Phhhptppht. Pause. mmsmmpmp. Longer pause. <sputtering noise>. Pause.
It was 2005. We are standing in shul (synagogue). It is the first day of Rosh Hashanah. The entire day is a buildup to hearing the blowing of the shofar. There are a great many explanations for why the Shofar is so important to Rosh Hashanah and for Jews in general. But on top of all of them, we find that the shofar blasts cut to our core, bypassing reason and the senses, reaching directly to our souls. When we actually hear the shofar, of course.
And today, all we hear is the Rebbe, a small and wizened man well into his 80s, trying, and repeatedly failing, to blow the old and mis-shapen ram’s horn in his hands. Try as he might, he cannot produce a sound that could be called a shofar blast. Eventually, perhaps after 10 minutes, he switches to another horn, and after considerable delay manages to produce the required sounds.
From my perspective, a newly-arrived Jew in town, it is a debacle at best, a farce at worst. The person who blows shofar must be competent at the task. I would have been almost flawless, even with a horn I had blown only once before. And I knew it. So why are we listening to the quiet sputtering, instead of having the sounds of the shofar fill and consume us?
No. I am standing there, waiting, yearning, hoping – and wishing that the Rebbe would stop embarassing himself. Why not pick someone else? Why not start with the horn that actually seems blowable, instead of starting with the dreadful, possibly-unblowable one? To what possible end could this synagogue, a Satmar shtiebel, justify such a terrible Shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah?
I did not know. And, in my haste to reach judgement, I did not care. There was no possible way to justify such gross imcompetence. And for what? So an old man who clearly is not good at it, can spend the better part of an hour trying to blow a horn that clearly does not want to produce a proper blast?
I was wrong. So wrong, that I am only writing of it now.
I learned the underlying story after the Rebbe died. Jews have a tradition of a week of visiting the mourners, hearing stories and piecing together what the world has lost, now that the living is no longer. And at these quiet visits, one is able to learn oh-so-very-much that was not discussed before.
I had known that the Rebbe was interred at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. What I had not known is that he was married and had five children before the Holocaust.
But most critically to this story is that I learned that the Rebbe, while in Auschwitz, realized that Rosh Hashanah was approaching. And the central commandment, to hear the blast of the ram’s horn, would not be fulfilled unless someone had a shofar. Nobody did, of course. So, in the midst of everything else going in (including widespread disease and starvation), he went to the fence, and negotiated with a local farmer.
The Rebbe traded a week of his rations in return for the horn cut from a ram’s head. He then took that horn and painstakingly hollowed it out, without the benefit of the technology and techniques that make it a straightforward (if smelly) job today. I understand it took weeks of work. But he got there. And then, on Rosh Hashanah, he blew the ram’s horn, the shofar, for the Jews in Auschwitz.
The war ended. The Rebbe’s wife and all of his children had been murdered. He was all that was left of his family.
After the camps were liberated, the Rebbe went back to his old village and found a Torah scroll that was defaced and defiled by the Nazis. He saved it, and repaired what could be repaired, and it was wrapped and preserved. Our shul still has it today, though we do not (cannot) read from it because of its wounds.
And he kept that shofar, the one he blew in Auschwitz. The Rebbe went on to remarry (while still in a DP camp), and produced a large family. He committed his life to rebuilding from the ashes.
But he also kept that connection, the connection to all that was lost, to all that was sacrificed so that the Torah and Judaism would not be erased from the face of the earth.
So every single year from 1945 until the end of his life in 2007, he blew (or tried to blow) the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. The very same one that he had made during the war.
And I was the idiot who, during the holiest days of the year, quietly steamed about the incompetency of the old man and the lousy quality of his shofar.
How I wish I could have known then, what I know now.
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Links, for the curious: Wiki, and a local article.