Blog

I love music. Most of us do. When I’m listening to the soaring harmonies of a well-rehearsed choir, or the perfect interaction of six saxes, four trombones and five trumpets in the Colorado Jazz Repertory Orchestra, or am bopping along to a well-loved 60’s song, something stirs inside me. Memories, perhaps, of the college boyfriend, of the opera-loving mother, of where I was when I first heard that particular song. Maybe it’s the melody that touches. Maybe the beat is making my body move. Maybe it’s the words that perfectly sum up that feeling at that time. Or it’s the combination of all the elements that taps into my emotions and wrings me dry.

To love music is to love order. We combine notes and phrases into mathematical progressions. In scales, timbres and rhythms, we discover infinite permutations. A Verdi opera. A Beatles tune. A Broadway classic.

The shofar makes a more primal music. Very early man developed primitive flutes from animal bones and used stones, wood and sticks as percussion. Through the millenia, music has played a key role in both religious and secular settings. The lyre accompanied the poets’ words. The trumpet heralded great ceremony. The drums brought hopes of rain. Horns – shofars – ordered armies into battle.

Hearing the sound of a shofar blown a minimum of thirty times in the sequence written in the prayer book is one of the core mitzvot of the High Holy Days. But a shofar is not a trumpet or a clarinet. It’s a plain horn of an animal. Its music is not the mannered music we’re used to hearing. It does not impress or amuse with its complexity. There’s no soaring symphony, no sweet sequences of notes, no subtleties of timbre. It could be the sound of a small child crying for a parent, a simple, primal cry. It’s a cry that has no words, maybe because the words of repentance are so difficult to voice. It’s a cry of mourning, a spiritual cry from the heart for help, a cry for inspiration, a prayer for grace. But the cry also has a spark of aspiration – that no matter our transgressions, the spark can flame again and make us whole.

So this year, when we hear the primal cry of the shofar, let’s close our eyes and follow the raw blasts of deep passion with our hearts, translating emotion into sound, without thought interfering.