Despite being a feminist, for much of my life I assumed that to be a good shofar blower one needed a big barrel chest. I thought that the essential quality one needed to blow shofar was big masculinity.
My barrel-chested father was an excellent shofar blower. He blew the shofar from the bima in my home synagogue each year, turning bright red as he blew each of the blasts. I always held my breath during his shofar-blowing hoping that he didn’t keel over and die from the effort.
The year after my father died, Jeremy asked me to blow shofar in the sanctuary three days before Rosh Hashanah. I guess that someone had bowed out of the job. I hadn’t actually blown shofar in public before, but I knew that I could get a sound out of the shofar we owned. I immediately agreed to take on the mitzvah.
I started practicing. After a couple of tries I realized that I produced a bigger, stronger sound if I practiced using the same muscles that I was trained to use in Lamaze classes when I prepared to give birth to my children.
When you give birth to a baby, you learn to harness all of your strength to push that baby out. Blowing a shofar requires exactly the same focus, using of all of the muscles inside of your body to push the sound out from the bottom of your torso up through your body and out the shofar. The force that animates my shofar blowing comes directly from my uterus.
היּוֹם הַרת עוָֹלם,
Today the world is birthed
Is what we say on Rosh HaShanah over and over again. The memory of birthing babies is the force behind my shofar blowing.
