Shofar: The Sound of Freedom

When Joseph Kaltmann blows a ram’s horn called a shofar, the trumpetlike sound is booming, piercing, just “really loud,” according to his son, Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann of New Albany, Ohio. The vigor with which the 84-year-old man blows is inspired by the sounds he heard as a teen lying half-dead in a World War II Nazi concentration camp in Halberstadt, Germany.

He heard thundering and explosions as the U.S. Army’s 8th Armored Division liberated the camp.

“The Americans came in ’45. I could not walk, I was very weak,” Joseph Kaltmann, a Czechoslovakian who now lives in Australia, said in a phone interview. The U.S. troops rescued him, carrying him out of the camp.

“And I am alive now,” he said.

When he blows the horn, he recalls the words from daily prayers — “blow the great shofar for your freedom,” said his son, who learned his own style, though not quite so loud, from his father.

The shofar also represents other kinds of freedom — freedom from sin, freedom to return to one’s true essence — for Jews who must hear its sounds on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, said Kaltmann, an ordained Orthodox rabbi at the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center.

The holiday began at sundown yesterday and runs through sundown on Tuesday. It starts a 10-day period of repentance that ends on Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and atonement that marks the day that God forgave their ancestors for worshipping a golden calf idol.

Excepting Saturdays, the horn is also blown every day in the month that precedes Rosh Hashana “ to awaken us, … to arouse us to repent, to return to our creator,” Kaltmann said.

Shofars come in all shapes and sizes, from rams’ horns from Israel to longer horns that come from kudus (African antelopes) and are used by Yemenis, said Rabbi William Goldberg at the Breslov Judaica Gift Centre in Bexley. Some are polished. Some Moroccan horns are etched. Each is unique, with its own sound. Small plastic shofars are made for children.

Shofars are made after an animal is slaughtered. Its horns are boiled to remove cartilage, and an opening is made at the narrow end. The horns can come from any kosher animal except a cow, because of the golden calf.

The ram’s horn is reminis cent of the Genesis story in which a ram caught in a thicket is slaughtered in place of Isaac after God tests Isaac’s father, Abraham, by ordering him to sacrifice his only son.

Goldberg said kosher shofars are certified as such by rabbis or courts and sell from about $20 to about $300.

A trumpet player in high school, Goldberg has blown the shofar or provided the calling that accompanies it for 10 to 15 years at the Beth Jacob modern Orthodox synagogue on the East Side. He said it’s a tremendous honor and responsibility because Jewish law demands that all Jews hear the shofar on Rosh Hashana.

Three different sounds must be blown in certain lengths and orders, he said, for a total of 100 sounds each day. He said it takes a certain knack, but the key is to meet the command.

“Some people can get a big sound out, some can just eke a sound out, but they both can be kosher,” he said. He blows loudly, he said, to make sure the sounds are heard by all of the 400-some people who attend the synagogue on Rosh Hashana.

A shofar must be bent, never straight, because it must send the sounds to God in the heavens, Gold-berg said. The twists in the horn also represent repentance from a bent or broken heart, Kaltmann said.

Shofar intonations hold “tremendous meaning,” he said, calling on a parable in which a king hears the cry of his lost son, rejected by guards at the palace gates, and welcomes him home.

“That’s why we blow the shofar,” Kaltmann said. “We go to temple, we cry out to God. … When a kid cries out for help, a parent has to hear.

“It’s a profound story, all of us on our own level coming home. … I find it very redeeming and very much full of hope.”