Songfest
July 24, 2009
Don’t miss our two August Erev Rosh Hashanah Dinner rehearsals for singers. In order to participate, we need a commitment from you for at least one of them…. They are on Wednesday nights, August 5th and 26th, at Havurah. A third mandatory rehearsal will take place on Thursday night, September 10th. Singers and all musicians welcome…
Want to know a secret? Once upon a time, Havurah was light years ahead when it came to liturgical music. We played outstanding original arrangements that set our hearts soaring. It was not an infrequent occurrence on a Friday night, when a new guitarist stepped up and taught a song or a prayer. At the High Holidays, we were greeted by any number of musicians playing together and encouraging us to join in. But over the past 15 years, everybody else caught up. If you set foot inside a thriving minyan in New York or Boston or Philadelphia or San Francisco – and certainly in a number of cases in Jerusalem, you will no longer get just davenning. There is heartfelt beautiful music everywhere.
What’s more, this music is integral to prayer. It’s no longer music as performance; it’s adopted by the shaliach tsibbur, the person leading what used to be the standard progression of opening, then closing, one psalm or bracha after another. Clearly, Shlomo Carlebach is responsible for much of this revolution, but there is the role played by women leaders, and there is a whole new generation of awakened rabbis. They realize that the old dualistic notion of the ones in charge of a service producing something for an audience was stale. So, for instance, last year I was in Jerusalem and ran into one of our own former Shabbat School kids (now 24), and he invited me to come along with him to his own minyan. He casually let it drop that he himself was among the Torah readers that particular week, so how could I miss it? The minute I arrived, the average age of the minyan leapt upwards around ten years. I put on my tallit and got settled in, and found myself davenning along with a leader who sang herself through most of the morning prayer. It was all done relatively traditionally, with little fanfare. The assembled group of twenty year olds formed an arc around her, letting their voices rise in beautiful harmonies. The tunes were familiar ones, welcoming me in. And, by the way, our own Havurah kid all grown up, read Torah quite competently, which made me proud.
Now I can no longer wait for this music to find its way in to what we do on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. We have fabulous musicians (many of them!), and some gorgeous voices. So I’ve taken it upon myself to bring in the tunes I’ve heard elsewhere, to teach them and make them a part of what we do on a regular basis.
And this Erev Rosh Hashanah, we’re going to showcase 4 or 5 melodies, but more importantly, give our music people a chance to step up at our communal dinner at the Tiffany Center. I want to make it clear that this group of singers and instrumentalists is anything but a closed society! It’s made up of anyone who can play an instrument or who likes to sing. We’ve met three times this Spring, but we’ll be meeting in August and early in September before Rosh Hashanah. You are most welcome to join us – but we are insisting that if you’d like to sing on Erev Rosh Hashanah at the dinner, you will need to make one out of the two August rehearsals listed above, as well as the one in September. Even more important, we want to make Havurah a setting for gorgeous singing and davenning. We have scheduled one Saturday morning a month, at which we’ll incorporate a good deal more singing, and we are also going to rearrange the way we sit together to reflect this shift. And stay tuned for some new tunes that will permeate what we do on Friday nights.
Like the psalmist says, we are going to “sing a new song” because we’re overdue. So many people comment that it was music that once brought them to Havurah. Now it’s time for the commitment to make good music once again, and to instill every reason for a sustained spiritual presence week to week. Join us in August and throughout the year.
Rabbi Joey
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