I thought that before we arrived at the crush of Rosh haShanah, we would just take a week to review the sequence of shofar blasts, and how we got from the original Torah mitsvah to the common practice today. According to Torah law, we are required to hear 9 shofar blasts on Rosh haShanah, 3 "teruah"s, with a "tekiah" before and after. We'll get to the definition of those words in a minute. By Torah law, those blasts did not have to come in any particular context. Hazal, based on references in the pesuqim, came up with the notion of malkhuyot, shofarot, and zikhronot, 3 berakhot they believed were relevant to Rosh haShanah ( tomorrow afternoon, as part of a 2 Shabbat series of talks in the RJC, I will be discussing these berakhot and their meaning an hour before minha; between minha and maariv, Rabbi Rosenblatt will be discussing the special piyyutim of the Rosh haShanah prayers-- for full information, see the flyer "Preparing for an Audience with the King" in the lucite boxes at the shul). Ideally, they said, one would blow the three sets of blasts during the recitation of each of these three berakhot.

Nowadays, there is a difference of custom as to which recitation of Shemoneh Esreh we blow the shofar. While the custom in the RJC (and Ashkenazic congregations generally) is to blow during the repretition of the Shemoneh Esreh, many Sefardic congregations blow during the silent Shemoneh Esreh-- with reasonable source material to support either version.

That would still leave us at nine shofar blasts, with the essential blast being the "teruah." The tekiah was primarily a sort of introduction and conclusion, a way of ushering in and out the blast we really cared about. There was also never a debate about how the tekiah should sound-- it was a "qol pashut," a plain, simple sound. The interpretation of "simple" varies from shul to shul-- Rabbi Lichtenstein in Gush was very careful that the sound come out without a spitting sound at the beginning (at all) and that it not waver too much during the course of the qol, and that it end without a last rush of sound either. Other supervisors of tekiot are less exacting as to the meaning of pashut, but clearly the sound is supposed to be one simple blow of the shofar, lasting as long as a "teruah" would.

The definition of teruah became a matter of debate during the time of the amoraim. Everyone was clear that it was supposed to sound like a cry, the question only being whether it was a cry that consisted of lengthier sobs, or a series of short little cries, or both. As a result (in good Jewish fashion), the amoraim eventually decided to do all three, to insure that we are doing it correctly. If you count the "shevarim-teruah" as 2 blasts, you'll see that a series of three blasts, done three ways, comes out to ten shofar blasts. This desire to meet all opinions, then, took us from nine blasts to thirty (three teruot, with a tekiah on either side, each teruah being performed three ways, one of which counts as two, comes to thirty).

From thirty, we got to sixty by the institution of the tekiot de-Meyushav. While ideally the tekiot are heard in the course of shemoneh esreh, the mitsvah de-oraita does not require it. Aware that some people would be too ill to stand for the whole process of Shemoneh Esreh, the custom became to blow a full set of 'de-oraita" blasts before Mussaf, to insure that everyone fulfilled their obligation, regardless of their health or other factors. As a matter of fact, because of the Tekiot de-Meyushav (as they are called, since people could theoretically sit for them), Rambam believed that during the course of Shemoneh Esreh, there was no need to blow all the different kinds of teruah at each berakhah of Mussaf; rather, he thought, we could blow shevarim teruah at the 1st berakhah, shevarim at the second, and so on.

In any case, we've arrived at sixty. Based on a pasuq that refers to Sisra's mother as crying at her window when waiting for Sisra to return from his campaign in the Holy Land (he never did), the custom became to blow a total of a hundred blasts, to outdo her crying. I feel confident, however, that in the absence of other reasons to blow 60 blasts, we never would have undertaken to get to 100. Anyway, to reach 100, there are several customs as to when to blow the extra 40; they end, though, at the end of Mussaf-- which means that the berakhah we make on shofar at the beginning of Mussaf applies throughout the repetition of Shemoneh Esreh until after the last blast, and that any extraneous conversation until that point constitutes a hefseq, a break between the berakhah and the performance of the mitsvah attached to it.