When synagogues were shut in the first year of the pandemic, some of us might have been grateful for the shofar on the mantelpiece that might have been an heirloom or a souvenir from Israel, which enabled us to make a stab at fulfilling the core mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah.
Even if lockdown might have been a once-in-a-lifetime emergency, a shofar can still be a handy artefact to own — perhaps to blow for an elderly relative who otherwise wouldn’t get to hear it.
Traditionally, the rabbinic preference is for a curved ram’s horn, while the Yemenite Jews took their impressively long and twisting shofars from a kudu.
But if you had an eye for something less common, then Kobi Kahn-Harris might have an alternative to offer. The former JCoSS pupil from North London, who later this month starts a classics degree at Cambridge University, has begun making and selling his own shofarot, fashioned from the horns of springboks, blesboks and pronghorns.
One of Kobi Kahn-Harris's exotic shofarot: made from a springbok horn
“I enjoy making things,” he said, citing for example the Roman shields he made out of an interest in experimental archaeology.
In June this year, he was visiting the annual medieval fair in Barnet with his mother, Deborah Kahn-Harris, who is principal of the Reform rabbinic academy, Leo Baeck College. Among the items they saw on sale were cow horns, “which are not kosher for shofarot — but these were technically a different species of cow, so debatably kosher,” he said. “We bought one anyway to see if I could make it into a shofar because it would have looked really cool.”
It might have complemented the kudu horn that already adorns a wall in their home. But while his first attempt at shofar-making did not succeed, undeterred, his mother found a springbok horn online which proved to be more promising shofar material.
“Horns are not particularly easy to get in the UK,” he said. His source, he believes, is from South Africa “where they farm springboks for meat and this is a by-product”.
The inner layers of bone and collagen have been removed before they reach him, leaving an outer shell of keratin. First he must boil them to sanitise them, then drill out a mouthpiece that forms a channel into the hollow of horn, then they must be sanded and oiled. “You don’t want a rough edge otherwise it will hurt your mouth, you won’t be able to get a good seal to it. You want a nice smooth mouthpiece.”
The springbok shofar is typically shorter and darker than the ram’s horn. “Instead of mirror polish, which you often see, they are oiled and sanded. They are smooth to the touch, but you can still the grain in them and the ridges are really defined. I think it shows more respect to the animal.” It has a sharp, high sound. Online he sells it for around £90.
Since crafting a shofar — which takes three to four hours — can be a messy business, his work space is his back garden. He uses an electric bit to drill the mouthpiece — he tried initially by hand but it is “a massive pain and it hurts”. He has learned the technique from online guides, while a friend who plays the French horn has provided some useful information about mouthpieces.
An example of a blesbok horn he shows me “has two tones, as opposed to the springbok, which has just one. The higher tone is quite similar to but louder than the springbok one, but the lower tone ,which is the easier to produce and nicer, is low and booming. It is a really beautiful sound.”
But the most unusual shofar comes from a pronghorn, a north American animal which unlike the other horn-producers does not belong to the family of bovidae and sheds its horn. “I reclaim them from old taxidermy — mounted horns sitting in an antique shop not being used. They have a distinct grain like wood.” A fin-like protuberance from the body of the shofar gives it a unique look; it produces a lower, more muted sound than the springbok horn.
Among the reasons rabbis ruled out cows’ horns was their association with the Golden Calf — the beginning of the Ten Days of Penitence is hardly the right time to invoke a reminder of the archetypal sin of rebellion. But he observes there might be a practical aspect in that the hollow section of the horn is smaller than in the case of other animals and it would be far harder to drill out a mouthpiece.
Otherwise, he said, “If there is horn you like, I can probably turn into a shofar depending on its condition and what type of horn it is.”
His mother has taught him to blow a shofar and using his own is “like eating a meal you cooked yourself or using a chair you carved. It is something I have made and I feel much more personally connected to the ones I have kept for myself. There is also more character because a lot of the rams and kudu are mass-produced in Israel in factories, where they use hydraulic presses and blowtorches to shape the horns.”
Instead, his artisan shofarot are largely crafted by hand tools “like they would have done in the past”.
