Friday, August 1, 2014

David Zasloff Plays Shofar as an Instrument - Beyond Tekiah and Beyond Hatikvah


In our first year of blogging back in 2010, we posted a video of musician/comedian David Zasloff using his shofar to play...not the tekiah, shevarim, teruah blasts heard every year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem.

But Hatikvah was only the beginning. Zasloff has perfected the art of playing the shofar as a musical instrument. He has a band that plays "Zen Jazz" that he defines as African Jewish Japanese Latin Caribbean BeBop. In this video he launches into a standup comic routine in which he explains the principles of "Zen Judaism" - "We believe everything is sacred and everything is marketable."

The last few minutes of the video show him playing a medley of Christmas songs on the shofar - songs mostly written by Jews, and "blues for the Jews" -- Jumpin' in Jerusalem on a giant Yemenite shofar.

Enjoy!

(A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.)


4 comments:

  1. This is bit sacrireligious and uncomfortable.

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  2. The music was interesting, the comedy not so funny and the audience ignorant.

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  3. I don't know. I thought it was ok. The audience wasn't so much ignorant as just not so religious. I've seen funnier and I've seen worse on this site (the Bark Mitzvah comes to mind as an example of real disrespect and ignorance) and he could have skipped "Silent Night," as it wasn't written by a Jew, but the rest of them were. True, he should come to shul more often. But I actually wish him luck. I'm saying this as a former comedian and as a rabbi.

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