Borough Park, NY – Rabbi Levi Meisner’s Shofar Lessons Rings Out

Borough Park, NY – In his corner of Brooklyn, he has the status of a Louis Armstrong, though he is a young man with a different kind of horn.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Meisner is an expert on the shofar, the ram’s horn whose wailing, shivering sounds Jews will hear in synagogues across the world on Rosh Hashana, the two-day holiday that begins at sundown Wednesday. Though he no longer blows the shofar at formal services, he has taught scores of shofar blowers who do, especially in the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, where he lives.

Many people think the shofar is a relatively simple wind instrument to master; after all, it does not have anything like the range of do-re-mi notes that Mr. Armstrong could evoke from a trumpet. But Rabbi Meisner, 28, a lush-bearded father of two whose main livelihood is as a kosher supervisor for a rabbinical court, will tell you its simplicity is deceptive.

It does not take many lessons to learn the shofar, he said, but it takes a good deal of practice, practice, practice to sound an elegant tekiyah, shvorim, teruah – the three varieties of sounds that in various combinations are blown on Rosh Hashana and in abbreviated form at the close of Yom Kippur.

“You can’t teach how to blow,” he said, with the seeming incongruity of a Mel Brooks “2,000-Year-Old Man” routine. “It’s more to take away the bad habits that detract from blowing. Most people blow with a lot of effort, a lot of power. It’s exactly the opposite.”

“There’s a fancy word with trumpets: embouchure,” he continued. “That tells you how to hold the trumpet in the lips, not to push too tight. The sounds happens by tiny vibrations. As the Talmud says, ‘Intelligence, not work.’ ”

The other day, Rabbi Meisner, wearing his daily garb of a navy frock coat over a vest and white shirt buttoned at the neck, was instructing Yeedle Melber, 33, while a recent graduate, Rabbi Yechiel Lichtenstein, looked on. Mr. Melber said he wanted to be able to blow the shofar this holiday for his mother, who cannot leave the house because of recent surgery. Eventually, he said, he would also like to blow the shofar for his shtibl – a room-size house of worship. He can do an adequate long tekiyah and the trio of shvorim notes, but the nine short blasts of the teruah elude him.

“I fell into a trap that a lot of people do,” Mr. Melber said. “I get tense.”

“That’s the No. 1 killer,” Rabbi Meisner agreed.

“You have to become one with the shofar,” Mr. Melber said, echoing a mystical phrase of Rabbi Meisner’s. “You have to make peace with the shofar.”

Rabbi Meisner also imparts some practical tips for better blowing. Try not to eat before shofar time – it is easier to blow on an empty stomach. The first sound – tekiyah – can be performed with either a clean single keening sound or with a moanlike dip midway. Either way, it becomes a piercing call to repentance, which is after all the holiday’s raison d’être.

“They say the tekiyah is meant to straighten out the crookedness of the heart,” Mr. Melber said.

In recent weeks, Rabbi Meisner coached more than 50 students with two or three lessons apiece; he estimates that he has taught several hundred students in recent years. The need is great because Borough Park has 200 synagogues. But his influence will also be felt farther away – in a town outside Kiev in Ukraine, for example, where Rabbi Lichtenstein will be jetting in to lead a congregation that does not have a rabbi.