What is the job of a cantor?
Today, at least in North America, the better question is: what isn’t?
After the hard burn of sacred musical artistry across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the musical role of the modern cantor has increasingly taken a back seat to the medieval (or even Talmudic) cantorial paradigm of the synagogue overseer — a communal factotum serving a wide variety of educational, pastoral, and administrative needs.
Yet when you ask the man on the street what a cantor does, the answer you will most likely get is: the cantor sings.
We cantors have had a very hard time escaping this pigeonhole. And perhaps we never will. No matter how many hospital beds we visit, children we teach, or emails we answer (nebuch), the most front-facing aspect of our office is the musical part.
This is a problem that no amount of PR seems to have been able to solve. The American cantorate, organized in the mid-twentieth century, has spent millions of hours and countless resources promoting the ideals of the professional hazzan so as to include the full care economy of the modern synagogue: programming, membership outreach, teaching Torah, youth and adult education, pastoral care, music direction, etc.
Three decades later, my cantors organization came out with a promotional video to welcome new candidates into the cantorate.
Its title— More Than A Singer.
I highly recommend the video, which is availalbe in its entirety online, in part (and with no small irony) for the beautiful chanting of Hazzan David Lefkowitz, my colleague and cantor emeritus of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue.
But I also recommend it for the sagacious oratory of my favorite historical cantor, Samuel Rosenbaum, the four-decade executive vice-president of the Cantors Assembly. His thoughtful remarks, together with those of Cantors Barbara Ostfeld and Henry Rosenblum, set the stage for a new vision of the professional and dignified cantorial clergyman.
But now fast forward another thirty years. In 2016, my fellow cantors came up with a new promotional video to invite motivated young leaders into the profession.
This was the pitch:
The video, like the previous one, was a warm-hearted classic, featuring some of my most talented colleagues doing what they do best — educating kids, doing pastoral visits, leading choirs, and collaborating across the community. It also starred my childhood hazzan, Elisheva Dienstfrey, who (as I wrote last week) has been a wonderful cheerleader for me and a model for successful cantorial ministry, having served in her synagogue now for twenty-five years.
But again I cringed — not from the video’s content, which was beautiful, but from the fact that we still have to labor so hard to make this point. Let’s hope that in 2046 that cantors will no longer need to take out another infomercial to remind the world that we don’t just sing.1
Speaking to my congregation this past Friday night, I made a shocking confession.
Despite the fact that I do sing, I don’t actually think that it is my job.
My job — and the job of the cantor — is to pray.
What is the difference between singing and praying?
As I like to say to my cantorial students: You don’t have to be a good murderer to play Macbeth, but you do have to be a committed Jew who loves what (and to Whom) they are praying in order to be a hazzan. The delta between the two — the actor and the prayer — is the matter of intention, known in Hebrew as kavannah.
Right now, my son and I are reading a book together about body language. One of the interesting facts we learned is about communication: modern research has shownthat communication is 55% body language, 38% tone, and only 7% words.
This has many implications for human life. After all, if our words are only 7% of our communication, why is it so important that we mean what we say? Surely the other ninety-three percent is enough to get by.
I know that for some, not knowing what we are saying in prayer is actually a feature, not a bug. It avoids all sorts of cognitive dissonance around whether we actually agree with the liturgy, allowing the text to shake off its pshat (basic meaning) and become a trance-like incantation leading to union with aspecific divnity. Such ignorance, accidental or willed, can indeed become a form of bliss.
I know this vibe well, and have experienced it in almost every denomination. I know it can be very helpful, even to some clergy, towards achieving a sense of devotion.
Yet meaning what we say lies at the very bedrock of Western society. It is the foundation of trust and of the family. And it is arguably the foundation of Judaism itself. Our still-small-voiced, incorporeal God did not record His visual presence or His aural grandeur, but only left us the silent, sacred script of the Torah scroll.
This elevation of honest words — said with kavannah — is also fundamental to the rabbinic ideal of prayer. On Rosh Hashanah, Jews read the story of Hannah at the opening of the book of Samuel. Hannah, who really wants to become a mom, arrives at God’s tent to pray. It is written: “Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.”
Eli, the local priest, then proceeds to berate Hannah, believing her to be drunk. After all, isn’t prayer supposed to be out loud or musically intoned? Where’s the 93%? Or for that matter, in those days of sacrifices, where’s the beef?!
Hannah’s prayer had no voice — only whispered words as the sincere outpourings of her heart. Yet this nondramatic, nonmusical, communication was the foundation of rabbinic prayer as created by our sages. The laws of the Amidah, the apex prayer of the thrice-daily service, are that it is to be recited in a whisper. Many people call this the “silent amidah,” but this is incorrect. The worshiper should be able to hear the words of their own prayer, yet barely audible. In such intimacy with God, it is the still small voice of our kavannah, or intention, that matters the most.
People ask me a lot who my favorite cantors are. It may also shock you to know that my favorite cantors are not my favorite singers.
They are the people who I believe.
In fact, one of my favorite prayer leaders is not a cantor at all.
Rabbi
did not go to cantorial school. He is, however, an incredible shaliah tzibbur, and it is not because of his vocal technique or repertoire, but simply because he believes very deeply in what he is saying.I heard the rabbi lead services for the first time at a sweaty, emotionally intense Selichot at Kehillat Hadar, an independent prayer group (minyan) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (you can hear one such service above). I was mesmerized – not by him, but by the connected, faithful, kavannic environment he created which became a container for my own honest prayer. After he came a few months later to my seminary to teach about prayer leadership, I was almost moved to transfer schools to Hebrew College in Boston, where he then served on the faculty.
Ultimately I did not, which was a good thing. If I had, I would have met my wife at the wrong time.
That was 2008, and we were not destined not meet until 2012. I confess to you that, like a bottle of wine, I needed to age for a few more years in order to reach maturity.
But my experiences with Rabbi Leader and other spiritually-motivated rabbis, hazzanim, and laypeople always remind me of my real job — to pray and to teach others to pray.
Speaking to America’s cantors, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “All we have are the words in the liturgy and reverence in our hearts. But even these two are often apart from each other. It is the task of music to bring them together.” Thus our cantorial ancestors were not just concerned with music — the best of them were concerned with prayer and bringing their community along with them into divine communion.2 Loving music is easy. But when you love the One beyond the music, it is sweeter than any sacred chord.
So my job in the synagogue is not to sing. It is to be a ba’al tefillah – to be a master of prayer, and to teach people to love it. That’s certainly what I’m hoping to do across my educational work with my preschool, religious school, bar/bat mitzvah, and adults.
And I hope I don’t have to keep saying it thirty years from now, but my colleagues are indeed correct:
Singing is just the beginning.
I half-imagine that the next iteration will be titled “The Cantor: More Than a Robot.”
For more about cantors and kavannah, this short piece deals with both themes in connection to the upcoming High Holidays:
A Question of Intention
The Jewish High Holidays are the pinnacle of planned spiritual experience. Its prayerbook, the Machzor, opens to reveal an extended arch-anthology of Jewish theology, rendering multiple one-to-six-hour sacred libretti into which Jews pour their communal longings during the longest liturgies of the year — a veritable Bayreuth of blessings. The orchestra …
Thank you. It is an honor to be mentioned by you in this way. And a share your sense that that is what makes it meaningful for people to pray with me. I have tried to teach that for many years. Gratitude and love.
Thank you! Much to savor here, I greatly appreciate it.