Of Jewish Flutes & Funerals

A tribute to a lost tradition and a lost friend

Last week, a close cantorial friend of mine lost his beloved wife of over six decades. Sandy Lubin z’’l was a stylish lover of the arts, a generous Jewish community leader and volunteer, and the devoted mother of three children and grandmother of nine. When I came to my first job in Maryland, she and her husband (the cantor emeritus) were always my cheerleaders as I got my sea legs in the waters of synagogue leadership. Sandy lived a full life, with both uplift and hardship, and her loss is deeply felt by her family and community.

As a lover of music, it was only fitting that Sandy’s cousin, Adrianne Greenbaum, a nationally-recognized klezmer flautist, came up at her funeral to offer this beautiful piece of original flute music.

This was incredibly touching, but perhaps surprising to some. After all, Jews don’t usually think of flutes, let alone musical instruments, as a part of mourning. Traditional Jewish law typically forbids the mourner from even listening to live music during the year of mourning (aveilut) — a disorientating practice that, I’ve been taught, allows grief to surface and process without distraction.

But this was not always so. In all societies, laws increase with the scale and complexity of the group; what was once permitted in a more flexible, smaller enterprise becomes regulated and/or excluded at a larger scale. In the Talmudic era, individual rabbis held a multiplicity of opinions on all matters of Jewish life and practice, long before legal codes were used to create a more uniform practice along large, transnational group of Jews. So too, with the halachic banishment of the once normative tradition of the funerary flute.

In truth, flutes have long been in the forefront of Jewish emotional expression, especially in times of mourning, for over three thousand years. The melody of this long tradition is easily lost, but if we listen closely, its dulcet tones are still ready to pull at the Jewish heart. Today’s learning is dedicated in honor of Sandy.

I. Funerary Flutes of Jewish Antiquity

The first woodwinds of the Torah originated with Yuval, the father of music amongst the descendants of Cain. His innovation, the ‘ugav, (pipe) is mentioned only five times in the Hebrew Bible as a complement to the lyre (kinor) in creating joy. The biblical flute — the chalil — also appears in times of joy and as an instrument accompanying excitement and prophecy. But one source in the Hebrew Bible anticipates a special transformation in the meaning of flutes:

And I will make an end in Moab
—declares GOD —
Of those who offer at a shrine
And burn incense to their god.

Therefore,
My heart moans for Moab like a flute;
Like a flute my heart moans
For the people of Kir-heres—

-Jeremiah 48:35-6

Here in the late seventh century BCE, Jeremiah invoked the moaning of the flute as a channel for grief. This source is particularly poignant because it is the experience of the flute that opens the heart, expressing God’s compassion for the suffering of Israel’s enemies, however deserving or ordained the punishment may be (A good reminder in our day and age that one can feel judgment and compassion at the same time).

In the Mishnaic period (1st-3rd centuries CE), the rabbinic interaction with Hellenism carried this practice of funerary flutes even further. These woodwinds became a standard part of the professional mourning at Jewish funerals; as Rabbi Yehuda taught, “Even a pauper in Israel should not provide less than two flutes and a wailing woman (M. Ketubbot 4:4).” Apparently providing flutes was so important that some rabbis said that bringing them overrides Shabbat prohibitions. Other rabbis were even concerned that you might do a work-around and ask your non-Jewish friend to bring them instead:

Mishnah Shabbat, 23:4 - [One may] await nightfall at the Shabbat limit to see to the business of a bride and of a corpse, to fetch its coffin and wrappings. If a gentile brought the flutes on the Sabbath a Israelite may not play dirges on them unless they had been brought from nearby.

To get a distant echo of the funerary flutes of the past, here’s a tune on the aulos — one of the standard flutes in the Greco-Roman era. Perhaps listening to this we might feel the sense of moaning and emotionalism that our rabbinic ancestors experienced at a second-century Jewish funeral:

II. Did the Rabbis Use Historically-Informed Performance Practice?

Flutes were not only used in the context of funerals, but also before the altar in the Temple during the three pilgrimage festivals. Describing the instruments of Temple worship, the Talmud fascinatingly recalls an antique flute which dated back all the way to the time of Moses:

BT Arachin 10b:

The Sages taught: There was a flute in the Temple; it was smooth and it was thin, it was made from reed, and it was in existence from the days of Moses. The king issued a command and they plated [the flute] with gold, but then its sound was not as pleasant as before. They therefore removed its plating and its sound was then as pleasant as it was before.

What was this Moses Flute (abuva d’moshe)? The Talmud shows that it was a reed flute in an old style. And amazingly, the attempt to adorn or “modernize” the flute actually impeded the sound. Most flutes of this era were either wooden or metal, and so it is notable that it was a humble, “antique” reed instrument that was used in the Temple for its sweetness. Another Talmudic source (BT Sukkah 50b) event cites the Moses Flute as a proof that instrumental music counts as divine worship. Perhaps this was argued from a sense of continuity with the past. After all, if Moses can play the flute to worship God, why can’t we? I don’t yet know of any stories of Moses the flautist, but I do know that this looks like the earliest religious articulation of a philosophy of historically-informed performance.

We can see now that the rabbinic approach to the flute was the standard, popular instrument for funerals, bringing out the emotion of the day as much as the wailing women who accompanied them. The flute also had a role in Temple worship on days of pilgrimage and celebration. And the sweetness of the flute apparently was embodied in a reed instrument thought to date back to the days of Moses, whose antiquarian qualities were preserved to keep the instrument sweet and appropriately humble for worship.

III. The Shepherd Music of Chazonus

While I will write another post about the broader expressive qualities of woodwinds across Jewish history, in recognition of Sandy and her life as a cantor’s wife I’ll add one more meditation on the influence of the flute in Ashkenazi music. While not always an expression of mourning, the well-known association of flutes with shepherding is behind some key moments of expression in both chazonus and Yiddish song.

Some of the most ubiquitous shepherd music which permeated in Eastern European Jewish culture is captured in the doina. This klezmer genre is closely related to the Rumanian doina - a lonely shepherd's melody often in free meter. In klezmer, the Jewish doina was played as a forshpil (prelude), used to attract the notice of the audience, and make them concentrate and ready to a faster, danceable tune or suite of melodies. In Jewish culture doinas were played at weddings, and were also an opportunity for expressing virtuosic playing.

This genre is featured heavily in traditional Eastern European cantorial singing on the High Holidays. Cantors would do improvisations or compositions for the text k’vakaras ro’eh edro - “as a shepherd tends his flock”— in the mode and style of a shepherd music, the doina.

I learned one version like this while studying to be a cantor. It is from the unpublished compositions of William Bogzester, one of the teachers of the current cantorial master, Jack Mendelson. You can read the manuscript here, and listen to a little bit of the cantorial doina:

Compare this to the early klezmer recording below, which really gives an excellent feel for the klezmer flute. The flute was featured in many klezmer ensembles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long before the current combination of clarinet, violin, and other brass became more favored. 

The sounds of flutes also found their mournful and expressive ways into the repertoire of Yiddish song. This next doine I learned from my colleague, Cantor Sarah Myerson. As faculty at Yiddish New York, Cantor Myerson taught us We learned from this video of the song “Doyne” sung by the great Arkady Gendler z’’l. In this plaintive song about the suffering of Jewish farmers in difficult times and the consolation offered by the klezmer, Gendler ends each verse by vocalizing “ofelyu” — the plaintive sounds of the doina, showing its expressive and mournful character.

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Flutes, to sum up, were klei zemer (musical instruments) of intense human emotion, — with special powers to open human hearts and face the realities of suffering and loss. Their sweetness was desirable before God in ways that date back even to the time of Moses, and continued into our own era as expressive vessels of shepherd music amongst Eastern European Jews.

Sweet, expressive, and facing difficulty with an open heart. This was the Jewish tradition of the flute, and this was also Sandy herself. May her memory always be for a blessing.

Sondra “Sandy” Lubin z’’l (1936-2024)