September 26th: Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat Shuvah
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
This is Rabbi Ostrich’s Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon: Jewish Music and Our Souls
There is an encounter described in Deuteronomy 29 between God and the people—read both last Shabbat and on Yom Kippur morning: אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם כֻּלְּכֶם לִפְנֵי ה' אֱלֹקיכֶם
“You are standing this day, all of you, before the Lord your God.” It is a very moving account, but its context is not clear. Is it a remembrance of the Revelation at Mount Sinai, or is it describing a second covenantal ceremony, forty years after Sinai and just before the Israelites enter the Promised Land? If it is a new ceremony, solidifying the covenantal relationship, then all the people involved are Israelites. However, if it is a reminder of the original covenantal event at Mount Sinai, then, according the Midrash, the whole world was the “audience.” As the Mekhilta (de Rabbi Ishmael) asks and answers: Why did God give the Ten Commandments at Sinai? Would not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have been holier? True, but Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, and giving the Torah there would suggest that the Ten Commandments are only for the Jews—and not for the other nations of the world. God chose Mount Sinai, a place out in the middle of the desert—a place owned by no one and accessible to all, to make it clear that the Divine Law is available and applicable to all humans.[1]
So, we can ask, are the Ten Commandments ours, or do they belong to everyone? We love it when other faiths are influenced by Jewish Tradition, but is it really ours to own and control, or does God’s wisdom belong to all of God’s children? And, what about wisdom or spiritual practices that come from other religious traditions? Are these religious or cultural things “theirs,” or are they universal and “owned” by all? When we get down to it, what makes a religious custom or insight Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Hindu? Are they not all from the same Divine Source—and would this not challenge the notion that certain groups have proprietary rights for things that originated in their cultures or religions?
This kind of question has particular relevance when we Jews are presented with wisdom, spiritual practices, or customs that come from non-Jewish sources. Whether we are talking about flowers at funerals, Yoga, singing Christmas carols or hymns like Amazing Grace, or yard decorations at Christmastime/ Chanukah, we often find ourselves trying to figure out whether some customs or observances are kosher. Are they non-Jewish, but okay for Jews? Or are they non-Jewish and crossing a line beyond what is properly and loyally Jewish. By the way, this is not a new question, with plenty of examples in both the Bible and the Talmud. What makes something Jewish; what makes something non-Jewish; and what makes something parev?
One of the areas where relative Jewishness can be questioned is in music, and let me introduce it with a song:
If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.
I’d hammer in the evenin’, all over this land.
I’d hammer out danger. I’d hammer out warning.
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
I first heard this song at a Reform Movement summer camp in 1965, and it seemed very Jewish. We sang it at Jewish worship services and youth group activities. We sang it with kavannah and felt very Jewish singing it, and it took me years before I realized that it is not a Jewish song at all. Peter, Paul, and Mary seemed Jewish, but only one, Peter Yarrow, was actually Jewish.[2] Nonetheless, their music seemed Jewish, as did a lot of the secular Folk Music Revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
The songs seemed Jewish because the American socialism and progressivism that typified the music had a Tikkun Olam sensibility to it. Though the term Tikkun Olam was not used back then in the context of social justice, our Tradition has been calling for social justice since the days of the Bible—“Justice shall well up like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.” (Amos 5.24), so one can understand why many Jews saw labor unions, socialism, and even communism as paths to the Prophetic dream. Judaism sees justice, righteousness, and universal love as paving the way for the Messianic Age.
So, even though songs like If I Had a Hammer and This Land is Your Land are not particularly Jewish, they partake of values that are also found in Judaism—and thus we Jewish teens sang them with heart and soul and in Jewish settings.
Part of their appeal was that these folk songs were part of general youth culture—the youth culture of the beatniks and rock’n’roll and hippies that so enervated the formative years of the post-World War II Baby Boom. The music was very appealing, and it filled in a gap in Jewish music. In the early 1960s, Jewish music consisted of:
(1) fancy classical or operatic sounding choral arrangements for choir and organ—or for a capella choirs
(2) big voice cantorial pieces using traditional nusach but with operatic flourishes
(3) congregational sing-along tunes—sometimes inspired by nusach or European folk tunes
(4) Klezmer music from Eastern Europe
(5) Labor Zionist folk tunes and marching songs
There was no Jewish youth music, and we Jewish teenagers wanted music that would “speak to our generation.”
The revolution in Jewish music occurred when youth group and camp songleaders—teenagers who played guitar—began putting prayer book and Bible passages into folk tunes, tunes with the chord progressions and styles of folk and rock.
A similar effort was being mounted in Israel—especially with the immense cultural energy after the 1967 Six Day War. So many young Israelis started putting holy texts into folk-rock settings that an annual showcase, the Hassidic Song Festival[3], was organized and became a worldwide Jewish phenomenon. One of its songs continues in our own worship service, the repeating version of Shema by Tzvika Pik.
One of my first experiences with what we could call home-grown Jewish folk music came around 1969 when I heard about a teenager my age from Houston, a songleader, writing his own Jewish song. Using the old-fashioned worship language of our prayer book, he composed a youth-style tune, rendering Psalm 8 in a way I had never heard it before:
How glorious! How glorious Thy Name!
How glorious Thy Name in all the earth!
Who knew we could write our own Jewish music—music that was good and cool and Jewish? It was a revelation for me—a real seminal moment of Jewish possibilities. That teenager, by the way, is now Rabbi Les Bronstein, recently retired from a Reconstructionist congregation in the New York suburbs.
Another revelation for me came in college when a friend showed me an album by a girl he knew from St. Paul, Minnesota. Her name was Debbie Friedman, and she was a songleader in Temple youth group and Reform summer camp. She had written a bunch of her own songs and, in 1972, recorded an album. You have to understand, this was back in the days when albums were not something anyone could just record. It was a big deal, and the fact that there was an album of Jewish youth music was astounding. Who knew such a thing was possible?
Debbie went on to compose dozens and dozens of songs, record many albums, and inspire several generations of songleaders and composers of Jewish youth music. For many years, she was part of an early summer event in which camp songleaders from all over the country gathered to learn the latest in Jewish folk music—so that they could teach it at their camps and keep everyone up to date.
As with much of the youth revolution in the 1960s, there was pushback from our elders. Accustomed to a different ambience in worship services, the guitars and more energetic rhythms were unsettling. Whereas we teens thought of standard Temple worship as boring, many pious adults loved services the way they were—finding their style of worship and their music dignified and elevating. These two different worship preferences resulted in quite a tussle, and many lines were drawn in the sand.
One example. The setting of Shalom Rav which we all know and love was written in 1974 by two Reform movement songleaders, Dan Freelander and Jeff Klepper: שָׁלוֹם רָב עַל יִשְׂרָאֵל עַמְךָ תָּשִׂים לְעוֹלָם...
They went on to became clergy—Dan a Rabbi and Jeff a Cantor, but, back then, they were just students. And, when they wanted to play their setting of Shalom Rav in the Hebrew Union College Chapel in New York, their idea was totally squashed. There was a firm line between camp music and Temple music, and the College was not going to allow that line to be breached.
Things changed as the teens of the 1960s grew into adulthood and leadership in synagogues and in the movement, and in the early 2000s, the Cantorial School was renamed for one of our “rabble-rousing” teenaged songleaders, the remarkably talented and tenacious Debbie Friedman. This new Jewish music— combining folk guitar stylings and time-honored Jewish texts—had become more and more popular. In the Reform, Reconstructionist, and even Conservative Movements, this new style music became the way people connected with God.
Many of us may not even know how new some of our “traditional” worship music is. For example, this Vesham’ru, וְשָׁמְרוּ בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת..., was not handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai. It was written by two Rabbinical students at Camp Ramah in California in the 1960s. Moshe Rothblum and Yossi Gordon were writing a skit and needed to show that the scene was set at noon on Shabbat, and so they wrote a new tune for a prayer recited at Kiddush.
Another example is Veha’er Aynaynu, וְהָאֵר עֵינֵֽינוּ בְּתוֹרָתֶֽךָ, וְדַבֵּק לִבֵּֽנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתֶֽיךָ...
The tune was written in the 1960s by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, an emissary of the previous Lubavitcher Rabbi, Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn. The Rebbe wanted Reb Shlomo to combine Judaism with youth culture, and this energetic and spiritual setting is just one example of his impressive and lasting success.
At our own Brit Shalom, the “revolution” involved the then-new Rabbi Jeff Eisenstat who was young and cool and played the guitar. People loved his music, but some worried that the Old Guard would not approve. The big moment came a few months after Rabbi Jeff’s arrival when the Patriarch of the congregation, Mr. Charles Schlow, came to services. Afterwards, everyone was waiting with bated breath to see what Mr. Schlow would say. When asked about the guitar music, he nodded his head in approval, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Rabbi Eisenstat’s legendary career was off to a great start.
One more memory: I was a Temple-goer as a child and knew the English of the Ve’ahavta by heart: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” There was a holiness to its subject matter, its language, and its cadence, and it was a beloved passage. So, when Debbie Friedman took that text and rendered it into a folk song that both honored the holy connection and resonated with our youthful musical tastes, it was a gift. I still remember how this song was both emotionally and spiritually exhilarating.
Getting back to “Atem Nitzavim” and who was included in the Covenant Ceremony, music is a perfect place to consider what makes a cultural expression “Jewish.” Music connects on an emotional, a visceral level. As Duke Ellington used to reflect, it is extremely personal: “You either dig it or you don’t.” Jewish history contains thousands of different musical approaches to our traditional texts, and it is interesting to consider which of those settings we dig and why. For instance, there are more than 1500 settings for Lecha Dodi, and some may seem more Jewish or more holy than others. What is it about a text and a melody that does or does not connect us with the Divine?
For many Jewish teenagers of the 1960s, If I Had a Hammer was a Jewish song—even though it was not. And for some of us, traditional Iraqi or Moroccan settings of Adon Olam or Yigdal may not seem “Jewish,” even though Iraqi and Moroccan Jews have used such tunes to connect with God for centuries. Cultural subjectivity is ubiquitous and inevitable, and I find the whole subject fascinating. How does Jewishness and kavannah work in our souls? It is a continuing work-in-progress, as are we, and, in our moments of holiness this year, let us think about our connection with God and how our Tradition contributes to it.
[1] Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael
[2] Paul Stooky is Catholic, and Mary Travers—though she was fond of Reform Judaism in her later years—was never Jewish.
[3] 1969-1992