It's kind of like taking the Jewish idea phrase-turned-idea of what is done initially not for its own sake will eventually be done for its own sake to its unnatural, kicking, screaming extreme. There are some definite ways in which Judaism is all about extremes, at least ritually speaking - the fasts, the gorging, the eight-day cracker fests, and the bacchanalian four hour-long dinners - but I would argue that it is moderate-to-stingy in the "letting loose" department. Shofar is essentially a disciplined letting loose. The discipline part is, of course, distinctly Jewish. But if you ask me, the rest of it's pretty primal.

I, personally, have never blown shofar, despite my rockstar lineage (though there is documented photographic evidence of my brother and I trying reeal hard on a couple of rams' horns) but I can draw from a few things that have similarly tickled my primal.

There was the Chen Zhen exhibit at art space PS1 in Queens, featuring an installation made up of beds-and-chairs-turned-drums, suspended from a high ceiling, drumsticks totally aching to be used hanging at their sides. Same formula, really: stretched animal skins, unknowingly antsy humans, and an otherwise dead-silent museum. Similar results: a few tentative taps, the reverb an absolute shock to the cynical system. Then, a brief pause during which time reservations fly out the window, and enter the inevitable gone-crazy-pound-out-jam-session, smack in the middle of an art museum, sweat-producing rhythms created by a bunch of reluctant strangers.

There are smaller things, too. The opening strains of Rainer Maria's "Tinfoil." The lilty part of Morrissey's "Suedehead." Emo kids when nobody is watching.

The shofar is intended to represent crying, but there is no literal value to this. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are emotional holidays, but in a religion practically built on farfetched symbolism - walnuts and apples as slave-mortar, backyards as tent-dotted desert plains, unleavened bread as the blanket Oppression - it seems we would take the shofar and its sounds as just that: a symbol.

I argue, there is something far more kooky and radical at play. That the shofar demands more not only of our Jewish imaginations, but of our deep psyches, something that can't be said of every ritual object.

The scrawl along the wall of sketches outside the Zhen installation begins to explain the artist's belief that physical engagement - noisemaking, banging out rhythms - is a really viable means for conflict resolution. This belief is reflected in his materials - the furniture that functions as the drums' bodies are an ingathering of material exiles, imported from various parts of the world - but more pertinently, in what happens to viewers of (or participants in) the artwork.

Because I come from a family of musicians, I have a built-in inferiority complex. I gave up on my romance with the guitar circa 1999, when I played "Dust in the Wind" one too many times to impress anyone. So a room full of drums, while alluring, is a tad intimidating for me. But, my god -- a room full of drums! I unhung one of the fat wooden sticks and added my tentative tap to the hesitant, percussive thumps that were starting to fill the air in the large room. The malleability of the skin invited a few more taps, coaxed by the natural bounce. Where there is tapping and bouncing, the body usually gets involved. Soon, tapping turned to banging. All around me. Mid-swing, I looked around the room, and was surprised by my first instinctual feeling: guilt. I felt strangely, guiltily voyeuristic just watching and being a part of this group of rhythm-merging strangers. Did everyone else feel it, the tremendous sensation of creating something This Big in public, with people you didn't know? I watched the faces to try to figure it out, but any time I caught someone's eye, I looked back down at my drum.

[1]       2       [3]       [next->] Lower image: Chen Zhen, Incantations (detail)