I Like It!

This past Shabbat, along with Jonathan Lewis and my wife, Katrin, I attended Shirei Chagigah in North London at the Alyth Synagogue. Aside from being transformative in its own right and allowing me to meet over half of my UK Reform rabbinical colleagues, the conference seemed tailor-made to address some of the questions that we will all wrestle with over the next weeks, months and even years.

As we were introduced to melodies including quite a few unfamiliar to me, the natural questions of musical taste and preference in synagogue settings arose. This moved conversation inevitably to the complexity of introducing new melodies or musical styles into a community.

Perhaps it is comforting to know that these issues are universal. There were more discussions on how to teach new music and then deal with the resistance within a congregation than any other single subject. And within our discussions on “change” since I arrived, this is probably the element of change that is most critical to acknowledge and unflinchingly discuss. In short, any time I use a melody that is not part of Sinai minhag (custom) or any time I pick up my guitar, there will be reactions and differing emotions.

The reality is, Judaism has acknowledged how complicated and problematic music can be with thousands of years of extraordinary ambivalence. On the one hand, we have David HaMelech the Psalmist dancing, singing and acting as the first musical therapist and on the other hand the forbidding of musical instruments in the Shulchan Aruch for Shabbat worship. In the Talmud, music is conflated with magic and mysticism-- uncontrollable forces that are looked upon as something to be understood by only the most select elite and kept away from the rest of us for fear of its transformative power.

At a psychological level, clinical trials have helped us understand that the sense of loss that can be associated with a change of melody can literally be associated with the trauma of death. An example given by one of my teachers is that we often link music with someone that has passed, and that when we no longer hear that melody, we can react as if that person has been lost to us again. How can a rabbi or cantor ever hope to compete with that level of association?

I believe the most profound discussion of this at Shirei Chagigah came from a workshop attended by Jonathan and Katrin where the terms “like” and “don’t like” associated with synagogue music were discussed. Honestly, we all fall into this in one way or another, rabbis and cantors included. We hear a prayer chanted in a specific way or a melody attached to a prayer and our instant reaction is, “I like it!” or perhaps the opposite. Then we communicate this with each other and perhaps the rabbi/cantor/prayer leader and the discussion of prayer and liturgy-- the collected public theology of Judaism for thousands of years-- becomes a discussion of taste based on personal aesthetics rather than the larger dialogue of our relationship with our prayer tradition. And what makes this more complicated is that as we have stepped into a moment of like or dislike, we may become less aware that those around us are experiencing the same thing quite differently than we are. Maybe a “like” for us is not quite shared by our neighbor.

Of course, in many ways this is self-serving. My job, especially in the first weeks and months of my rabbinate at Sinai Leeds, will be made much easier if I don’t have to navigate people not liking my musical choices.

But this is also an opportunity for us all to step away from like/dislike as our primary measurement of our relationship with liturgy. As I do not and of course cannot yet know all the melodies that have been loved and cherished at Sinai, I cannot yet sing, chant, play and pray only with known melodies. That makes this a predictable conflict that can be avoided with compassion for each other and a focus of the other dialogic aspects of our tradition.

From my position, I can promise to listen and learn. Every shul has its own complicated ruach and I am a new complicated element in that dialogue. I can never replicate exactly what has been done in the past because, first of all, which past are we talking about? Which moment of time do we snapshot and hold up as the “past” that we which imprinted as present? My past? What about my older or younger neighbors with different years of influence in the shul? Second of all, I was hired to be myself. But all this must be a dialogue and can never be a monologue. I will grow and learn with Sinai as I ask Sinai to grow and learn with me. Perhaps we reach the point that when we cry out, “I like it!” it will only be for the shining light we have created together in our musical and prayerful dialogue.