From the Deep Recesses of the Jewish Soul, a Sweet Sound

When 8-year-old Brad Salter first stepped up to blow the shofar at Jewish High Holy Day services, he was a significant exception to the tradition of having pious older men perform the honor.

It was 1960, and the boy had no way of knowing that he would become a virtuoso on the ram’s horn, beginning a three-decade family tradition.

Rabbi Joseph Wagner of the Burbank Jewish Community Center had wanted to ease the pain of young Brad, whose 15-year-old brother, Dickie, had died of leukemia earlier that year. The privilege of blowing the horn at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services that fall, Wagner reasoned, might help.

“He said this was going to be something special for Brad because he had lost his brother,” recalls Brad’s mother, Rose Salter Cohen. “He was afraid that Brad would feel the effects of Dickie’s death.”

For two decades, Brad carried out what he immediately grasped was a “very special” honor. In 1980, shortly after Brad moved to Hawaii, and a year after Rabbi Wagner died, Brad’s younger brother, Randy, inherited the role.

As the Jewish New Year arrives this evening, a Salter has blown the shofar at what is now Temple Emanu El for 31 of the last 32 years. The exception was in 1976, when the Salter brothers’ father died on Rosh Hashanah.

Randy, now a 27-year-old attorney, is one of hundreds of Los Angeles Jews who will sound the shofar during the holidays, among them a woman rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a psychiatrist.

The blowers say the piercing sound of the instrument--intended to remind Jews of their obligations to God--profoundly moves them. As worshipers pray for another year of life, the blowers sound blasts five times during morning Rosh Hashanah services and once at the end of Yom Kippur.

Tension is high as blowers move to the front of the congregation and place the horn to their lips.

“Everybody gets nervous when they see a person put a shofar to their lips, and they’re just hoping it won’t come up like a croak. You can feel it in the room,” says Rabbi Naomi Levy, who will blow the horn at Temple Mishkon Tephilo in Venice.

“There’s tremendous pressure,” agrees Rabbi Danny Landes of the B’nai David-Judea Congregation in the Pico-Robertson area. “The person sounding the shofar is really representative of the community. The sound emanates from the ram’s horn, but it starts in the inner recesses of the Jewish soul.”

As the sounding grows closer, anxious congregants grow silent.

“It’s not uncommon to hear little bits of conversation during service, and all of a sudden I start blowing this thing and it’s quiet,” says Jerry Zerg, 65, an architect who has blown the shofar at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple for 10 years.

At the end of the last long blasts, worshipers buzz with relief. “Usually there’s some 15-year-old boy with his digital watch timing you,” says Stephen Marmer, a psychiatrist who attends Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles. “I close my eyes, and I feel as though I’m living 2,000 years ago. . . . It’s a startling sound. It’s like nothing we hear in 20th-Century Los Angeles.”

“When you finish,” says Marmer, “there’s usually a nervous laugh that goes through the congregation--like they want (the final blast) to be as long as possible, but they don’t want you to faint.”

“I see people in the congregation crying,” says Randy Salter. “They’re bubbling over with excitement. They root for you. . . . After blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, you walk around the congregation with the Torah before you put it away. You’re greeted with the yasher koach, which means, ‘You’ve got strength.’ It’s a congratulation.”

The instruments that unleash these feelings come in different colors and lengths (from one to three feet) and produce a variety of sounds. Most are created by Israeli craftsmen who buy the horns from slaughterhouses.

Their production is strictly governed by Jewish law. Horns must be taken from kosher animals, usually from rams, but occasionally from mountain goats, antelopes or others. And they must be bent to remind Jews to enter the new year with humility: A straight horn would be a sign of arrogance, says Rabbi Joshua Berkowitz of Beth Jacob Congregation in Los Angeles.

Because the horns have no natural mouthpieces, blowers say wind is less important than placing the lips properly on a hand-carved opening.

“You’re actually putting your lips together and vibrating them and letting out a small amount of air. It’s like (making) a raspberry sound when you were a kid,” says Randy Salter. “That’s how you get the long blasts.”

Levy, who has been following the ancient command to blow the shofar in the temple in the morning during the current Hebrew month of Elul , says people are surprised that women have power to sustain the blasts.

“(They think) women are too fragile or too dainty,” she says. “So there’s always like a ‘wow!’ ”

Levy notwithstanding, women seldom blow the shofar at services. Jewish law exempts women from the obligation--and, over the centuries, the exemption has largely turned into a prohibition.

“It is one interpretation of the law, and I don’t accept the interpretation,” Levy says. “It’s an interpretation that has tended to leave women on the sidelines. It’s an interpretation that is based on a misunderstanding of who women are.”

Levy, 29, will share time sounding the instrument with Sam Widawski, 67, who has performed the task at Mishkon Tephilo for 25 years. The Holocaust survivor learned to blow the ram’s horn as a boy in Poland.

“My grandmother raised me,” Widawski says. “She studied with some of the great rabbis and was learned in Hebrew. I’m not surprised when a woman studies the Talmud. I’m happy about it.”

Like Widawski, Marmer learned to blow the shofar as a boy, attending a class at a Hollywood temple. He sounded the instrument for 15 years in other congregations before starting at Stephen Wise seven years ago. He practices for a month before the services, using a long black shofar with two twists in it that he purchased in Jerusalem two years ago.

“I must have blown 50 shofarot that afternoon,” he recalls of the purchase. “My wife and kids were holding their ears by the end.

“I ended up getting one that was unpolished and makes a beautiful, eerie, natural sound. . . . Because it’s unpolished you can catch more than a little hint of the aroma of the ram.”

When Marmer blows the horn in public, he says he and the congregation are connected--but pleasing worshipers is not his primary concern.

“If I do let out a clunker of a note, I have to keep going,” he says. “This is a little like a musical performance, but mostly it’s a deeply spiritual act. In a way, you want it to sound as beautiful as possible, but in a way you have to not care how it sounds. You have to surrender yourself to what comes out.”

Randy Salter would agree. “When I get up there,” he says, “I close my eyes. The sound does what it’s supposed to do, which is resonate through your body and mind. You feel almost rejuvenated, which is what the High Holidays are all about. You feel like you got a fresh start.”