Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Meisner is an expert on the shofar, the ram’s horn whose wailing, shivering sounds Jews will hear in synagogues across the world on Rosh Hashana, the two-day holiday that began at sundown Wednesday. Though he no longer blows the shofar at formal services, he has taught scores of shofar blowers who do, especially in the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, where he lives.
Many people think the shofar is a relatively simple wind instrument to master; after all, it does not have anything like the range of do-re-mi notes that Mr. Armstrong could evoke from a trumpet. But Rabbi Meisner, 28, a lush-bearded father of two whose main livelihood is as a kosher supervisor for a rabbinical court, will tell you its simplicity is deceptive.
It does not take many lessons to learn the shofar, he said, but it takes a good deal of practice, practice, practice to sound an elegant tekiah, shevarim, teruah — the three varieties of sounds that in various combinations are blown on Rosh Hashana and in abbreviated form at the close of Yom Kippur.
“You can’t teach how to blow,” he said, with the seeming incongruity of a Mel Brooks “2,000-Year-Old Man” routine. “It’s more to take away the bad habits that detract from blowing. Most people blow with a lot of effort, a lot of power. It’s exactly the opposite.
“There’s a fancy word with trumpets: embouchure,” he continued. “That tells you how to hold the trumpet in the lips, not to push too tight. The sounds happens by tiny vibrations. As the Talmud says, ‘Intelligence, not work.’ ”
The other day, Rabbi Meisner, wearing his daily garb of a navy frock coat over a vest and white shirt buttoned at the neck, was instructing Yeedle Melber, 33, while a recent graduate, Rabbi Yechiel Lichtenstein, looked on. Mr. Melber said he wanted to be able to blow the shofar this holiday for his mother, who cannot leave the house because of recent surgery. Eventually, he said, he would also like to blow the shofar for his shtibl — a room-size house of worship. He can do an adequate long tekiah and the trio of shevarim notes, but the nine short blasts of the teruah elude him.
“I fell into a trap that a lot of people do,” Mr. Melber said. “I get tense.”
“That’s the No. 1 killer,” Rabbi Meisner agreed.
“You have to become one with the shofar,” Mr. Melber said, echoing a mystical phrase of Rabbi Meisner’s. “You have to make peace with the shofar.”
In recent weeks, Rabbi Meisner coached more than 50 students with two or three lessons apiece; he estimates that he has taught several hundred students in recent years. The need is great because Borough Park has 200 synagogues. But his influence will also be felt farther away — in a town outside Kiev in Ukraine, for example, where Rabbi Lichtenstein will be jetting in to lead a congregation that does not have a rabbi.
Until now, Rabbi Meisner has not usually charged for lessons, but students typically will buy a shofar from him; he sells them out of his living room for $50 to $250 apiece.
Shofars are reminiscent of the ram that Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac, a Torah tale read on Rosh Hashana’s second day. Shofars were blasted at Mount Sinai and in Joshua’s capture of Jericho. Thereafter, they were blown as a call to battle or as a summons to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Believers expect the Messiah’s arrival to be announced with a shofar’s sound.
Shofars are mostly produced in Israel, Morocco and China, and the horn can come from a ram or almost any other kosher animal — some Jews prefer the spiraling horn of a kudu antelope — but the animal need not be slaughtered in kosher fashion. After the horn is cut off the carcass, its core is removed and the horn is heated by blowtorch or in oil so it can be straightened out for the drilling of a hole that joins the slender tip with the naturally hollowed-out fatter end. The horn is sanitized with an antiseptic solution, sanded, polished and sometimes carved with teethlike decorations. Any puncture, even if it is repaired, renders the shofar ritually unfit. For Jews, hearing the shofar is a mitzvah — a required, virtuous deed. In the ultra-Orthodox world, women are encouraged, though not obligated, to hear the shofar; they are also permitted to do the actual trumpeting, but only at a service for other women.
Hearing the sound of the shofar is so essential that some synagogues are architecturally designed to assure that the acoustics do not resonate with strong echoes that overwhelm the shofar’s pure sound. On this point, Judaism makes an important distinction.
“If you hear the echo alone,” Rabbi Meisner said, “you don’t fulfill the mitzvah.”
