What Is A Shofar?

Reflections on an Ancient Instrument

This Rosh Hashana, we will blow the shofar 100 times per day, but what is a shofar? Here is an incomplete list of shofaric associations:

A Shofar is

• A sign of salvation and hope in the midst of despondency and horror. (Symbolizing the ram in the thicket that Abraham sees just as he thinks he is condemned to sacrifice his son).

• A trumpet blast for battle (as in the battle of Jericho).

• An alarm clock for the soul.

• An instrument of the human cry, the vessel for an inarticulate shreak, like the cry of Rachel, the cry of exiles, the cry of a people in bondage, the lone cry of the dissident prophet in the wilderness.

• The shofar is a request to be heard—the people’s request of God and God’s request of the people. We ask “Where are you?” And hear the question turned towards us.

• A tree falls in the forest and makes no sound; a shofar blasts in the desert and reverberates in every subsequent shofar blast across the world.

• The shofar is a dog whistle of the cosmologically responsible.

• According to Rav Yitzchok Hutner, the shofar is the paradigmatic thing, not unlike Heidegger’s jug. The shofar is, accordingly, defined less by its walls than by its emptiness. The walls of the shofar represent this world, while the sound emanating from the hollow of the shofar is the echo of the world to come.

• For Cynthia Ozick, the shofar symbolizes the paradoxical unity of particularism and universalism. The narrow end of the shofar is Jewish culture, peoplehood, covenant, while the wide end is what the world hears. Only by blowing into one’s tradition and heritage can one produce something worthy of a universal audience.

• Whatever it is, the shofar is a vestige of a time when a ram’s horn was a cutting edge technology. Now, the defunct, low-fi means of sounding out is a symbol of the continued relevance of the seemingly irrelevant, the holiness of the discarded. The shofar is the “subaltern” voice of those who have been lost to history, the retort of the lost cause. We may not be able to listen to all prayers and demands, but God can. The sound of the shofar says, “You are not alone.”

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