly known today as “Tequila,” originally had a second “l” in its name, “Tequilla” – which, of course, was pronounced “tekiya.” The Champs perform the song with a saxophone, but centuries earlier Sephardim performed it entirely on shofars. Unfortunately, the ability to control tone on shofars so melodically has been lost to time and chapped lips. continued on previous page