Tending the Cantorial Garden

Celebrating Our Graduates

Graduation is finally here. Over the past few weeks, students of all stripes have been receiving their diplomas as they ritually mark the end of their academic journey. I have drunk deeply from the livestreams of such ceremonies, as I have a number former students, colleagues, and advisees who have ascended the podium, shaken those most official hands, and become newly-minted rabbis, cantors, and undergraduates.

Yet while millions mark these memorable milestones, mirth gives way to mourning, as the civilized world reels from last week’s tragic terrorist attack in Washington DC which took the lives of two young Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, z”l. The gunman, may his name be eternally forgotten, was yet another emissary of the same mass movement which has been disrupting graduations and higher learning throughout America, co-opting them as forced stages for their theatre of transgression and violence. Others have commented on this better than I, so I will only add the words of one who recognized the predations of mass movements nearly one century ago, Eric Hoffer:

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.¹

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), a working-class autodidact who wrote bestselling books on mass movements and the modern temperament.

The Jewish people have a unique strength with which to soldier forward amidst such degradations of human life and Western values. Like our Israelite ancestors, we are always carrying broken tablets such these together with the whole ones in the ark of our hearts, and thus we will mourn and we will celebrate, and continue the bittersweet dance of Ecclesiastes (3:1-4):

A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven:

A time for being born and a time for dying,
A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted.

A time for slaying and a time for healing,
A time for tearing down and a time for building up;

A time for weeping and a time for laughing,
A time for wailing and a time for dancing…

Ceremonies mark all parts of this dance under the sun, ever undulating between joy and sorrow. As a cantor, I’m nearly always on the dance floor. One of the most precious parts of being klei kodesh (clergy) is being invited into these moments and elevating them towards the sacred, keeping us moving, grounded, and with our eyes upward.

As a result, I have very strong opinions about ceremonies, and this season of caps and gowns is no exception. Like a good religious service, a good graduation ceremony contains uplifting music, drama, elevated speech, inspiring messages, and colorful costume. This is the standard of practice in academic graduations around the world. But among my professional kind, the cantors, I must admit that I’ve never quite seen the graduation ceremony that I have always imagined.

Cantorial ordination rites most often mirror those of our rabbinic colleagues, and thus have been rooted in words: a mentor speaks, the ordinee speaks, an academic representative confers a title, and the audience applauds, followed by the occasional nod to cantorial particularism through the offering of a song.

Yet this is far too pareve for my liking. To be a cantor is to participate in monotheistic shamanism and priestly musical ministry. It is a practice of healing, social vision, and Torah which draws on a deep lineage of artists, energy workers, and religious leaders. And so I’ve always thought that there should be a much more energy-rich, chazonus-driven “laying of hands” in order to bring the initiated into this levitical line. As my colleague Jeremiah Lockwood writes, chazonus itself is a “body genre” which awakens deep physical responses:

“The cantorial vocal style offers the listener specific sonic cues to this scripted response through the repertoire of vocal noises imitative of sobbing or sighing. These sounds engender a mimetic response, gesturing toward practices of introspection, memory, and emotional flooding the listeners are intended to experience.”²

Thus I’ve always thought that the numinous, spellbinding nature of chazonus should be employed in trance-like temperament before a court of three, transforming the ordination moment into a sonic mikvah of musical incantation into which the neophyte cantor immerses, emerging as a sanctified vessel of sacred song.

I have been following cantorial graduations for many years, partly for the feels and partly because I’ve been teaching cantorial students ever since I was, well, a cantorial student. Starting as a nusach tutor my senior year in seminary, I fast discovered that I had a penchant for teaching future prayer leaders. After all, it was teaching some of the things which I loved most: Jewish music, liturgy, and faith.

I went on to do various types of cantorial education over the first ten years of my career: developing and running a four-year cantorial internship program; returning annually to my cantorial alma mater to lecture on musical and practical issues in the cantorate; tutoring European prayer leaders online; bringing students to my pulpits for annual concerts; and teaching semester courses for American and European cantorial schools. I’ve also been privileged to be associated with Temple Beth El in Rochester, NY for the past several years, which annually produces the Richard Briskin Cantor-in-Residence concert for an excellent JTS cantorial student. So I’ve enjoyed watching over a decade of cantors go through their paces, emerging as leaders for the synagogues of today.

But over the past four years that I’ve spent in the academic world, I’ve also gotten to see the written creativity of these young clergy, serving as a thesis advisor for a number of cantorial senior projects.

The cantorate has long been one of the largest and most under-recognized sources of Jewish musicological research. From the cantorial journals of the nineteenth century, to the father and grandfather of Jewish musicology, Eduard Birnbaum (1855-1920) and A.Z. Idelsohn (1883-1938), to the cantor-run Journal of Synagogue Music (1967-present), cantors have always been studying synagogue musical traditions.³ And as degree-conferring programs, American cantorial schools have broadly required a thesis or senior project before graduation. While the majority of these have never been printed in a peer-reviewed academic journal, there are nevertheless dozens, if not hundreds of extant cantorial theses which represent not only the individual strengths of America’s cantors, but rich, underappreciated interventions into both Jewish musicology and ritual practice.⁴

In honor of these graduations, it’s my pleasure to celebrate cantorial accomplishments by highlighting the innovative and fascinating research of my four cantorial advisees over the past half-decade:

Cantor Kochava Munro (Hebrew College ‘23): “Niggunim: Tools for Spiritual Growth:”

Cantor Munro grew up in a cantorial household, yet the role of the Hassidic niggun, especially in its twenty-first century forms, came as a powerful revelation and a conduit for spiritual feeling. She wanted to understand not only the essential nature of the niggun, but how Jews were entrained into its use. By using the clergy student body of her seminary (Hebrew College in Boston), she conducted qualitative and quantitative surveys of the contexts and purposes of niggun-singing among faculty and students, as well as assessed connections between congregational life the incubatory musical environment of the seminary itself. Cantor Munro concluded that the efficacy of niggunim related to their permeation across multiple Jewish contexts, including classroom learning, services, tikkun olam projects, dedicated singing circles, private devotion, and even board meetings. The niggun’s power is the way it creates uplifting communal connections, and yet also deeply personal ones. As Cantor Munro puts its: "Each niggun tells a story, a glimpse into our personal lives, a peek at the sacred parts of ourselves.” Her work gives new analytical framework to this musical window into the self, with intriguing implications for congregational life.

Rabbi Cantor Gabrielle Pescador (ALEPH Ordination Program ‘24): “Cantor Saul Nadvan”

The inspiration for many people to become klei kodesh is often linked to a key figure from one’s youth. For Rabbi Cantor Gabrielle Pesacdor, this figure was her childhood cantor from Congregation Shaar HaShomayim in Windsor, Ontario — Cantor Saul Nadvan. While pursuing the cantorate (and ultimately the rabbinate as well) later in life, Cantor Pescador found herself filled with emotion as she re-connected with the cantorial echoes of her upbringing. After unexpectedly discovering a little known LP of Cantor Nadvan in her garage (recorded above), she went down a path of research and discovery, writing a biography of Cantor Nadvan and offering insightful musical analysis of his recorded works. In doing this research, Rabbi Pescador not only illuminated the fascinating history of this Canadian cantorial clerygman, but systematically demonstrated the role of his cantorial music as midrash (interpretive storytelling) on the liturgical text. In doing so she has not only elevated the memory of Cantor Nadvan, but the religious spirit of the cantorial arts as well.

Cantor Carl Sayres (Academy for Jewish Religion ‘25): “Nusach as a Spiritual Practice”

Leading cantorial teacher Jack Mendelson tells the story of coming home from the synagogue in Boro Park and his mother asking him, in Yiddish: “What did the cantor say?” —-Not what did he sing, but what did he say. This carries the essential point that the cantor is no mere singer, but one who speaks great, even sophisticated truths through the medium of music.

This observation is at the heart of Cantor Carl Sayers’ deep convictions about the cantorate and the mystery of its art — the cantor always has something to say, and studying cantorial music is how one truly listens. Cantor Sayres has thus developed a unique framework for “for deep exploration of Jewish liturgy and how that depth can help us develop our understanding of and relationship with God.” He envisions nusach study as a spiritual parallel to Torah study, helping us come to know the faithful lifeways and Torah metaphors which are deeply ingrained into the essence of the cantorial soundscape. Cantor Sayres’ thesis contains detailed musicological comparisons of cantorial settings understood within a novel framework suggesting an inherent ethos and rich symbolic meaning for each of the cantorial modes. This complex and revelatory method will dazzle and delight Jewish music mavens, and reveals Cantor Sayers as a true darshan — someone who seeks the deepest meaning of the cantorial universe, helping us all to discover what the cantor is truly saying—and why.

Cantor Jenni Asher (Academy of Jewish Religion California ‘25): “Circle Songs and their use in Liturgy for Ashkenazi Synagogue Services in the United States”

The “circle song” is a musical term coined by the famed vocalist Bobbi McFerrin, described by the artist as “a group singing technique that involves creating music through improvisation and collaboration, challenging all participants to play, sing, invent, imagine, and explore.” Creating a sense of “groove” and unending musical possibility, the circle song creates an aliveness that many religious services often struggle to achieve. Cantor Jenni Asher applied her love and training improvisational music in order to explore this musical form in the context of Jewish worship. Transcending the accepted pacing of neo-chasidic niggunim circles, Cantor Asher’s thesis creates a “How-To” guide for Jewish circle songs which allow a prayer leader to intermix them with familiar modalities of Jewish chant. She also has created circle song arrangements which successfully gel with familiar twenty-first century synagogue repertoire. Music’s healing power derives from that sense of “flow” which the circle song so well captures, and Cantor Asher’s adaptation of the genre is certain to help many religious services get their groove back.

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Photo by RUT MIIT on Unsplash

My blessings this week to all of our graduates, cantorial or otherwise. May the studies you have done taught you not to nurture grievance or to seek a lost self in an agitant collective, but to plant eternal life within your own souls. Such stuff is not the in the ecology of mass movements, but in the gardening of the spirit which is nurtured by study, prayer, and deeds of lovingkindness.

1. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 98.

2. Jeremiah Lockwood, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era, 153.

3. For a detailed analysis of this overlap, see Judah M. Cohen, “Whither Jewish Music? Jewish Studies, Music Scholarship, and the Tilt between Seminary and University,” AJS Review 32/1 (April 2008): pp. 29-48.

4. For reference, here are two amazing lists (and far from comprehensive) of cantorial theses from HUC-New York and from the H.L. Miller Cantorial School at JTS.