Snow in August

17

One wet Tuesday after school, Michael entered the synagogue through the Kelly Street entrance. The door was open, awaiting his arrival, and he paused for a moment in the vestibule, feeling safe. As he shook the rain off his mackinaw, he heard a hard, almost braying sound from the far side of the door leading to the rabbi’s rooms. The notes were familiar. Braaah, braawp, brah-brah, bruh, brah-brah, braawp… The first notes of “And the Angels Sing.”

The sound abruptly stopped. Michael opened the door quietly and saw Rabbi Hirsch standing near the bookcase, deep in concentration, trying to blow on a curved instrument made of polished horn. His eyes were closed. He started to keep the beat with one foot, then tried again. Braaah, braawp… Then he paused, opened his eyes, saw Michael, and laughed.

“You catched me!” he said.

“Caught,” Michael said.

“You caught me,” the rabbi said. “I want to surprise you, but…” He brandished the horn. “I’m going to be a regular Ziggy Elman!”

Michael looked at the horn. “What is that in your hand?”

The rabbi explained that the instrument was a shofar, a ram’s horn. It was used in ceremonies during the holy days called Rosh Hashanah and was the same kind of horn that Joshua had used in biblical days to flatten the walls of Jericho.

Michael started singing a song he’d heard a lot on the radio:

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,

Jericho,

Jericho.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,

And the walls came tumbling down….

“Wait, wait!” the rabbi said, signaling with the shofar. “Now, again!”

Michael sang the words more forcefully and the rabbi played a few notes in the thick, plangent tones of the ram’s horn. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho… The sound of the shofar was fat, primitive, eerie, as if Rabbi Hirsch were reaching back across the centuries. But there was no melody from the horn. It was not mournful. It was not melancholy. It was just loud and brutal, like a foghorn.

When the rabbi finished, he shook his head sadly, his face drained by failure.

“Is impossible,” he said. “A tune you can’t get from a shofar, just a noise. You need—” He pounded his chest as if asking it to identify itself. “What’s the word?”

“Lungs,” Michael said. “So you have enough breath.”

“Yes, yes, lungs.”

He turned the shofar over in his hands.

“Why can’t I make from it music?” he said softly. “Why can’t I make from it joy?”

Michael could offer no answer.

“Why can’t I make from a shofar like a regular Ziggy Elman?”

Rabbi Hirsch laid the shofar on a shelf of the bookcase and switched on the radio. It was tuned to WHN. Red Barber was explaining that with runners on first and third and none out, the Dodgers were sitting in the catbird seat.

“There’s a bird in America that looks like a cat?” the rabbi asked.

“I don’t know,” Michael said.

“So why does Red Barber say the Dodgers, they are in the catbird seat?”

“He says it all the time, like he says rhubarb.”

The rabbi was flicking through the dictionary.

“Rhubarb? That’s like a fruit I see in Roulston’s grocery store.”

“Red Barber uses it to describe, like, well, a big fight. You know, if a batter gets hit by a pitch and he charges the mound? Or when Leo Durocher comes out to holler at the umpires. That’s a rhubarb. And he says ‘We’re sitting in the catbird seat’ when he means the Dodgers are in good shape. They have the upper hand. They’re sitting pretty. Know what I mean?”

“No.”

The words zipped through Michael’s mind, and he realized what they must sound like to Rabbi Hirsch. Good shape and upper hand and sitting pretty. How did they come to mean what they mean?

“It’s like to have an advantage,” Michael said. “Like, you don’t have to worry now. You can’t lose. You can do it.”

Rabbi Hirsch nodded, as if finally understanding Michael’s fumbling attempts to explain. He went to the bookcase and lifted the horn again.

“If like Ziggy Elman I can play this shofar,” he said, “I am sitting in the catbird seat.”

Michael smiled.

“You said it.”