Friday, September 23, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Palestinian media has been obsessed with Jews blowing the shofar for weeks. It began when Yehuda Glick played a recording on his phone of a shofar blast while visiting the Temple Mount, an event that was widely reported in Arab media as if he played the shofar itself.
Glick was banned from the Temple Mount as a result - something the Arab media did not report - and he therefore decided to blow the shofar from outside, near the eastern wall.
Muslims objected to that as well, and the Israeli police arrested Glick again. But Israeli courts ruled that there is no reason not to blow the shofar outside the Mount.
Yet when Jews returned to blow the shofar again, they were arrested anyway, for "violating public order."
Five times a day, the loudspeakers on the Temple Mount blast the call of the muezzin at a decibel level 10 times higher than what the most accomplished shofar blower couldn't approach. (The numbers I see are 95 decibels maximum for the shofar but ss high as 110 decibels for muezzin loudspeakers in India, which I suppose are comparable to those on the Temple Mount.) Each muezzin call takes minutes, while the shofar blast takes seconds (except on Rosh Hashanah itself.)
Palestinian fear and anger at shofar blasts is antisemitism, and as if often the case, the proof can be seen in history.
Today, the Palestinians are saying that the spot that Glick blew the shofar is an Islamic cemetery. But back in 2006, they stopped shofar blowers at the Kotel HaKatan - not a Muslim holy place and not a cemetery .
I'm not certain whether Jews blew the shofar at the Kotel before the twentieth century, but I have news articles from 1914 and 1919 about shofar blasts for specific occasions (not on the holidays) to call attention to major events. Apparently, though, the shofar was blown routinely at the Kotel.
In 1929, just as today, Muslims managed to get the police (then British, now Israeli!) to acceded to their demands not to blow the shofar by threatening violence.
But brave Jews risked certain arrest every year from 1930 through 1947 to blow the shofar at the Kotel.
The Mufti's objection to the shofar was his objection to Judaism. And the Palestinian objection to the shofar today is the exact same thing.
Hamas says that Jews visiting the Temple Mount with shofars (and the lulav and etrog) will "lead to a battle nobody wants." But what they are really saying is that they hate the idea of Jewish human rights so much that they will go to war to try to prevent them.
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