I have another confession to make. For a brief period in my life, I was a karaite.
I know that most of you lie awake at night, terrified that your children will one day come home from school proclaiming such a dreadful affinity.
For the rest of you: the karaites are a sect of Judaism that rejects the binding nature of the oral law. Once a mainstream Jewish sect throughout the medieval world, they have dwindled to a very small community of just 40,000 people, most of whom live in Israel.
While I admit that I have recanted this heresy, my brief fling with neo-karaism amidst my love affair with Torah did leave me with one thing: an interesting reading list with a fascinating connection to music.
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My first encounter with the karaites came through my Medieval Jewish History class with Dr. Benjamin Gampel. Here we read millennium-old karaite texts and analyzed this post-biblical Judaism’s struggle against rabbinic hegemony. In my fascination with this anti-rabbinic conservatism, I went on to rediscover karaitic convictions in an unlikely place — nineteenth-century England.
Influenced by a number of Anglican thinkers, a group of Anglo-Jewish intellectuals in the early nineteenth century began to advocate for the sufficiency of the Torah and the superfluousness of the oral law. Rabbi David Woolf Marks (1811-1909) the inaugural rabbi of the liberal West London Synagogue, was deeply influenced by this “neo-Karaite” school. Though he deeply respected the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud, he considered their works as human rather than divine.
Word to the wise: whenever you want to bomb the status quo, just go back to your tradition’s oldest sources. This is how a lot of changes in Jewish history have happened, especially regarding music—from sixteenth century Jewish music theorists to nineteenth century reformers.
Rabbi David Woolf Marks was no different. In charting a different path forward for his inaugural liberal community in London, he reliably turned back to the music-filled days of the Jerusalem Temple.
On September 26, 1859, Rabbi Marks gave a grand sermon on the occasion of the inauguration of the synagogue’s new organ.1 Telling a three-thousand-year tale of Jewish and Christian sacred music, he recounted how each faith distanced itself from instrumental music, and then returned to it as a result of changing political and social conditions. While describing the instrument-filled Temple service, Rabbi Marks made his a case for the modern pipe organ, remarking: “there can be little question that, if it had been in existence, our ancestors of the second Temple would have gladly availed themselves of it for public worship.”
Concluding his long musical history, Rabbi Marks sums the case for change:
“…whilst the principles of Judaism have remained fixed and immutable since the days of Moses, the ceremonial or external worship has been subjected to constant modifications, according to the changes in the political and social relations in which the Jewish people have been placed. The form of worship in Solomon’s Temple offered a marked contrast to that which was originally practiced in the Tabernacle of Moses. The worship in the second Temple differed in many respects from that of the first; and wider changes still occurred when the Temple was replaced by the Synagogue, and when liturgies were substituted for the sacrificial rite, which was peculiar to the holy land. With these historical evidences before us, we may fearlessly advance the proposition, that in as much as time has wrought its influence on the forms of worship, the exigencies of time may again be consulted for the purpose of bringing our ritual practices into harmony with our mental, social and political progress.”
But is the mere fact of change enough to bomb the present? Are our social and political realities different enough that our music should manifest an entirely different world than the muted musical hegemony of rabbinic Judaism?
This is still an open question. One cannot but be impressed by Rabbi Ethan Tucker’s thorough halachic and philosophical investigation into the permissibility of musical instruments on Shabbat and Festivals, pointing to the wisdom of restriction within a legal pluralism. Or one may be persuaded by Ruth Wisse, who argues that our new era of Jewish national sovereignty requires as great a transformation in Judaism as that enacted by our rabbinic forefathers. Perhaps this very reality was shown analogusly in music by the neo-Karaite Rabbi Marks, realizing that once Jews could have political power and citizenship, and their musical powers should be expanded as well.
But to what end? Here, Rabbi Marks reminds us what it is all about:
“Still let me guard you, dear congregants, against indulging the idea that the organ occupies the chief place in the consecration of our Temple of Prayer. The leading feature in the inauguration of the Tabernacle of Moses was not the external worship, but the heart-felt love of religion made manifest on that occasion by the thousands of devout supplicants that prostrated themselves at the Altar. Again, at the consecration of the Temple of Solomon, the magnificence of the building, the pomp of the ritual, the gorgeousness of priestly decoration, and the sounds that came from hundreds of instruments and from thousands of vocal performers, weighed not as much as a feather with Him “that searcheth the heart,” when compared with the true prayerful spirit which the worshippers brought to the shrine of the Sanctuary. So, brethren, the leading feature in the dedication of our Synagogue to-day is not the organ nor its appliances ; but the pure motive that brings you hither, and the earnest piety in which your souls are enwrapped.”
As our parasha says this week: “This is the dedication of the altar (Num. 7:84)” Although there may be differences in details about the how, the why remains the same: God speaking to us, and us speaking to God.
Chag Shavuot Sameach.
For the full sermon, see David Woolf Marks, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions at the West London Synagogue of British Jews, Vol. 2 (London: Trübner & Company, 1885): 168-180, No. XIV.
A favorite quote from it here follows: “It is difficult, however to reconcile the conflicting views of men, who proclaim on every Sabbath day that ‘it is a good thing to sing praises unto God accompanied by the strains of instrumental music’ (Ps. 92:2-4) and who yet maintain it to be sinful to carry that object into effect.”