What Shofar Is Seen But Not Heard?

The goal of this blog is Shabbat table conversation… please print and share.

Last week was the “Call of the Child”…

This week, the call of the shofar — shuls around the world began to resonate with daily shofar blasts in anticipation of the great Day of Shofar – Rosh Hashanah.

This week’s title is a riddle for your table so obscure that unless you have 100,000 or so people at your table, I’d bet no one will get it right.

It’s based on a fascinating statement in the Talmud – so fascinating that I put it in the Amazing Jewish Fact-a-Day Calendar:

R. Gamaliel had a shofoferet through which he could see at a distance of two thousand cubits across the land and a corresponding distance across the sea. Eiruvin 43b

Context is everything, right? It’s clear from the context that Rabban Gamliel’s shofoferet is not a curved shofar like ours rather a straight tube.

(Perhaps like the gemsbok shofar pictured above?)

While polished glass lenses were invented centuries after the life of Rabban Gamliel, ancient Greeks and Romans knew that certain stones, crystals and water-filled spheres could magnify optics.

Therefore, while we don’t know how Rabban Gamliel’s shofoferet worked, is it outlandish to speculate that he — the greatest sage of his generation who was entirely familiar with scientific matters — knew about crystal lenses?

Or that he perhaps discovered that putting lenses at the ends of a tube would sharpen his view of a distant object?

Did you know… that with a small telescope no more powerful than the one used by Galileo 400 years ago, you can see the four largest moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn? (An average pair of binoculars works too.)

Now: If you’ve ever used a telescope then you know that using it is the epitome of choosing what to look at — it needs to be aimed perfectly and held rock-steady. You are not going to stumble on Jupiter or Saturn, it is going to be a deliberate gaze.

Question for your table: Clearly a person can choose what to look at. But is the same true of seeing – does a person choose what to see?

Shabbat Shalom.