Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teruah: Fall Holidays Pt. II

Last week, I wrote an introduction to Israelite time-keeping and the fall holidays.
This Wednesday, the 23rd, we celebrated the Feast of Trumpets.

As feasts go, Trumpets is pretty low-impact.

From Leviticus 23:23-25:
The Lord said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites: ‘On the first day of the seventh month you are to have a day of Sabbath rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts. Do no regular work...’”

On that day, we read the story of Joshua and Jericho, as trumpets play largely into the tale. We took it easy at home--we didn't clean or lift anything heavy. And, as our shofar arrived in the mail that day, we spend about a half hour figuring out how to make it sound like anything other than a dying rabbit.

This is what our shofar looks like--link for product page

Our shofar is a very common ram's horn shofar. They're small, light, and, most importantly for us, cheap. Because they are shorter, it's harder to get a nice sound out of them. They tend to sound higher and a little more "shrieky". I think it has something to do with needing more air/force to make the horn reverberate.

The nicer/easier to use horns are kudu horns. They're about three times and long, and they are spiral-shaped. They don't take as much air to make a sound, and the sound is more mellow.

This is a Kudu

This is a Kudu shofar

After about half an hour, each of us was able to coax out a vaguely trumpety-sound, and the horn was starting to smell, so we called it good.

But, why was the horn smelling? Though sellers of shofars usually clean the horns for you--polish them nicely, cut a smooth mouth-hole, and scrub out the insides, it's very hard to get them 100% clean. Renewed by our soggy breath, the shofar was starting to smell like, well, a dead animal.

Sven looked into it, and we've been applying various cleaning techniques for the last few days to ready it for more practice and the upcoming holidays. Techniques have included--soaking it in vinegar, drying it, and soaking it again in soap and water; soaking it in soap and water and scrubbing out the inside; and packing it full of baking powder for a day, adding hot water and salt, and soaking for another day. With the treatments, it now mostly smells like bone--how a dog's chew toy smells after a small while of vigorous chewing. It's not the best smell in the world, but it's not the worst, either.

I don't have much more to share, so I'll leave you with this video; enjoy the sound of a skilled shofar player :)