Page ten

OK, so here’s a thing: I’m in the first few pages of a book that looked quite interesting, judging from the cover and all. It’s an analysis of musician’s life and ouvre kinda thing, and, there on page ten is this bit:

Music making was a craft held in low esteem by Eastern European Orthodox Jews [in America in the 1920s and 1930s] whose religious tradition had no Bachs, no Telemanns, and indeed no instrumental music. The cantor sings a capella, and save for the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn, on the high holy day of Yom Kippur, music has no place in the Orthodox synagogue.

Now, part of it is that there is terrific liturgical music for the voice, with famous compositions recorded and justly celebrated within the community of American Jews; the idea that music has no place is just wrong. Part of it is that the fellow we are talking about was in a Reform temple at the time, so they had organ music and whatnot, so the bit about the Orthodox Jews is utterly irrelevant.

But mostly it’s that the shofar is blown on Rosh Hashanah, not on Yom Kippur. I mean, yes, it is blown once at the end of Yom Kippur—technically not on the Yom itself but at the moment that it is over. And for that matter, the shofar is blown once a day from the second of Elul. Rosh Hashanah, on the other hand, is Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the shofar. On Rosh Hashanah, we hear one hundred shofar blasts (well, we are obligated to hear 30 blasts, which are sounded during the morning shacharit service, but the thirty blasts are repeated twice more in the additional musaf service and then there another ten blasts at the end of the day’s prayers) (note: technical definition of a blast is available, for those who want it, but is not necessary for this discussion) (I stopped typing two days ago in the middle of that second parenthesis and now have forgotten my point) (Oh, yes, that was it).

Perhaps this is just a silly mistake, the sort of thing that the writer (perhaps a Jewish-secular writer going on his vague recollection of childhood attendance at services) threw in and nobody bothered checking because it was not going to be central to any further argument. Or perhaps this is the first symptom of a sloppy, lazy writer who is (a) going to be completely misrepresenting the context of the work for a whole book, and (2) going to be scattering little factoids (by the earlier, funnier definition of factoid) throughout the whole book that totally make me want to plotz.

What’s your advice, Gentle Reader? Should I give up now or press on? This is, by the way, one of those semi-pop semi-scholarly books, prof-author and footnotes, Big University Press, reviews in major popular journals. Aimed, essentially, at Your Humble Blogger. Could have had my name on it, in fact. But…

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.