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Let Us Sing a New Song!
We are pleased to share with you the first installment of our spring series on Leadership, Learning, and Love. As we prepare to celebrate a Passover unlike any we've ever experienced before, President Sharon Cohen Anisfeld shares an introduction to the series and to this first issue: "Let us Sing a New Song!"
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Prayer Leadership and Song
Hebrew College graduates Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer (above) and Rabbi David Fainsilber infuse music into everything they do as leaders of The Kitchen in San Francisco and the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe respectively. Watch this video on how their musical leadership has made an impact in their communities.
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Sholem Velt der Gantser: A Song of Peace
By Cantor Lynn Torgove, Head of Vocal Arts at Hebrew College
with a reflection by Rabbi Nehemia Polen, Professor of Jewish Thought
You have given the week the sweat of your toil.
But now, Man, you are a prince.
Come, beloved, and greet your Princess, your Sabbath rest.
Greetings to the whole world, in a spirit of fellowship.
Let our voices blend together in a heartfelt Shabbat song.
Quiet evening has descended, peaceful now is the hour.
Let us go, my beloved, to meet the bride and let us welcome the presence of Shabbat. (Translated from Yiddish)
In this time of such dire circumstances and difficulties, I have found that music that I once knew and loved has taken on new meaning and significance. Sholem Velt der Gantser is one such song.
Written at the beginning of the 20th century in New York City by two brothers, Israel and Ben Goichberg (also known as Ben Yomen), Sholem Velt der Gantser began its century-long journey. Israel wrote the poem in his native Yiddish and Ben composed the music. The brothers emigrated from Uman, Ukraine, the town where Reb Nachman of Breslov had lived his last days, and they found employment working as educators in the Yiddish secular schools and summer camps of New York.
Memorable Jewish tunes and lyrics like Sholem Velt der Gantser are often re-interpreted, re-arranged, and performed by various artists, in the true folk tradition. These songs are handed down over the decades and often become known as "traditional" melodies, even when they were composed by well-known composers and poets. In that tradition, Sholem Velt der Gantser was adopted by the international klezmer duo of Jeff Warschauer and Deb Strauss, who arranged it for voice, guitar, and violin. Cantor Becky Khitrik and Amy Lieberman, Music Director of Hebrew College’s resident choir Kol Arev, further transformed the song into a choral piece with klezmer instrumental accompaniment. Kol Arev sings this song to welcome the Sabbath bride at the beginning of Kabbalat Shabbat.
The song begins with the words Sholem velt der gantser—Peace or Greetings to the whole world. The "whole world" has taken on a new urgency, a new imperative and new sense of our universal connectedness as we realize what has always been true: We are all family, greeting each other with the words of Peace in a fellowship. We pass that message to you in this heartfelt Shabbes lid, Sabbath Song.
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Song and the Journey Out of Egypt
By Rabbi Sharon Cohen AnisfeldHebrew College President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld offers a d'var torah on Passover and the power of song to reflect the paradoxes of the human heart.
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Esa Einai: A Song in Order to Ascend
By Jackson Mercer, Hebrew College Rabbinical Student
Jewish music is my inner song. I recognize my music as my joining into a centuries-old relationship with Jewish texts and traditions. I also see music as a way of deepening emotional experiences. In the context of this unprecedented moment in the world, music can be grounding and therapeutic.
This melody is for Psalm 121. Rather than being another 'Song of the Ascent,' it can be read as a 'Song in Order to Ascend' (Shir La'maalot). It says: 'I turn myself to the mountains and I look for help. Where does my help come from? It comes from God.' I grew up in Northern California singing a lot of melodies connected to this line of text. I was surrounded by lots of hills and mountains, so to me, the visceral connection to mountains was really powerful. In Judaism there are so many moments that happen on hilltops and mountaintops. It's where we make our cities. It’s where we go to draw closer to God. We go vertical to reach a divine presence. The fact that we have to ascend to have a conversation with Divinity is a fascinating idea to me. In the last two notes of the melody, you feel like you’re at the top of the mountain. Then you step back and say, 'Oh I’m at the top of the mountain and that’s really scary.' To be able to chart that in a melody was very rewarding and interesting for me.
I made this video a few months ago. People put their headphones on and sang along, and through the wonders of technology, I layered the voices on top of one another. At the time it was just me wanting to sing with my friends—people from across the denominational spectrum and around the country were able to virtually sing the same song at the same time. I couldn't have imagined that people would be doing this all the time now, and that this would become the new normal.
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Some of us have mantras—phrases that keeps running through our mind—in times of challenge. I realized that one of mine is from “Hatikvah,” Ode lo avdah tikvatenu, Hatikvah bat shanot alpayim. We have not lost our hope, the hope that has persisted for thousands of years.
I know from my rabbinic work with families in grief, that a key to a family’s recovery after experiencing tragedy is having one person in that family who holds and articulates a vision of hope. Many families will make it through a difficult time if just one person is able to look through to the other side of a crisis and continues to say that things will eventually be all right. Living well through this situation is being able to convey to the people around us, even in our fear and uncertainty, that there will be a time when we will clasp hands, hug one another, feel safe again, celebrate in actual community, and come together for work and play.
At the same time, because I’m Jewish, I like my hope served with a side order of reality. So I’m drawn to the work of cultural critic Maria Popova as she discusses how the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit “maps the uneven terrain of our grounds for hope.” Solnit writes, “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. … Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
As we prepare to celebrate a Passover different from all other Passovers, I want to share how the writer and animator Hanan Harchol underscores how we have “room to act” in our lives. In his wonderful animation “Maror (Bitter Herbs),” Harchol says that we choose to consume the bitter herbs rather than to passively let the bitterness of life consume and overwhelm us. We have the power to act. We did not choose to be in this difficult time but we can manage the bitterness, choose what we will model and teach as we experience these difficulties.
While I am not at all in a “silver lining” frame of mind, it is true that for many people the experience of living through—and leading in—crisis is the refiner’s fire that shapes our life and our work going forward. There will be a time when this will be over and I want to be able to look back and say that I comported myself well, that I found ways to be value added to the lives of the people whom I love and the people who came to know me online. I want to be able to say that I lived with courage and I held out the hope that we would use the lessons we learned to think deeply and bring more love, compassion and hope into our many worlds.
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