Galilee Diary #462, October 21, 2009 Marc Rosenstein
Blow the shofar on the new moon, on the full
moon for our feast day, For it is a law for Israel, a ruling of the God of
Jacob. -Psalms 81:4-5
Shorashim is located on the west-facing slope of a shoulder of Mt. Gilon,
overlooking the Hilazon Valley. Across the valley, less than a mile away, is the
Moslem village of Sha'ab. We don't have that much contact with the villagers,
but we hear from them all the time. Weddings are held outdoors, and the
amplification system for the dance music is quite robust, so we "participate" in
every wedding - which means, during the summer, just about every night.
Fortunately, they usually end by midnight. And the muezzin's call to prayer in
the mosque is also amplified, and carries clearly across the valley, five times
a day. Within our first year here we had already "stopped hearing" these sounds,
in the sense that they had just become a normal part of the environment, often
blotted out of our consciousness by other stimuli - not waking us up or
disturbing us. The other day I happened to be awake at 4:00 in the morning. It
was a clear, cool morning, a few days before Rosh Hodesh, so there was a bright
sliver of a moon in the eastern sky, and the nasal, mournful chant of the
muezzin drifted across the valley, and it occurred to me that this was a
beautiful moment, and that actually I like hearing the muezzin; it has become
part of what defines home for me - a part of the landscape like the olive trees
that carpet the valley. During the day or early evening, I guess I really have
stopped hearing it; and if I happen to be in a village at prayer time, it is
often rather a nuisance, like a low flying jet - you have to stop conversation
for a minute or two until the noise subsides. But in the pre-dawn silence,
attenuated by distance, it seemed somehow comforting. Often, the muezzin's call
wakes up the jackals that live down the mountainside, and they add a backup
chorus of howling that seems just right.
It's
interesting how sounds become a part of the landscape. In the Turkish period,
the municipal boundaries of a village were defined by the reach of the muezzin's
call (unamplified) - so sound actually did define the landscape. I imagine that
my response to the muezzin's regular call is parallel to the feelings aroused by
church bells for those who live in small towns in America - or big cities in
Europe. On the other hand, the dominant and frequent sound that seems to
characterize the landscape of most big cities today is that of the sirens of
emergency vehicles echoing through urban canyons. People who come from the city
to spend a night in the Galilee comment not only on the muezzin, but on the
silence before and after. When you experience silence you become aware of the
impact of constant background noise on your quality of life.
If you
think about the "Shofarot" section of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, which catalogs
the references in the Bible to the sounding of the shofar and its meanings, it
seems that we Jews too have placed a strong emphasis on sounds that fill and
define the public space. The shofar is not an instrument for drawing-room
chamber music concerts; it is the ancient middle eastern version of church bells
and amplified muezzins. Like those public sounds, it is designed to wake us up,
penetrate and interrupt our mundane consciousness, to call us to attention, to
bring us together.
So I noticed and appreciated the muezzin's call, and
then drifted back to sleep, to be awakened to start my day an hour later by my
clock radio playing the advertisements before the morning news.
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