Shofar and bagpipe

This High Holiday season, like every High Holiday season for the last 25 years, will mix the sounds of the shofar and the bagpipe.

The shofar — the ram’s horn that punctuates Rosh Hashanah and whose long bleat-blast ends Yom Kippur — is blown during the month of Elul and then during both days of Rosh Hashanah (although because the holiday’s first day is Shabbat, we won’t hear it until Sunday).

It’s a primal sound. Atavistic. When you hear it, it bypasses your brain to go right to your heart. Run, it might tell you. Or it might pierce you with pain or longing. Or it might stir you to battle. It can’t specify which battle — it’s not sophisticated — but it can tell you that you have to fight, and that it must be alongside the people hearing it with you.

And then there’s the bagpipe. They’re old, the internet tells me; they date back to the 14th century. Of course, that makes them mewling babies compared to the shofar. And they are much more complicated than the shofar, and they can make many more sounds. There’s much that makes those two kinds of instruments very different from each other.

But like a shofar, a bagpipe produces a brain-bypassing sound. It warns of danger, bellows with grief, gathers and orients and rallies. Like the shofar, the sounds it makes are primal. Atavistic.

I live on the block that ends in the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Every year for a very long time, there has been a ceremony remembering the firefighters who died on 9/11. Every year, early in the morning, the road above it is blocked off, and then the main part of Riverside is too. Then the firefighters — mainly from New York, large groups from New Jersey, and delegates from farther away — and the dignitaries gather. My dog and I walk by them every year.

Every year is not the same. The first few years were full of palpable grief. The names that were recited were of people the audience remembered. As the years passed, the mood lightened. When the ceremony started, solemnity returned, but in general there was less gloom.

Five years ago, to mark the 20th anniversary, speakers read the name, rank, and unit of every one of the firefighters who were killed, and then a bell was rung after every name. There were 345 of them. It was a small percentage of the 2,977 who died at the Twin Towers, but a long enough list to make the enormity of the pure evil of the day clear.

So the bagpipes. Men in kilts play them at the Firemen’s Memorial. First, it is necessary to say that while there may be a lot that’s theoretically funny about men in kilts, when you see them, you are not tempted to giggle. Instead you gape. They are formidable.

Five years ago, I stayed for the reading of the names. It was Shabbat, so I did not have to rush home to work. I listened to “Amazing Grace,” on the bagpipe, which is deeply not Jewish, but is so beautiful and so mournful and so deeply human that I cried. And so did almost everyone around me.

But when I am back home, working from my desk in my apartment on the 13th floor of my building, which is on top of a hill, I can hear the bagpipes on September 11. They remind us of terror and evil, and also of community and the possibility of hope.

This year they will be followed closely by the sounds of shofar, which also sing to us of community and the possibility of hope.

All of us at the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News wish all of our readers a better year. A good year. A year of sweetness. A year of community and the possibility of hope.

—JP

opinion