Shofar, so good

I have the deep honor of serving as West End Synagogue’s principal Shofarist or as Rabbi Joshua Kullock likes to put it, our official CSO, or Chief Shofar Officer.  It’s a role I take very seriously, and I spend this time of year practicing and getting in shape for that important task.   
 
It's been a very interesting role and so much has changed over the years.  People always ask me how I stumbled into this role, did I practice or have a trainer?  The simple fact is that I have never had anyone teach me.  I spent many years playing trombone in grade school and in college as a music major; not only was my dad a conductor who studied under Leonard Bernstein, he was also a recovering trombonist, so I come by it genetically.  Throw in some YouTube videos, and to play three notes is pretty simple.  My current record on Tekiah Gedolah is right under a minute and thirty seconds without circular breathing. 
 
For years I had used a ram’s horn, and one day I walked into the gift shop at West End Synagogue and Helen Crowley talked me into upgrading to a kudu horn shofar.  Game.  Changer.  But not for the reason you might think! The reason it is so much easier to blow my larger shofar is simply how the mouthpiece is bored out – mine is more comparable to a trumpet or French horn mouthpiece.  And the reality is if I ever hit the lottery, I’m totally going to buy a shofar with a mouthpiece bored out to a trombone mouthpiece cup.   
 
Things got a little different during the pandemic. In 2020, West End made the tough decision to record services for High Holidays out of an abundance of concern for our congregants. It was extra-challenging for us, because my wife Abby had the day job of building the safety plan for the second-largest state agency with offices in all 95 counties, and also consulting our shul. She will never tell me which was more challenging… 
 
So much effort was made to schedule the filming of the services so that only a few people would be together at a time, people would remain isolated while recording their individual segments, and it would all be sewn together at the end.  I did my part and blew the shofar for all of the services with Rabbi Kullock.  It seemed like everything was in the bag.  And then, disaster struck.  Somehow, due to a technical difficulty, half of the recordings were destroyed – we were back to square one right before the high holidays.  And so, we ended up recording many pieces live the day of.  And I have to say, while it was so lonely being at High Holidays with around a dozen people, that year will forever be a special memory for me. 
 
And if you didn’t know, the simple act of hearing the someone sound the shofar is a mitzvah.  So, that year, I stood out in the parking lot of West End, handed Rabbi Kullock my old school Radio Shack bullhorn, and I blew shofar for as many cars that could fill the parking lot, then those folks would leave, the next group would drive in, and then Rabbi Joshua and I would repeat the process.  And it gave me special joy that year driving around to congregants’ houses delivering Rosh Hashanah gift bags and also letting them hear the shofar from a safe distance. 
 
There have been lots of great stories over the years, like the time in ’22 when Abby and I almost got stranded in Paris and made it back to Nashville with just enough time to get to services.  But the toughest year I ever faced was in 2016.  A mere four days after my best friend, my brother Chris Sparks, was brutally shot in an unsolved murder, I made the decision to push through to blow shofar on the High Holidays.  It was, without question, the worst performance I have ever displayed in my time blowing shofar – I was a disaster. Rabbi Kullock gave me many opportunities to abort mission. But I stubbornly carried on; it was one of the few things I had to hold onto.  And the thing that destroyed me was seeing two brothers, Joe and Arthur Perlen, standing together at the front of the audience. It made me realize that I would never get to grow older with my best friend, and it absolutely crushed me. 
 
This year, my brother’s yahrzeit and High Holidays fall on the exact same days as they did in 2016.  I am in a much better place than I was back then, thanks to great therapy, and channeling my grief through social action, and advocating for common-sense legislation on Capitol Hill.  I still don’t know who killed my brother, but at the very least, I hope that I can offer some solace to my fellow congregants, and there is no way I can perform as badly as I did in ’16.   
 
I hope this New Year that you not only get to hear the sound of the shofar, but also that it announces the start of a sweet, wonderful era for all of you.