I am aware that there is a din of putting the kohen gadol in isolation for a week before Yom Kippur, but it looks like people want to extend it to the baal tokea on Rosh haShana this year. From the Times of Israel:
Hoffman, professor of Otolaryngology at the University of Iowa Hospitals, told The Times of Israel that quarantining shofar blowers before they blow may be in order. “Serial testing and quarantining the ram’s hornblower prior to the event may help mitigate risk,” he said.(Pedantic parenthetical comment: I'm not sure there is a noun "hornblower." The word makes me think Admiral, not musician. Would you use "horn player" here or something else? Maybe someone more pedantic than me knows the answer :)
Update: a reader emailed me that the MG"A in siman 581 quotes from the ShL"H that the baal tokeah and shat"z have to be mafrish themselves from "kol davar ha'mavi li'dei tumah" three days before Y"T, so there is some zecher to the din by R"H as well.
(-- "Pedantic...pedantic"
ReplyDeleteThough pedantry denies,
It's plain the Bible means
That Solomon grew wise
While talking with his queens.
{William Yeats}
[that's not to say those royal women knew about the baal tokeah's separation, or digested more than a spoonful of hilchos Y"T...])
Important comment regarding the hornblower.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/hyphen-rules-open-closed-compound-words
A bigger problem, one that actually made me itch, was the rest of the phrase.
"quarantining the ram’s hornblower "
It's not the ram's hornblower. Mr. Ram has no need for a personal horn blower. It's the Ram's-horn blower.