Alan Wagner still pictures it as one of the most stirring religious experiences of his boyhood. Perched on his father’s shoulders in their synagogue in Omaha, Neb., he strained to catch an ...

Merrick Fagan is a bass player and bartender, not a rabbi, but during the High Holy Days, he is entrusted with a sacred, God-ordained task. At Rosh Hashanah morning services, he blows a hollowed-out ...

Being little more than a husk of keratin from the head of a ram, goat 0r antelope, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow ...

Rabbi Zalman Levitin of Chabad House blows a shofar at The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach on Sept. 29, 2016. Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – began the evening of Oct. 2. And for the more ...

Rosh Hashanah is called Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the horn. But what instrument fulfills this mitzvah? The Torah itself does not specify, entrusting the Oral Torah (Torah she’ba‘al peh) ...

There's no way around it: The sound filling the sanctuary of Congregation Ner Tamid resembles the pained bleating of a herd of water buffalo after a lunch of profoundly questionable burritos. Yet, a ...

Since I was a boy, my musical heroes have been jazz musicians — Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane. My own trumpet playing was good enough to get me the solo chair in the school ...

Blowing shofar at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley daily for the month of Elul and for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Cooper is used to the feeling of clenching his shoulders and neck muscles, having ...