“The shofar has a singular importance for the Jewish people,” writes archaeologist Alex Joffe in Jewish Ideas Daily. “Made of the horn of sheep, goat, mountain goat, antelope, or gazelle, the shofar is used to sound the birthday of the world on Rosh Hashanah.
The poet Yehuda Amichai wrote about the shofar in his poem, “The Real Hero.”

—Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell Shofar and the Messiah

The real hero of the Isaac story was the ram,
who didn’t know about the conspiracy between the others.
As if he had volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
I want to sing a song in his memory—
about his curly wool and his human eyes,
about the horns that were silent on his living head,
and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered
to sound their battle cries
or to blare out their obscene joy.
I want to remember the last frame
like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:
the young man tanned and manicured in his jazzy suit
and beside him the angel, dressed for a party
in a long silk gown,
both of them empty-eyed, looking
at two empty places,

and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
caught in the thicket before the slaughter.
The thicket was his last friend.

The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of the Isaac story
was the ram.