BOB ABERNETHY, host: The holiest time in the Jewish calendar begins next Wednesday evening (September 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur ten days later. For Jews around the world, it’s a period of introspection and atonement. During both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, congregants hear the sounding of the ram’s horn or shofar. Our producer, Noelle Seper, visited the Glickman family near Buffalo, New York, for whom sounding the Shofar has been a three-generation tradition.

NOELLE SERPER, producer: When the congregation gathers at Temple Beth Am to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, they will experience what Jews have for centuries—the blast of the shofar as a kind of wake-up call.

RABBI IRWIN TANENBAUM (Temple Beth Am, Williamsville, New York): Tekiah…

It’s a reminder. It sends a shiver, that we can be better than we are, and how do we approach God but with that strange cry in our ear, and perhaps on our lip, and we come before God and we say who are we? What are we? Remember what we could be, and help us along.

The Glickmans, for three generations, have been our shofar blowers here in this congregation.

SERPER: Marshall Glickman became Temple Beth Am’s Ba’al Tekiah, or the one who sounds the shofar, over 40 years ago.

MARLENE GLICKMAN (Widow of Marshall Glickman): They used to time him, because he could hold it so long, and they couldn’t believe it. He felt a commitment to his religion and a commitment to his God and to his congregation. He just felt like it was a gift that he was giving to the community and that he was the person through God giving that gift. At his funeral, there were over 800 people.

JOE GLICKMAN (Son of Marshall Glickman): When the funeral was over, when they put him in the ground, we blew the shofar, and it was quite nice. It was very lovely. The notes were great, and I don’t know that I’ve ever played the notes as well as we did at that point. But at that point I guess people said, “Wow, you should keep on playing,” and “Why don’t you and your son play in echo?”

RABBI TANENBAUM: Tekiah…

JOE GLICKMAN: It just gives the room a deeper vibrating, vibrational sound that echoes through one’s heart, one’s chest.

RABBI TANENBAUM: Shevarim Teruah…

JOE GLICKMAN: They listen to the shofar, and they can close their eyes and say, “This is the same sound I heard 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.” These are the same prayers, the same music, and they feel a oneness with times gone by.

STEVE GLICKMAN (Marshall Glickman’s grandson): Blowing the shofar is a family tradition that my grandfather started when he was 15, and I started when I was 14. It just makes me happy to continue that tradition.

RABBI IRWIN KULA (President, National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership): I think one of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. So you come out of Rosh Hashanah and say, “New Year. Everything’s sweet. It’s amazing. Life is good,” and then okay, well, given that, why not check out who I am?

Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in the synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

There really are three basic questions that these 10 days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people and can I feel forgiven? And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior?

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur, “Who shall live, and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written—in other words your fate, your destiny, in a sense, is written down, is inscribed—and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed.

Our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life.

If Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur work, at the end of Yom Kippur there’s a final blast. The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

This period is called either the High Holy Days, the High Holidays, the Awesome Days, and they incorporate the days of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and then ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are called the ten days of repentance, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There really are three basic questions that these ten days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? I think that’s a really hard question to ask. Can I become better or is this the way it is and I’m doing the best I can, and that’s it? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people, and can I feel forgiven? I think that’s also a very difficult question. We talk a lot about forgiveness and wanting to be forgiven and to forgive other people, but it’s really hard. And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior? And whether you believe in a God in the sky or the cosmos or reality or the universe or whatever it is your belief system is, do you actually believe that you’re accountable for how you behave? And I think those three questions and themes run through the entire High Holy Day period.

Can I really change? Can forgiveness be real in my life, and can I be accountable? You just can’t answer those questions. You actually have to practice answering them, and so it turns out that the 30 days before Rosh Hashanah—really the 40 days before Yom Kippur—are days devoted to practicing in those three areas. So, we actually practice asking what changes in our behavior do we have to make that would be more aligned with who we imagine we ought to be, who we think God wants us to be. We practice forgiveness. In other words, you can’t come on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, and expect some spiritual forgiveness experience without first preparing by asking people for forgiveness for things that you’ve done and by granting forgiveness to people who have done things to you. And, finally, unless you actually begin to think about your behavior and what you are accountable for and what have been the consequences of the previous year’s behavior, you’re not going to have a Yom Kippur experience.

The practice amongst the many practices in the forty days prior to Yom Kippur, first and foremost, [is] what I call a kind of spiritual, moral, or ethical inventory, and that is to go through one’s life, the different areas in one’s life. First, the family, family relationships, the most intimate relationships, extending out to friendships, then work relationships and how one is operating at work with other people and the work one is doing. Then the larger community, world, nature—to actually go through those areas. My practice, and the practice that I suggest, is to take two things. Take your checkbook and take your Day-Timer or Blackberry calendar and to look—how did I use my time this year? Because that says a lot about who we are. And how did I use my money this year? So there’s that piece, which is part of the practice in preparation, and then to actually recognize about where one is and ask people for forgiveness, and that means literally picking up the phone and saying “Hey, you know what? Earlier this year, I know, I dissed you” or “I did something that was very inappropriate,” or “I took credit for something,” whatever it is, or “I ignored you,” and to be able to come to terms and ask for forgiveness. It turns out the more you practice and prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the richer that experience is.

In more traditional communities, in the mornings of the week before Rosh Hashanah there are penitential prayers. Those are prayers in which one asks for forgiveness, and it’s a kind of asking for forgiveness in general, in the hope that it’ll stimulate where, specifically, I need to ask for forgiveness, and that’s every morning for the week before. There’s also another practice starting the month before Rosh Hashanah—in other words, those forty days prior to Yom Kippur—of blowing the shofar, which is one of the central symbols of the High Holiday experience, blowing the shofar at the end of the morning prayer service, and the shofar is just a blast of the ram’s horn, and it, in a sense, wakes you up. You’re not used to hearing a blast of a ram’s horn, and it is supposed to cause you to become more alert to your own behavior.

What the Jewish wisdom tradition invites us to think is that before one can actually approach God, or what I call kind of the “vertical dimension,” one has to have the horizontal dimension in order. I would say it this way, that the moral alignment between us as individuals is a necessary component and base for the spiritual relationship that we want. I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He came to the United States, one of his first trips, and they brought him to a meditation center, and what struck him was that people were engaged in spiritual practice who hadn’t developed an ethical practice, and he said this was the first time he ever saw spiritual practice being built and created independent of ethical practice, and I think that most religious traditions and most spiritual wisdom traditions would suggest that the alienation or the disconnection between us and God is actually a consequence and a function of a deep disconnection between us and other human beings, and so the practice in Jewish life is you can’t come to God on Yom Kippur and ask for forgiveness or ask for a realignment in the relationship if you haven’t done the work between you and other human beings.

Changing your fate for the coming year is a part of a larger question: Do we believe that our behavior actually affects our destiny? Now we have to understand that in a fairly careful way because there’s not a direct cause-effect correspondence that we can generally pick up: “If I’m good, there’ll be no sickness; if I’m bad, I’ll be punished.” Well, it turns out that we know, most of us, that life doesn’t move that easily, and cause-effect is not that clean. But there’s a deeper sense, I think, at least in my experience, and I think this is most people’s experience, there’s a deeper sense that there’s a relationship between my behavior and my destiny, in how I feel about myself, in how I approach the world, in that whatever happens to me somehow I’m capable of dealing with what happens to me at a higher, more evolved level if my behavior is correct and aligned with the things and values that I hold most deeply. So there’s a sense on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which thousands of people gather together and go through many, many prayers in which we ask ourselves, “How have I done?” For illuminating and actually elucidating the variety of potential sins, and the word for sin in Hebrew is “chet,” which means “missing the mark,” the places where I’ve missed the mark and the sense that if I can discover some of those places and begin to correct them that my destiny will actually be better.

No matter what path you’re on, the path is always filled with unpredictability. The path is always filled with things that we can’t control and places that we can’t control. But what we can really control, as best we can, is our behavior up front and our responses to other people, and responses to the unpredictability and vulnerability and fragility in life. And Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to think about that. One of the most important prayers on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur comes right at the center of the worship service, when the most people are in the synagogue, is a prayer “Who shall live, and who shall die?” And that’s a question that we don’t often ask ourselves, and I don’t think we should ask it every day; if you ask it every day, it would be a little crazy. But once a year to come clean, to look around and say, “You know what? There’ are no guarantees here. There is a fragility to our lives. Given that, how do I want to live?” If I look at my job, I look at my spouse, I look at my friend, I look at my parents, and I say “Wow, what is really true about life or death is that I don’t know, no matter what I do, no matter how good I take care of people, I don’t know if next year at this time everybody’s going to be here.” Well, given that, what are my obligations? How do I want to treat the people both close to me, and how do I want to act in a world in which I may not be here a year from now? Now, confronting our mortality up front and surfacing the anxiety that that does produce, and then asking who do I want to be—given that, generally speaking, helps us become more ethical human beings and much more sensitive to life.

We know that we’re not going to be able to change everything, and, of course, the paradox is that we’ll probably be here the following Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably saying the exact same prayers and probably, for most of the things that we tried to change, having not been so successful. But part of what it means to be a human being is to stay in that game, to believe that yes, we can change, that the change happens incrementally, to not imagine that your life is over because you haven’t made those changes, and that’s part of the message of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When I get to the service on Rosh Hashanah morning and get to those prayers that I know I said the exact same prayers—I’m 51-one years old—I remember saying them probably consciously since I’m about seven or eight. And it’s funny, pretty much for the last 25-30 years it’s the same ones that I’m still working on, you know? How to be a little bit more patient with the people I care about, how to be a little less oriented towards being in conflict with the people with whom I deeply disagree, how to be a little bit more generous and a little less ego-centered. So, you know, these are the ongoing dilemmas, and I think that if you have a regular, set time in a year, or even in a week or in a day, but here we’re talking about the High Holidays, if you have a regular, set time in which a community comes together by the thousands to do a little introspection and ask how am I aligned with other human beings, how am I aligned with God, and how am I aligned with who I deeply want to be, chances are we’ll be a little bit better.

The central activity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the activity that defines almost everything that’s happening, is the word “teshuva.” Teshuva comes from the word, “shuv,” which means “to return,” and there’s this sense that deep down, deep, deep, deep, deep down, you know, in the privacy of your own heart and your own soul and mind and spirit, we know we want to be good people, deep down. But what happens in life is things get distorted, and we get hurt, and we become fearful and filled with anxiety and scared, and so we don’t act in light of what deep, deep, deep down we know we can be and want to be. Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

“Repent” would be a more Protestant or Christian term for the word for teshuva. We don’t actually have—there’s no word “repent” that way. But repent means to try to make up for what you do. We have a process in Jewish wisdom, and Maimonides was the most important articulator of this, we have a process of gaining forgiveness that I call the four R’s, and the first is to realize what one has done. You know, until you realize what you’ve done wrong, you can’t do anything about it, and realization is really hard. You know, you can tell a person they’ve done wrong, and a person can tell me “you did something wrong, you did something wrong.” But until you see it and realize it, you’re not in the game, the forgiveness game. So the first is to realize. The next is to regret, actually, that I did it. The next thing is to attempt to repair. Sometimes that repair is in a conversation. Sometimes that repair is in financial remuneration. Sometimes that repair is in actually diminishing myself a little bit to allow a realignment in the relationship and changing my behavior, and only then is there the fourth R—reconciliation, and it’s those four R’s together, which is the process of forgiveness, which for us, for Jews, is what we mean by repentance.

The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

On Rosh Hashanah afternoon, after having been in synagogue most of the day and then coming and having a festive New Year’s meal, a practice developed called Tashlikh, from the word, l’hashlikh, to cast away or to throw away, and it is, like all ritual, a theatrical re-enactment, and we go to a brook or a river or a stream or an ocean, a body of water, and we symbolically, either taking bread or something, cast away our sins into the water, and, of course, the water carries them away, and having been in this process of teshuva, this process of spiritual and moral inventory, over the last thirty days, and now anticipating the next ten days to actually physically remove and cast away and stand at water that is a cleansing symbol to begin with, that carries away, in a sense, our sins is a very powerful interior, in a sense, re-enactment together as a community. So, literally, you just stand at the water and from young to old take a crumb of bread and throw it into the water. And there’s a passage that says “Cast away my sins, cast away my sins.” And then, very often, since it’s done kind of late afternoon and the sun is beginning to set, very often birds will come and they’ll take the bread away, and it has a wonderful theatrical feel and a sense of liberation, that my sins are being removed from me. And what that’s really saying is that I may sin, but I’m not sinful. And I think that’s a piece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur experience. Very often, for ourselves and for other people, we confuse doing bad things with being bad people. And I’m not sure, really, if we can evolve and grow morally and psychologically and spiritually as long as we think we are bad people. We’re people who, very often, do bad things, who very often sin but have the capacity to cast away that sin, to work through those mistakes and become better people.

One of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. One would expect that first I have to atone, first I have to make sure I’ve come to terms with who I am, and I’ve realized and regretted and repaired and gotten better, and then I get to celebrate. In fact, the Jewish calendar runs it in reverse. First we’re going to celebrate the New Year. Now in the context of celebration of a New Year, the change really is possible. Now let’s get down to the business of change. And I think pedagogically and methodologically and psychologically that’s a very, very important move. First, everything’s going to be okay. Now let’s work on things, as opposed to let’s work on things and see if everything’s going to be okay.

On Yom Kippur, five times during the day there’s a confessional, there’s a list of “for the sin that I did with my mouth, for the sin that I did with my eyes, for the sin that I did by stealing, for the sin that I did with arrogance,” and there’s five times during the Yom Kippur service one goes through, one goes “Al Khet” for the sin. It’s a practice of hitting one’s heart, kind of to get the heart going, that type of idea, and what’s interesting is almost all of the sins recognized are between human beings. They are not between the human being and God. On Yom Kippur, this intense, spiritual, introspective day, the vast majority of sins that are evoked or attempted to bring to consciousness are between human beings, which is a way of saying that if you really want to know God, you’d better start with the most visible symbol and image of God available, which is other human beings.

Atonement is really just a fancy word for the forgiveness process. The word Yom Kippurim, from the word “kappare,” really means to be engaged in this forgiveness process. Atonement is just a fancy word for “at one.” If you engage in forgiveness, if you do the introspection that is required during this period you will feel more at one with yourself, at one with other people, at one with the cosmos, or reality, or the universe, or God, whatever it is you call it. And that “at-one-ment,” that alignment is the goal of the Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur period.

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, “Who shall live and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written (in other words your fate, your destiny is written down, is inscribed), and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed. And there is this sense, and again, whether one believes it literally or as a deep metaphor, the only issue for me is, do you take it seriously, and that our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life. In that respect, there’s the sense that on Rosh Hashanah, who we are going to be based on, how we make this assessment, is written down. And, yet, then you have another ten days in which to really go through that process even more deeply of asking who you are, and then it gets sealed. And “gets sealed” doesn’t mean that it’s closed forever, because of course, the paradox, or the joke, or the irony, or the, you know, in Jewish wisdom there’s as many traditions that say but it’s really not sealed until the end of the whole holiday period, or three weeks later, at the end of the Festival of Tabernacles and Simchat Torah, that it’s really not sealed. And even then it’s really not sealed, because every morning you go through a practice in which you ask for forgiveness. So “sealed” is a way of saying something does happen if you spend a full day on Yom Kippur and you spend full days on Rosh Hashanah, the forty days and the process of engaging in teshuvah and forgiveness, something does happen, and there’s a feeling that if I’ve missed that or not done it right, that it does affect who we are. It does affect our destiny.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens, but again there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book, but just really think about who you are, and it can make a difference in your life.

Part of the ritual on Yom Kippur is by denying yourself these variety of bodily activities, eating, making love, washing, one begins to simulate in a way one’s bodily death, and, you know, by the end of the day on Yom Kippur, that hour before the final shofar blowing at sunset, people, you know, their faces are a little more craggy and their beards a little bit—and they’re running on empty a little bit, and one discovers that there’s a deeper life than simply the physical life. And if we can tap into that life, which I think every religious and spiritual wisdom tradition tries to do, to tap into that deeper dimension of life beyond just the material and physical and body, there is a deeper or new life that emerges, and that final blow of the shofar, and the shofar blow is only dependent on one’s breath; there’s no notes, you know, it’s just the breath of life. Sometimes I call it a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for us. You know, you hear that sound and there is a rebirth and in that respect confronting one’s own mortality, at least for me confronting my own mortality. My mother passed away between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur, and I know that, for me, that will be central in my mind. One of the major prayers in Yom Kippur is what’s called Yizkor, “to remember,” and the community as a whole remembers people who they loved and who’ve passed away, and you take that twenty minutes in the middle of the day and you remember someone who died and a lot of thoughts go, like, how did I really operate with that person and what do I need to do differently, and with time being so short, how do I want to love, and how do I want to be more compassionate, and how do I want to be there? And so it turns out confrontation with death is one of the great methodologies to make us appreciate life.

The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well known is fasting. Every single tradition has fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, my heart, and my ethical way, and that surely does help. We know there’s physical aspects to this, too. If you don’t eat, certain ego structures begin to loosen up and you’re a little bit more open. I mean, it turns out there’s a lot more tears Yom Kippur afternoon when we talk about our lives than there are Yom Kippur morning, because in the end when one doesn’t eat, one’s a little bit less in control of all of the structures we build to defend against difficult truths, to defend against insights and illuminations that are going to cause pain and will force us to think about our lives in different ways. So we fast as a way to become more in tune with our spiritual and our inner life.

The most visible, really the only symbol of Rosh Hashanah, is the ram’s horn, which is blown—100 different sounds or times is it blown. There are three basic sounds to the Rosh Hashanah. One is a longer sound. That sound then is broken up into three, and that sound is broken up into nine, and each sound stimulates a kind of call. One is more plaintive, one is more a little bit frenzied, with more anxiety, and those calls together are to evoke and to wake us up. “Arise from the slumber” is what Maimonides says the shofar sounds are supposed to do, and there’ll be 1000 people or 2000 people in the room, in the synagogue, and it is perfectly silent except for the sound of the shofar that’s piercing through all of the armor, so to speak, the internal armor that we construct to avoid hearing the deepest call of our life, which is to be decent human beings.

On Yom Kippur, there’s no shofar blowing until the very, very last act at sunset. The sun is set, Yom Kippur ends. The ending of Yom Kippur is the reciting of “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” “God is God,” and that’s recited one time, another thing is recited three times, another thing is recited seven, but at the end of Yom Kippur the very final act is the longest blow of the entire High Holiday period, and it’s just one long blow.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service, which begins at evening and extends to the next night at sunset. Kol Nidre means “all my promises,” and it’s a paragraph in which the congregation comes together and says all the promises, all the obligations, all the bonds that I have made this year, all of them should be dissolved. Now, what that is really about is it’s making a claim that if I’m really going to assess who I am, I have to look at every promise, every obligation, every commitment that I’ve made, because that’s what defines us—our promises, our obligations, our commitments….It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations…Now, once one has that experience, by the end of the Kol Nidre, which lasts about 10-15 minutes, it’s sung three times by the cantor in a very dramatic way, at the end of that all of my promises, all of my obligations are nullified. The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them….And as Yom Kippur unfolds, one takes back one’s promises in new commitments….So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours….You’ve got no responsibilities now. You have no promises, no obligations. They’re all null and void. Now, who do you want to be?

Whether they are Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist or Reform, whether they gather on a California beach or in a New York City synagogue, Jews share at least one common element at their Rosh Hashanah observances: the shofar.

“It’s such a powerful Jewish symbol,” said Rabbi Aaron Panken, vice president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “It is the specific symbol of repentance.”

Repentance is a central theme of the 10-day period starting with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which begins at sundown on Sept. 12 and culminates with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, beginning at sundown on Sept. 21.

The sound of the shofar connects these important days in the Jewish year. Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, is a time of preparation, and the shofar is blown every day. Its reverberations are at the heart of Rosh Hashanah services, and it is also blown at the end of services on Yom Kippur.

“The main way it’s used is to remind us that this is an alarm, a wake up call,” Panken said. “It reminds us to think about the way we behave and the kinds of things that we do, and to move us to act better.”

The shofar’s symbolism is rooted in its history, which begins in the Torah. “When the Ten Commandments were given at Mt. Sinai, the voice of the shofar was heard,” said Sylvia Herskowitz, director of Yeshiva University Museum.

The shofar is invoked at critical moments in the Bible and serves many purposes.

“It’s used for everything — from processionals of kings, as a call to war, to induce fear,” Panken said. “If you think about it, it’s sort of the air raid siren of its day, the way that people would communicate alarm or concern.”

The biblical commandment is that everyone should hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, Herskowitz said. It is so important that if someone is hospitalized or too ill to come to the synagogue, a shofar blower will visit and sound the shofar for them.

There are thousands of years of Jewish commentary on the shofar — on how it should sound and how it should be made. It is fashioned from an animal’s horn, most often a ram’s horn. The Talmud says it may also be made from the horn of a sheep, a goat, a mountain goat, antelope, or gazelle, Panken said.

“The horn of a cow is not acceptable,” according to Herskowitz. “Tradition says at the time of asking God for forgiveness, we don’t want to remind him of the sin of the Golden Calf,” referring to an idol worshipped by the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt.

The shofar must be whole. It should not be made from two animals’ horns that have been glued together, and it can’t have any breaks or holes in it.

“One of the requirements of the shape of the shofar is that it’s supposed to be bent, because we are supposed to be bent in subservience to God, in penitence,” said David Olivestone, who blows shofar at Congregation Ohab Zedek in New York City.

Olivestone learned to blow the shofar when he was a child. It can be difficult because there is no reed or valve, nothing to help make the sound. There is always an element of uncertainty about how the sound will come out, said Olivestone.

That uncertainty is not limited to the person who blows the shofar. The synagogue congregation also has a sense of anticipation about the sound the horn will make.

“I say it’s probably the most dramatic part of the Rosh Hashanah service, when the shofar blower comes up there,” Herskowitz said.

Before the shofar is blown during the Rosh Hashanah service, there is a blessing giving thanks for the commandment to hear it. Then, in many synagogues there are 100 blasts of the shofar and three distinct, mandatory sounds.

“You’re not allowed to interrupt anything, in Jewish law, between saying the blessing and doing the action,” Olivestone said. “So you cannot talk until the last note is sounded. Theoretically at least, the synagogue is very quiet. It’s all one long mitzvah,” he observed, using the Hebrew word for commandment or good deed.

The first mandatory sound for the shofar blower is the Tekiah.

“The Tekiah comes from the verb which means to blow the shofar,” he said. “The sound is in itself a sound of alarm. It’s a straight, simple note. The rule is that the Tekiah, which brackets other sounds, has to be at least as long as they are.”

The next mandatory note is the Shvarim.

“The word comes from the Hebrew word for something being broken. It’s a three-part sound. It sounds like somebody crying. Then the cry proceeds to a more intense stage. The next stage of somebody crying might be when they’re actually sobbing, and that’s the sound of Truah. It’s at least nine staccato sounds, rapid fire,” Olivestone said.

The last sound is the Tekiah Gedolah, which is really an extra long Tekiah, used to denote the end of the series, he said.

“There are loud blasts that come out of it, and there are these subtle, quiet sounds,” Panken said. “What’s interesting to me is that could mirror in a sense what repentance is like. There are these great moments when you have an incredible understanding that really strikes you and changes your life. Then those subtle, sort of small, yet still important moments.”

For all that has been written about its power and meaning, there is something about the sound of the shofar that is difficult to describe.

“When you think about it, it’s just an animal sound,” Olivestone said. “It’s just as basic as you can possibly get. One of the traditions in connection with the shofar is that there are prayers which can never be verbalized. There are prayers that are deeper than language. The shofar can somehow express the prayers that words are inadequate to express.”

Ansley Roan is a freelance religion reporter in New York.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Next week the Jewish High Holidays begin. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts Wednesday night (September 12) leading to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, nine days later (September 21). In synagogues, on both occasions, one of the traditional parts of the services is the blowing of the shofar, the ancient ram’s horn recalling Abraham’s last-minute sacrifice of a ram instead of his son, Isaac. On Rosh Hashanah the shofar’s mournful sound is intended to induce feelings of repentance and the need to return to God. Around the world, there are hundreds of classes to which children come to learn how shofars are made. We joined a group in Brooklyn, New York at a class called the Shofar Factory. Our guide was Rabbi Chaim Hershkowitz of Chabad’s Jewish Children’s Museum.

Rabbi CHAIM HERSHKOWITZ (Chabad’s Jewish Children’s Museum): Judaism is packed with symbols. The shofar is one of the main symbols that people identify with, you know, in terms of the High Holidays.

The Shofar Factory is meant to give kids a hands-on learning experience. We’ve all gone to synagogue. We’ve seen the shofar. Where it comes from, how does it get to its final stages–no one really knows. So that Shofar Factory takes that kid through all of the stages of making the shofar. And then, when he stands there on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur and he sees that shofar, it has much more of a significant meaning to his whole holiday.

A shofar can be as big as your hand to as big as they come. We don’t want someone to think that he’s just making noise with his hand. So the measurements start at being bigger than the fist. Usually, the longer the shofar the easier it is to get the sound out.

The commandment to actually hear the shofar is for Rosh Hashanah. However, it’s customary to blow for the entire month before as a preparation.

The reason why we do blow shofar is because Rosh Hashanah is the New Year, and it’s a time to look back at past behavior and fix that and look forward to the New Year and things that could use change. So the shofar is actually used throughout the service as an evoking sound for the Jewish people to do chuvah. The word chuvah usually is translated as “repent,” but the literal translation means “to return.”

Rosh Hashanah is two days, so both days the shofar’s sounded. The first sound that usually we blow with a shofar is the Tekiah, which is a very long shofar blast, symbolizing the deep yearning to return.

The next one would be the Shvarim, which is three medium-sized shofar blasts, again symbolizing the need to return and the feeling of remorse.

And then we have the Truah, which is the nine short shofar blasts, which symbolize the crying of a young child and realizing that he’s hit rock bottom and that now it’s time for change.

Throughout Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it’s usually a very serious and solemn time. At the end of Yom Kippur, we are certain that God had answered our prayers and forgiven us for all our sins for the past year. So that time at the end when you finally hear that shofar blast, it’s a great sigh of relief.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Next Wednesday evening the Jewish High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. According to Jewish tradition, this will be the 5765th year since Creation. We spoke about the High Holidays with a hazzan, also known as a cantor, who leads a congregation in sung prayer. He is Henrique Ozur Bass of Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac, Maryland. Also with his wife, a rabbi, Janet Ozur Bass, a Jewish day school teacher.

Hazzan HENRIQUE OZUR BASS (Congregation Har Shalom, Potomac, Maryland, praying in synagogue): Adonai, Adonai. As a hazzan in the congregation, I can ask for my congregation, for them to be inscribed in the Book of Life, for them to be granted another full year, and also carry their prayers all the way up to heaven.

Rabbi JANET OZUR BASS (Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Rockville, Maryland): Our relationship with God can only be whole and at one when we are at one with the people around us. So if I don’t ask for forgiveness, and in turn I don’t forgive, then I can’t have a healthy relationship with God. The shofar is a ram’s horn, and it is used as an announcing tool. it is used to wake us up. In the Bible it was used to call people for important announcements or for a war cry, and today it is used to remind us of our relationships during this time of year with God, with our community.

We are brought to the precipice of our death. We are reminded of our mortality. The liturgical poem asks who is going to die this year and asks with very, very specific and graphic language how that person is going to die. We are reminded of our mortality so that we can ask the question, so how should I live?

We are reminded with this very, very simple recipe for how to make our lives meaningful. “Teshuvah,” repentance; “tefillah,” and prayer; “tzedakah,” and giving of charity, but it’s also giving of ourselves to the community around us.

Hazzan OZUR BASS: It is such a powerful experience to let go of the guilt, the frustration, sometimes the anger that you have towards a specific incident that is just crowding your memory.

One common tradition is to eat apples and honey for a sweet New Year. A pomegranate has been incorporated because a pomegranate has many seeds, and it is a symbol of fertility, so we should be a fertile people. We have a round challah symbolizing that that there is no beginning to our lives. The year might start at Rosh Hashanah, but really it’s cyclical.

Rabbi OZUR BASS: In the Torah Yom Kippur is, we are told it is a day where we are to afflict ourselves. We are to refrain from exercising our appetites, not just eating but our sexual appetites. Our sense of physical beauty is diminished so that we can have moments when we meditate on inner beauty, on the beauty of our relationship with God. That’s what I love about these holidays. I am reminded to make the most of my relationships with the people around me, to treat myself with respect, to be the best that I can be as a human being, and when I fail I can have a second chance.

BOB ABERNETHY: On our calendar this week, the Jewish high holy days, which began Friday, September 6 with Rosh Hashana — the Jewish new year — and end September 16 with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We went to Rosh Hashana services at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York; and first, to a purification rite called “tashlikh,” performed in Central Park.

Rabbi GARY BRETTON-GRANATOOR (Stephen Wise Free Synagogue): Today we come to this body of water to perform the tashlikh ceremony… so that we may purify our hearts and our souls as the new year begins… “Avaynu malkaynu hanaynu” … and now if you take a piece of bread, as you throw it into the water, symbolically cast away your sins and let us be pure as we start this new year.

God has hopes for us. And in a way we have to try to live up to those hopes… It’s part of the human condition. We are flawed. And sometimes our flaws weigh us down especially when we want to try to become better people. If we allow our sins to weigh us down, we’ll never be able to free ourselves from our mistakes. … So we have to, after a real analysis of who we are and what we are and what our faults are, try to be able to cast them away. But we don’t cast them away without acknowledging what they’re all about. We cast them away by saying I know what I’ve done and I want to do “chuva,” I want to change.

I think that the heavens are open. We believe that God is giving us a chance… the gates of heaven are open to allow us to better ourselves.

The shofar is meant to really wake us up. It’s kind of like a spiritual alarm clock. Wake up! Recognize that you have a chance to make this world better. And it’s a plaintive cry, so we also hear that God is saying, “Come back, come back to me,” as any parent would to a child.

Repentance, prayer, and charity are the hallmark[s] of this season. We search our souls and then we pour out our souls to God, saying, “God help us, give us the strength to be the kind of people that we want to be.” But that’s all meaningless unless it compels us to do the right thing. And that’s what charity is all about. Those are the required actions even in the wake of September 11. Have we done the work of caring for others?

There is apples and honey here…

Apples are a symbol of life. And honey is a symbol of sweetness. And as we enter into this new year, we want to recognize that life is renewed and it should be a sweet year.

It’s a time when we feel that we’re being judged, when we judge ourselves very severely, and yet we’re living in an incredible world. We are surrounded by beauty; we’re surrounded by wonderful acts of generosity, of selflessness, and we have to stop for a moment and recognize how truly lucky we are.