Labors of the Heart
A Labor Day Reflection on Cantorial Work
The work of prayer is called avodah shebalev — the labor of the heart.
But those who lead prayer in community know that the labor isn’t just within.
The observance of Labor Day was founded in the nineteenth century to recognize the contributions of America’s unions and workers, and to celebrate the achievements of labor movements in fighting for better working conditions, wages, and safety. And although you might not know it from their suburban office perch, cantors have spent most of the last millennium as part of the underprotected and contingent labor class that our holiday commemorates.
Today we’ll find out why that is.
Thank you for reading Beyond the Music! If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please consider supporting me with a paid subscription.
I. Cantors Lean In
Before diving into the history, let me say something controversial: I’ve always thought that cantors are the women of the clergy workplace.
After all, cantors make 70 cents on the rabbinic dollar.
Cantors engage regularly in the congregational care economy of music, education, and pastoral care. Yet this is considered less consequential —the “women’s work” of the synagogue —in comparison with the sermon, the board meeting, and the fundraiser.
I’m not a feminist scholar. But I have long wondered if people who know this literature shouldn’t look at our profession from a critical lens.
Such issues still remain in our enlightened era, even after cantors fought a long battle for parity in the religious workplace. But a look back in time reveals our own era to be a professional oasis amidst an historical desert of employment insecurity and exploitation.
II. Make Way for the Factotum
The cantor is the original generalist of the Jewish labor market. Unable to command the leadership status and salary of the rabbi, the medieval cantor served as a communal factotum, scraping together a living through a pastiche of part-time religious work. These included roles as a scribe, schoolteacher, shochet (ritual slaughterers), mohel (ritual circumciser), shammash (beadle), notary public, musician, and/or preacher. Sometimes communities even would give their cantors the right to peddle as perk of the office.1 Like most musicians, cantors needed a day job — or in this case many day jobs — to pay the bills.
This is largely keeping with the mishnaic understanding of the term hazzan, originating from an Akkadian root word meaning “overseer.” Hazzanim in the second Temple period served as a class of sacred civil servants, appointed to fulfill official communal tasks like overseeing temple properties, making public announcements, and even meting out corporal punishment.2 This tradition of performing wide-ranging public religious work continued throughout cantorial history, even when in certain eras the focus on musical prayer allowed cantors to attain a more specialized status.
Such exceptions to this history of generalism occurred during times when prayer and music were held in very high esteem. One fine example is the Jewish community of Prague: This “Golden City” in East-Central Europe was the site of a burgeoning Jewish population— ten-thousand strong by 1700 — with thirteen synagogues, as many cantors, and Europe’s first Jewish musicians guild (from which we get the name “klezmer”). Even by the late seventeenth century, Prague had acquired a reputation for attracting the greatest cantors from all over Europe, and boasted lively instrumental kabbalat shabbat services using strings and a portable organ. With such a concentration of Jews, capital, and music, cantors finally had a chance to be well-compensated with fair terms of hire, as witnessed by this Bohemian contract from 1717.
Here, two synagogues pitched in to engage the services of a well-respected Polish cantor, Rabbi Yaakov Drobitscher. The rabbi’s cantorial stylings were so well-regarded that he got the nickname Rabbi Yo Kol — a pun on his first name which effectively means: “Rabbi What-a-voice!”3 His exclusive contract was shared between two synagogues, during which they agreed to accept him for a period of three years, together with his singers, or meshorerim. R. Drobitscher was to spend two-thirds of his time in the Klausen synagogue and one-third in the Pinkas synagogue, and his contract divided up these duties to reflect this arrangement: Out of the three years, two Yom Kippurs were to be spent at the Klausen synagogue, and one at the Pinkas synaogue; the first day of Rosh HaShanah at Klausen, the second at Pinkas; two Shabbats a month at Klausen; one at Pinkas, and so forth throughout the Hebrew calendar.
For his trouble, the cantor was to be paid fifteen Rhenish Gulden per week for his three year term, along with living quarters and a generous timeline for moving his family from Poland.4 While the medieval standard of low-paid, wide-ranging cantorial work was the norm, larger communities like Prague, Frankfurt, and Metz hosted more specialized cantors on better salaries, allowing them a more stable life devoted to the practice of music and prayer.
III. The American Wild West — of Cantorial Jobs
While major communities in the early modern period could envision cantorial work as remunerative and governed by secure contracts with adequate benefits, the medieval jack-of-all-trades cantorial norm persisted, especially in America. Dr. Shari Rabin’s 2015 study, “Working Jews: Hazanim and the Labor of Religion in Nineteenth Century America,” brilliantly elucidates the difficulties faced by cantors as they attempted to adapt to congregational expectations in an unregulated Jewish labor market.
Largely devoid of rabbis, mid-nineteenth century America was almost exclusively serviced by these uncredentialed hazzanim who performed “all tasks of traditional Jewish life.” This situation infuriated Reform movement founder Isaac Mayer Wise, who wrote:
“The existing Hazanim system is a ridiculous mockery of the Methodist Church, that any one whom the Holy Ghost moves, is a minister. It is foreign to Judaism, disgraces it before the community, and produces indifference among its own votaries.’”
Wise and his co-religionists helped to found Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati (1875-2024), in part to solve the issue of professionalism and standards among American clergy. This institution and its rabbis largely sought to exclude these lay hazanim from synagogue leadership, recruiting choirs and organists as sacred music workers and leaving religious leadership to the formally trained professionals.
Dr. Rabin’s analysis of cantorial working conditions in pre-HUC America further show cantors with all-encompassing communal responsibilities, including “collecting money, delivering invitations to meetings, making sure that the burial ground and synagogue were kept in order, managing matzah orders in preparation for Passover, and opening, closing, and heating the synagogue,” and in another case, preparing “ no less than 11 sermons for one month.” Despite the heavy and serious religious workload, these cantors were paid very low wages and subject to capricious congregational demands.
IV. Towards a More Perfect Union
The nineteenth-century labor conditions for cantors improved somewhat with a rise in the economic status of America’s Jewish community. But when a new wave of poor, Eastern European immigrants came to America’s shores, the old problem of lamentable cantorial labor conditions repeated itself. Hazzan Nathan Stolnitz recalled the nadir of the situation in which Yiddish-speaking cantors applied to join the American Federation of Labor (AFL, now the AFL-CIO):
“Unfortunately however the economic crisis that shook this continent in the thirties…led to a situation that brought unrest and disorder to the cantorial ranks, eventually bringing about a sad condition of chaos. I remember the stormy Cantors' convention in Atlantic City in 1938 when the state of the profession fell to such a desperate level that the group considered the drastic step of applying to the American Federation of Labor. The Agudath Ha-Hazzanim after stormy controversy actually took this step.
Some placed their hope for establishing some degree of order and discipline in the cantorial field through the power of organized labor. Though some of the leading and distinguished cantors were strongly opposed to what they considered the profanation of the sacred calling of a spiritual intercessor by an ill-matched liaison with trade unionism, the pressure of the conference's leadership prevailed, dominated by the iron-willed inflexible personality of [Cantor Benzion] Kapov-Kagen whom no one could bend. As it turned out later the match with the labor union was quite unsuitable and it had no permanence.”5
The problems, however, were not just economic. Cantors had no protections as “contingent” workers (to borrow Rabin’s term), and were continuously subject to predations of cantorial agents, capricious boards, and ruthless hiring practices. It was for this reason that cantors unions like the Cantors Assembly (CA) and American Conference of Cantors (ACC) arose in the mid-twentieth century — not only to create the culture of high standards and professionalism among their members but to protect cantors from the vagaries of this exploitative environment. Although superstar cantors in some large synagogues were able to command competitive salaries and achieve stability in their communities, this was the exception rather than the rule. As the longtime CA Executive Vice-President, Cantor Samuel Rosenbaum, quipped: “the Golden Age was only golden for a select few.”
Today, musicians and workers of all kinds once again find both their labor and humanity at risk of compromise, especially with the rise of AI-generated “content” and corporate value of the bottom line over the human being. We should be grateful for the hard work done all over our country, especially by those who lack the protections that you and I might come to expect. The history of cantorial labor reminds us of the importance of humane work environments, in the religious workplace and beyond. As Dr. Rabin sagaciously concludes:
“…the hazan is spectrally present in the multiple forms of contingent labor that comprise so much of our twenty-first-century American labor economy. In all of these contemporary contexts, work is obscured, even rendered invisible, by the easy presence of such labor, as well as by the boundaries we too neatly establish between our religious and economic conceits.”
Let our workers not be invisible, whether in the synagogue or on the street.
Ken Yehi Ratzon.
Today, Beyond the Music and the whole world mourns the tragic murders of six Israeli hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. May their memories always be for a blessing, and may all of the 101 remaining hostages be, please God, safely and speedily returned home.
We also mourn the loss of the great teacher of Chazanut, Cantor Naftali Hershtik z’’l, who passed away on Sunday.
For the Italian context of medieval cantorial terms of hire and benefits, see Sarah Geller, “The Cantors of Padua,” Journal of Synagogue Music 28/1 (Fall/Winter 2001): 37-51.
For teaching youth, see Mishnah Shabbat 1:3; for temple properties, see Mishnah Sukkah 4:4, Mishna Yoma 7:1, Mishnah Tamid 5:3; For corporal punishment, see Mishnah Makkot 3:12.
Today this amount comes out to about $52,000 USD per annum — which with a parsonage could allow R. Drobitscher to make a living.
Nathan Stolnitz, “Memories and Reminiscences,” Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference-Convention of the Cantors Assembly of America ed. Samuel Rosenbaum, Kiamesha Lake, NY( May 10-13, 1959): 11.
Wow - "Largo al factotum" in Yiddish! Cool! :)