Cantor's Message

Hillary Blank
 

In 2008, on one of the hottest days that year in Jerusalem, I was walking around the city in a thin sweatshirt, a long skirt and a shirt hiked up to my neck. I had just met a friend for lunch in a Haredi neighborhood and the outfit was appropriate dress for that occasion, but now I needed some air conditioning.

I spent three weeks of my summer at the Conservative Yeshiva on Agron Street, a short walk from the Yaffa Gate to the Old City. I remembered well that the Beit Midrash, the study hall was always comfortable. When I walked in, there was only one person in the Beit Midrash, a young man who asked, "Can I help you?"

"Sure," I said. "I’m a yeshiva student." The cantorial program that hadn’t yet started would also be housed at the Conservative Yeshiva.

"Which yeshiva?" he asked.

What was the confusion, I thought. "This yeshiva…?"

I looked at him, then I looked at myself, and realized that most people in long sleeves and ankle-length skirts in Jerusalem in August are part of the Orthodox or Haredi worlds. Of course he was confused: I looked lost.

Once I explained my ensemble to the young man, we got to laughing and talking and, eventually, studying together. We would meet at a lecture later that week. We would bump into one another at the "Beer Fest" in the city and talk into the wee hours of the morning. We would date for three and a half years, spend another year in Jerusalem and get engaged. We would be married on January 8th, 2012.

I’ve told this story countless times, usually as the story of "how I met the love of my life." This time is different. This is the story of just how special that Beit Midrash at the Conservative Yeshiva (CY) is.

Jerusalem is filled with yeshivas that share an amazing principle: the idea of learning for the sake of learning, or Torah Lishmah. I wrote of this in my first bulletin article and how much I treasure this way of learning. But studying in yeshiva allows for a whole new level of Torah Lishmah: at home I’m lucky to snag a half hour of Talmud learning without distraction; at yeshiva, it’s my full-time job to be a sponge for all things traditionally Jewish.

The CY not only offers a Torah Lishmah environment, it does so by gender-egalitarian, pluralistic and understanding means. At the CY, Jews of every age and nationality have resources at their fingertips to pray three times daily in a no-pressure community, explore Shabbat observance and challenge texts, all with no judgment

And the CY understands that not everyone has the luxury to take a year to study full-time (though that is an option). The three-week summer program, with generous stipends available to lay leaders, is an extraordinary opportunity to get a taste of yeshiva in just a short time frame.

Not everyone will be as lucky as I was to meet their b’sheret at the CY – though many have – but I recommend the program to people of all ages with full passion for the mission and deeds of that extraordinary institution. Take a moment to visit their website at www.conservativeyeshiva.org to learn more. I can’t think of a better way to learn and grow in Israel as a Conservative Jew.

Kol tuv,
Hillary Blank

...

December 2011

My favorite kind of request that I get as a cantor is the following: "would you please use the traditional melody‟ for this prayer?" The traditional melody? Which traditional melody? Since I began cantorial school, I've collected a dozen versions of Mi Chamocha, fifty melodies for V’shamru and maybe a hundred new Lecha Dodi tunes. I've learned that everybody has her own version of the traditional.

Where did this notion of a traditional melody originate? There are two great derivation points for this idea. The first is that there are some melodies that indeed date back several hundred years. For example, the musical archetype for the Shabbat and weekday recitation of "Aleinu" – in Ashkenazi communities – dates back at least two centuries and most likely several more. The tune for Aleinu thus belongs to a class of tunes known as mi’Sinai, "from Sinai"; the exaggerated title comes in recognition that the tune dates back to such a long time ago that we can‟t trace authorship or pinpoint its exact origin. The tune just… is. It exists and we dare not change it.

More markedly, though, the idea of traditional melodies comes from the fact that every Jewish community around the world developed its own musical repertoire that largely echoed the musical practices of its surrounding culture. Most people never left their communities long enough to be exposed to any other tunes than their own; in such a community, there may very well have been a single "traditional" tune for Lecha Dodi. Or, as was the custom of many communities, there may have been a pile of customary Lecha Dodi melodies from which the cantor could select. The pool of melodies was, however, finite.

Today, for many reasons, the world of Conservative Judaism is largely comprised of Ashkenazi Jews. Yet it is a polychromatic, dynamic makeup: many American Conservative synagogues have members whose ancestry leads back to Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Hungary and beyond. The result of this communal mash-up is an extraordinary clash of musical traditions. Inside the synagogue sanctuary, a beautiful and dynamic quilt has begun to emerge from the natural blending of these disparate musical roots.

The White Meadow "playlist" for services includes tunes that are credited to nearly every Ashkenazi country around the world. Further, I sometimes choose to incorporate contemporary melodies by American Jewish composers – what‟s so "traditional" about that? The answer is that, much like the Jews of some small shetl in Vilnius or that little town in France, White Meadow has it‟s own musical traditional, woven of its various parts.

There are those musicologists in the Jewish world who argue that we are now witness to the early buds of a real American Jewish liturgical tradition. Every time we go back to that one, familiar Lecha Dodi melody at White Meadow, we play into that bigger picture. And maybe someday in the distant future, a cantorial student will pick up a book of synagogue melodies and find one of our favorite synagogue tunes listed as, "sung in the style of the Rockaway, NJ Jewish community."

Kol tuv,
Hillary Blank
Cantor