The Family That Plays Shofar Together…

More than a few times, Mitch and Max Dorf have been out and about together when they are approached by a stranger who says something along the lines of: “Aren’t you the guys who play shofar at Wilshire Boulevard Temple?”

The answer is a resounding yes. The father-son duo has been playing together at the mid-city Reform synagogue since 2008, with a couple of years off because of the younger Dorf’s school commitments. They are as close as you can get to shofar rock stars. And they will be back on the bimah together this year.

It all started in 2002, when Mitch and his wife, Lynda, received a shofar for their 15th wedding anniversary from Lynda’s parents. The shofar was selected by their Milwaukee-based cantor during a visit to Chicago. 

Mitch, 56, a post-production sound mixer for television and film who played tuba in high school and college, tinkered with the shofar a bit. But mostly it served as a cherished decorative item. Then in 2006, Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s (WBT) Rabbi Dennis Eisner held a shofar blowing class in advance of the High Holy Days. Dorf brought his. Shortly thereafter, he was asked if he would play at services. With multiple services sometimes taking place concurrently, it simply wasn’t possible for temple clergy to play the shofar at every single one. Dorf was honored to be considered and began practicing.

The first service where he was asked to play was a family service at the Wiltern Theatre near the synagogue. “It was almost packed,” Dorf recalled. Then he had a realization: “I’m going on the same stage where I saw the Rolling Stones and Jerry Garcia.”

When Cantor Don Gurney called out the first tekiah, Dorf began. However, he unintentionally played in a higher register than he had been practicing, resulting in a distinctive sound. 

“We go through the whole thing and the place erupts and starts cheering,” Dorf said. Dorf did several other services that year. When Max, then 7, expressed an  interest in playing the shofar, too, they borrowed a small ram’s horn from Gurney and Max joined his dad on the bimah at the end of the Neilah service on Yom Kippur for a single tekiah gedolah. The following year was much the same.

In April 2008, the Dorf family, including daughter Sadie, traveled to Israel. Among the items on Mitch’s to-do list was purchasing a shofar for 9-year-old Max at the shuk in Jerusalem.

“It was like a supermarket for shofars,” said Max, now 20, and a junior at UC Berkeley. He remembers buckets and buckets of them. “My dad would pick one up and play it for a second. He probably went through 150 or 200.” Eventually, Mitch found one that caught his fancy and that he thought would be suitable for Max. But it was pricey. So he engaged in the obligatory bargaining. Max was unaccustomed to the practice. “I thought we were going to get into a fight,” he said. Instead, he got a shofar. A photo from that day captures a very happy, shaggy-haired boy in a Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap proudly carrying his shofar.

The commandment isn’t to blow the shofar, [it’s] to hear the shofar. We’re just the vehicle. It’s an extreme honor and privilege, and being able to do this with my son is unlike any other experience this father has with this son.” —  Mitch Dorf

That September, Mitch and Max brought their instruments to the Selichot service. Mitch expected a bunch of other players to be there, a sort of shofar choir. It turned out it was just the two of them. He also thought the service called for only 10 blasts. There were 30. Mitch remembers turning to Max: “Just blow and stay on your note in rhythm,” he counseled. “I’ll do the rest.

“After the first tekiah call from Cantor Gurney, we heard this amazing major chord [from mine and my son’s shofars] that sounded like a train rocketing through the sanctuary,” Mitch continued. “I looked at Cantor Gurney and saw in his eyes exactly what I heard. He then continued the calls and by the end we were all in tears. None of us had ever heard anything like it before. After, I don’t recall saying a thing but we embraced and maybe he said, ‘You two are hired.’ ”

It turned out that the shofar purchased in Chicago and the one purchased six years later and 6,000 miles away in Jerusalem, were a perfect, complementary pair.

A few days after their debut, the Dorfs played together at the family service, where they have become something of a fixture. In the years since, Mitch and Max have played dozens of more services. In 2012, they played at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where services were held while the sanctuary at WBT was undergoing renovations. The following year, they played at the community-wide celebration for the temple’s reopening and made the evening news. Max also took up the trombone along the way, although he has since transitioned to tuba, along with several other instruments. (He plays tuba for the Berkeley marching band.) 

For father and son, it’s been incredibly gratifying on multiple levels.

“The thing about blowing the shofar,” Mitch said, “[is] the commandment isn’t to blow the shofar, the commandment is to hear the shofar. We’re just the vehicle. It’s an extreme honor and privilege, and being able to do this with my son is unlike any other experience this father has with this son. The connection we have on the bimah — we don’t have to talk. We are listening to each other. As our sounds blend in this unique, wonderful chord, it kind of intertwines both of us together.”

“The experience and the evolution that this has gone through is something that I definitely would never have thought would happen,” Max added. “It’s cool that literally it was finding a needle in a haystack — this one shofar in a bucket stuck in the back corner of a shop in a shuk — and progressed into what it is today, and the effect it has brought into a lot of people’s lives.”