HEAR THE SHOFAR

with UW HILLEL

BLOWING THE SHOFAR is Alex Knopf, senior at UW-Madison majoring in chemical engineering. Announcing the shofar blast notes is Rabbi Andrea Steinberger.

 

UW Hillel Foundation is a beneficiary organization of the Jewish Federation of Madison, providing a home for more than 4,000 Jewish students attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hillel is a pluralistic organization supporting all of the Jewish movements as authentic expressions of Jewish Life.

 

Types of Shofar Blasts
The following blasts are blown on Rosh Hashanah:

 

  • Tekiah (תקיעה‎) is a single long blast of the shofar.
     
  • Shevarim (שברים‎) is composed of three connected short sounds.
     
  • Teruah (תרועה‎) - in most Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions, this is a string of many short-lived, broken blasts made by the tongue (e.g. tut-tut-tut-tut, etc.). In the Yemenite, Tunisian and Babylonian Jewish communities, it is a single long, reverberating blast.
     
  • It is customary for the last tekiah in a set of 30, and the last tekiah blown overall on a day of Rosh Hashanah, to be extended in length, called a tekiah gedolah ("great tekiah").

 

The shofar blasts follow a prescribed pattern:

  • tekiah-shevarim-teruah-tekiah
  • tekiah-shevarim-tekiah
  • tekiah-teruah-tekiah

 

Source Cited: "Shofar blowing." Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shofar_blowing, Accessed September 2, 2020