Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat this year, so in our shuls the shofar doesn’t sound until Sunday. It wasn’t always so. The Mishnah is quite clear: when the festival fell on Shabbat, they blew it in the Temple and nowhere else. The rest of Israel waited a day, as we will. In the courts of the Temple – the Beit Hamikdash – the horn sounded anyway. I’ve spent a few weeks trying to replay that moment.
The rabbis remembered the Temple day in extraordinary detail. Before dawn the priests draw lots for the day’s duties in the Chamber of Hewn Stone. As the sun clears the Mount of Olives, a man on the roof is asked whether the light has reached Hebron yet, and the day begins. At the additional offering for the day, the Musaf, the shofar is not a ram’s horn at all. Tractate Rosh Hashanah gives it as a straight horn of an ibex with a gold mouthpiece, played between two silver trumpets; the shofar draws its note long and the trumpets cut theirs short, because the commandment of the day is the shofar. The Levites sing Psalm 81 from the steps (“Sing aloud unto God our strength: make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob”).
Rosh Hashanah is the one festival that falls on the first of the month, so the witnessing of the moon runs on the same morning. Anyone who saw the sliver of moon the night before climbs to a courtyard called Beit Ya’azek, where the court examines them on what they claimed to have seen and, the Mishnah notes, lays on large meals so that people will bother to come. When the judges are satisfied, the head of the court says “Mekudash” (sanctified), and the crowd says it back. That night, men on the Mount of Olives wave long cedar poles bound with reeds and tow, lit, until a fire answers from Sartaba overlooking the Jordan valley; from Sartaba to Grofina, from Grofina to Hauran, from Hauran to Beit Baltin, the final mountain station, and there they kept waving until the whole of Babylonia, the Mishnah says, looked like one bonfire.
That is the day I’ve built. Scroll & Stone (scrollandstone.org), the site I create, has a new room called “The Temple”: a reconstruction of Herod’s Temple Mount and the city round it in the year 50 CE, 20 years before Titus destroyed the temple. The floor plan comes from tractate Middot, the timetable from Tamid and Rosh Hashanah, the walls from Josephus and from the archaeology at the foot of the platform. It isn’t a film. You drag to look round, scroll to come closer, and the clock runs from before dawn to the beacons; drag the timeline to any hour you like, or press “Highlights” and let the day carry you. Thousands of small figures go about their business, priests and Levites, judges and witnesses, a woman with a basket of doves, a boy with a lamb, and if you hover or tap any one of them you get who they are, what they’re doing at that moment, and the line of Mishnah or Josephus that says so. Click a building’s label and the passage that describes it opens. The shofar sounds when you ask it to. It runs in a browser, phone or laptop, in English, Hebrew, French and Spanish, and it costs nothing. It’s at scrollandstone.org/rh. The first time I let the clock run all the way through, I found I minded when the gates shut at dusk.
I built it because of what Scroll & Stone is for. Much of what the web offers on Jewish history is institutional or memorial: worthy, sometimes dreary, and mostly about what was done to us. The site takes a different line. We are a tribe, older than the categories of religion, nation and ethnicity. Every tribe has its scrolls, the stories it tells of who it is, and its stones, the record that backs them up. The site focuses on our scrolls and our stones: some 750 pieces, from the Merneptah Stele from 1208 BCE (the oldest known mention of Israel outside the Bible) to Bevis Marks; a calendar drawn as the spiral it is; a globe of communities whose lights move but never go out; a round room with 3,000 years on the wall. The voice is proud and never defensive. Pain may appear, but it doesn’t get the last word.
The Temple room is the same idea. Nobody has to tell you that the Temple was a working building with a dawn shift, a lamb inspection and a rota, because you watch the rota, and you can follow one priest from the lottery to his place at the altar and ask him, at each stop, where the Mishnah puts him. There’s an ordinary weekday room too, a Tuesday in Adar with the market open and no festival at all for anyone who wants to see the place simply getting on with it.
The people in that crowd didn’t know about what would happen in 20 years. Ancient Rome is a set of museum rooms now, and a pleasant place for a long weekend. On Sunday morning in Golders Green, Gateshead and Glasgow we’ll blow the shofar to the same pattern, tekiah, teruah, tekiah, and nobody will think it remarkable.
Two more versions follow. Immediately after Rosh Hashanah, the site will launch the Temple experience for Yom Kippur: the High Priest’s day after tractate Yoma, the five immersions, the lots over the two goats, the incense carried within the veil, the scapegoat led out to the cliff, and at dusk the daughters of Jerusalem dancing in the vineyards. Then will come Succot: water drawn at Siloam, the willows round the altar, 13 bulls, and the night of the water-drawing by torchlight, with Roman soldiers watching from the portico roofs because Josephus says they did. If you’d like to be told the morning each one opens, leave an email at scrollandstone.org/subscribe. You’ll get one message when a room opens and nothing else.
In the Temple they blew it on Shabbat. Come and hear it, and celebrate our ancient tribe’s wonderfully rich scrolls and stones.
Ashley Hirst makes scrollandstone.org, the story of the tribe of Israel in scroll and stone. The Rosh Hashanah room is at scrollandstone.org/rh
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