When is a shofar not a ram’s horn, and when can it be heard besides this time of year? The answer lies in Djerba and Yemen

Reverberating throughout Elul (the last month of the Jewish year, roughly corresponding to August/September) and climaxing on the High Holy Days, the blast of the shofar has changed little since it was first heard millennia ago. The rudimentary animal horn and the primal sound it produces evoke a raw emotion difficult to pin down. Humble in origin, the shofar can come from a goat, an antelope, or other species, although the standard horn is that of a ram.

“[Belonging] to the place of trumpeting.” This stone, discovered in the southwest corner of the Temple Mount and now on display in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, corroborates the mishnaic description of a specific point on the mount from which shofars or trumpets sounded | courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Sounding the Alarm

In the Bible, the shofar’s uses are varied. When Joshua captured Jericho, seven priests blasted shofars while encircling the city walls, and Gideon’s three hundred men blew ram’s horns to launch a surprise attack on their Midianite oppressors. In a more peaceful vein, a shofar was traditionally sounded every fifty years, at the end of Yom Kippur, to proclaim the economic reset of the Jubilee year, when all slaves went free.

The shofar was also used in ancient times to announce the onset of the Sabbath. The Talmud (Sukka 53b and Shabbat 35b) describes a series of six shofar blasts blown shortly before Shabbat, alerting people to stop working, prepare food for this holy day, and light candles. One of the more fascinating finds originating on the Temple Mount is a stone from the southwest corner of the Temple platform (then one of the highest points in Jerusalem), engraved: “for the place of trumpeting.” Close to both the Upper City (today’s Jewish Quarter) and the Lower, this spot would have been an ideal place to proclaim the start of the Sabbath – and the daily Temple service.

The Shulhan Arukh (Orah Haim 256), the 16th-century codex compiled in Safed by Rabbi Joseph Karo, reports that this pre-Sabbath tradition no longer existed in its author’s day, although he had heard of it. In Kraków, Karo’s colleague Rabbi Moses Isserles recommended the practice accepted in his community, which had replaced the pre-Sabbath shofar blasts with a town crier. One of the few vestiges of this custom is the sounding of the air-raid siren in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities a few minutes before candle lighting.

Horn blasts played an important part in ancient battles, serving as signals, warnings, or means of psychological warfare. The biblical Gideon, for example, blew horns to startle his Midianite foe at the outset of his surprise attack. Nicolas Poussin, Battle of Gideon against the Midianites, oil on canvas, 1625

Continuing Tradition

We recently visited the Tunisian island of Djerba, possibly the last place in the world where the original practice continues. An anomaly in the modern world, Djerba is a flourishing and even growing traditional Jewish community in a Muslim country. Every Friday, one of its members circulates among the one- and two-story homes in the Hara Kabira neighborhood (Hara is a Berber word of Greek origin meaning “segregated place”) where most Jews live, encouraging shopkeepers to lock up before Shabbat. Much the same thing happened in Jerusalem circa 1900, except that in Djerba they also blow the shofar. The Rosh Hashana sequence of ten shofar blasts (various combinations of tekia, terua, and shevarim notes) is sounded twice – once about ten minutes before candle lighting, to remind people to halt all business, and once when the candles are to be lit. According to the locals, the practice was suspended in other communities for fear of the non-Jews. Living as they do in an essentially all-Jewish district, Djerba’s Jews have no such concerns.