Elul התשפ״ו · Twenty-five posts
Rosh Hashanah runs two days. The first day is always a full house, and the second…is not. In 5787 it was the one that could not be skipped.
The argument
The first day of Rosh Hashanah fell on Shabbat, and on Shabbat the shofar is not sounded. Which left the whole festival’s hundred blasts — the one act the day is named for, Yom T’ru’ah, the day of sounding — on the second morning alone. Come only on the first day and you would hear no shofar at all.
That is the kind of thing that could be said sternly from the pulpit, once, to the people already in the room. It seemed better to say it twenty-five times on Facebook and Instagram, through the month when Jews are meant to be thinking about the year ahead anyway, to whoever happened to be holding a phone. The campaign kept Shabbat itself: nothing went out on a Saturday.
So: a poster a day through Elul, six days a week, each one a small argument by analogy. A bagel without the lox. A sundae without the cherry. The flag without the maple leaf. The Habs without the CH. In every image the missing thing has been replaced by a shofar — a horn of smoked salmon, a horn of honey, a matzah ball curled into a horn — so that the joke and the point arrive together.
Elul 5786 · 14 August – 11 September
Every posting day of the month, Sunday to Friday. Choose any day to see the poster full size.
1 Elul14 Aug
3 Elul16 Aug
4 Elul17 Aug
5 Elul18 Aug
6 Elul19 Aug
7 Elul20 Aug
8 Elul21 Aug
10 Elul23 Aug
11 Elul24 Aug
12 Elul25 Aug
13 Elul26 Aug
14 Elul27 Aug
15 Elul28 Aug
17 Elul30 Aug
18 Elul31 Aug
19 Elul1 Sep
20 Elul2 Sep
21 Elul3 Sep
22 Elul4 Sep
24 Elul6 Sep
25 Elul7 Sep
26 Elul8 Sep
27 Elul9 Sep
28 Elul10 Sep
29 Elul11 Sep
No post that day
Saturdays are absent because the campaign was: nothing was posted on Shabbat. Dates are given by their daytime civil equivalent; each Hebrew day begins the evening before.
Artwork — Zelly Design Co.