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July 2001 Issue

The Jewish Choral Movement: A Musical Minyan

By Rahel Musleah

You know you're at a Jewish choral festival when the warm-up exercises include breathing together while meditating on the shapes of the notes that delineate the Torah trope. At the annual North American Jewish Choral Festival held every summer, 450 singers cup their hands outward to form a merkha tip'ha. They arch their arms above their heads, a community kadma ve-azla. And they put them together, palm to palm as if they are praying, shaping the etnahta.

When they lift up their voices to create the lush sound of Salomone Rossi's 17th-century arrangement of "Adon Olam," Matthew Lazar, the festival's founder and director, notes, "Our purpose is to create a musical minyan. This is our statement of faith."

For Abba Borowich, choral singing provides a sense of wholeness. "There's a unity of spirit and purpose," says the psychiatrist from New Rochelle, NY. Like Borowich, Jewish singers all over America have found their musical soulmates in semi-professional, community, and synagogue choruses. From New York to Kansas, choral music has become an expression of Jewish identity, a transformative path to healing, a way to promulgate Jewish pride, and an avenue to Judaism that parallels the surge in adult study.

"Singing makes me feel there's a reason to go on living," says Leslie Jacobs, a member of the choir at North Shore Congregation Israel in Chicago, as well as Kol Zimra, a community choir. After losing her sister and suffering personal illness, Jacobs says she lost faith in God and in Judaism. Singing helped her re-establish an emotional bond with Judaism, as she found a "community of people who care intensely about one another."

"This is a tough time to be alive," explains Eleanor Epstein, the founder of Zemer Chai, a community chorus in Washington DC. "People are looking all over for that spiritual connection. A choir from your own tradition can be an anchor, a surcease from the world, a place where you belong, where you realize you can't do it alone."

The festival both nurtures and mirrors the Jewish choral movement as it features the spectrum of Jewish music--liturgical and folk, Yiddish and Sephardic, Renaissance and contemporary. That inclusive umbrella spans the Jewish community, too, as choral singers cross all age, geographical, musical and denominational boundaries. There are college students and grandmothers, amateur singers and professional soloists, cantors, conductors and simply lovers of Jewish music.

Elli Albert, the manager of Shirah, the Jewish Community Choir on the Palisades, in Tenafly, NJ, says she had never even met an Orthodox Jew before she joined the choir seven years ago. "Becoming friends with a large contingent of Jews, many of whom are quite religious, has opened me up to the ways others observe Judaism. It has encouraged me to ask questions of them that I would otherwise have been embarrassed to voice."

"In choral singing, the only thing that separates the singers are their voice parts," says Dr. Marsha Bryan Edelman, professor of music and education at Gratz College in Philadelphia, and president of the Zamir Choral Foundation. The foundation is an outgrowth of the Zamir Chorale, the first independent Jewish choir in the United States, formed in New York in 1960. Named for the nightingale mentioned in Song of Songs, Zamir sparked the renewal of the Jewish choral movement and inspired the creation of several other choirs with similar goals and names. Lazar created the foundation 11 years ago to sustain and advance the Jewish choral tradition through programs that unite and expand the Jewish choral community; it sponsors the festival in association with Gratz and the Commission on Synagogue Music of Reform Judaism.

"At the festival, music is the great equalizer, the glue everyone shares," adds Rabbi Daniel Freelander, one of the festival's coordinators, who is also director of program for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and with Jeff Klepper, the creator of the Jewish rock band, Kol B'Seder.

What is the power of singing together that nourishes its singers so? It is the ethereal sound of a Shabbat zemirah, "Barukh El Elyon," or the fun, staccato rhythm of a sophisticated "S'vivon Sov Sov Sov." It's "Hava Nagila" in seven-part harmony, transcending its ballgame fate, or Benjie Ellen Schiller's "Grace," a new composition that sustains its singers like the food it blesses. When music's universal emotional potency is coupled with eloquent Jewish texts, it can serve as a deeper entree into Judaism that any adult education course.

"Jewish music expresses more profoundly than any other medium certain truths about what Jews yearn for," says Donna Tabas, a member of Shirah. "Singing requires intimate contact with my breath. The breath, which is so often linked to the very name of God, can bring me ever so much closer to feeling God's presence. When I contemplate the chaos that exists in our everyday lives, sometimes just hearing a certain progression of chords, or hearing the intricate depth of a chord resolve in a certain way, can seem like the only pure truth that exists."

Lazar likes to encourage his choirs--Shirah, the Zamir Chorale and Selah--to rise to the level of sh'lihei tzibbur, leaders in prayer. But even the leaders need their rebbes. They are the conductors: teachers, commentators, coaches, arrangers, ethnomusicologists, historians, comedians, mentors, mothers, and fathers to their choral families. Their styles range from earthy to academic, but they share a mission, which they summarize in words like tikkun olam (healing the world) and k'lal yisrael (unity).

"Our music is a banner, both to the Jewish and non-Jewish world," says Joshua Jacobson, the director of the Zamir Chorale of Boston and professor of music at Northeastern University. In 1999, Boston Zamir traveled to Eastern Europe to celebrate the founding 100 years ago of Hazomir Chorus of Lodz, Poland. Coincidentally, this early multidenominational cultural group was also inspired to name itself after the text in the Song of Songs.

Once the hub of a Jewish population of 450,000, Lodz is now home to only 250 Jews. At the cemetery, the choir sang "Makh Tsu di Eygelekh" (close your little eyes), a lullaby composed by David Baygelman, who lived in the Lodz Ghetto and was one of the directors of the chorale. As Jacobson gave the first downbeat, he recalls, a butterfly settled on his score and stayed there throughout the song. At Terezin, the model camp, the group performed in an attic which once served as a secret theater. "We sensed the ghosts among us, the presence of all the composers, musicians and singers," Jacobson says. "We gave voice to them all."

The Jewish aspect is paramount to many of the singers. Borowich remembers trying out once for the Westchester Choral Society. When he brought home the score of Handel's "Messiah," his son, who was eight at the time, said, "Daddy you can't possibly sing that!" He didn't. The key, Borowich emphasizes, is community. "I don't enjoy singing by myself," he confesses, "but I love joining with others. Choral singing is a metaphor for life: it infuses my life with harmony and peace."

This year's Jewish Choral Festival will take place August 5-9 at the Nevele Hotel in Ellenville, NY. Contact the Zamir Choral Foundation for information: 212-362-3335, or visit www.zamirfdn.org.

Rahel Musleah, a freelance writer and children's author, is a member of Zamir (New York) and Shirah.

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