The Road Not Taken

On Choosing between Judaism and Classical Music

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

As a senior in college, I faced a difficult choice: was it to be music or Judaism?

I was offered, on the one hand, the opportunity to attend cantorial school in New York, and on the other, the chance to teach English in Austria with the promise of studying classical voice. This weighty decision represented two different visions of my long-term future. As both a serious musician and a serious Jew, the determination was not an easy one. Ultimately, I chose the path which I believed would give my individuality and my religious life the best chance at flourishing.

People are often surprised when they learn that I did not always plan to become a cantor. Most clergy have a “call story,” and it is easy to romanticize about how the divine hand ordained our religious leaders from a young age, like the biblical Samuel. So although many people encouraged me to become a cantor throughout my young adulthood, I was still uncertain, even after leading my first High Holidays. Facing two diverging roads, I chose the cantorate for its religious opportunity and family lifestyle, even as it placed limits on my musical being.

I have never regretted this decision. Like the jolt at the beginning of a roller coaster, my cantorial path pushed me towards teachers, mentors, experiences, and friendships which fed my life-long questions, love of learning, and desire for both music and yiddishkeit. And that continues until today. As I say to those who ask: Becoming a cantor was the best trick that God ever played on me.

Yet I know that this decision emerged from a difficult choice which is shared by many. My Christian colleagues perhaps have it easier, as their religious commitments are more celebrated by the Christianity-soaked milieu of classical music and the rhythms of Western society. The Jew seeking to walk with God in the way of halacha marches to the beat of a different drum, and often must awkwardly dance in polyrhythm to live in the musical world.

Like my cantorial school conundrum, Jewish involvement in classical music over the past two centuries is a tale of two roads. The question before us is: will they ultimately converge or diverge?

Jimi Hendrix famously quipped: “Music is my religion.” Whether being applied to reggae or Rachmaninov, this adage reveals the independent allure of music as a self-validating object of spiritual fascination. It is no mistake that the modern master of the niggun, Joey Weisenberg, titled his recent book The Torah of Music, as if mother music herself carries her own, independent wisdom that we should not forsake.

Yet the magnetic force of music often exists in tension with the gravity of religious commitment. As music scholar

Ted Gioia

has repeatedly demonstrated in his wide-ranging scholarship, music is a powerful force that expands human freedom. It reveals interior psychological space through expressive sounds, and powerfully conjures human energies in the immediacy of the present, whether to mend, to meditate, to muster or to march.¹

On the other hand, religious laws (known in Judaism as mitzvot, “commandments”), often do the opposite, ultimately limit human freedom and expression. They bring us into communion with both our nomos and narrative, our story and our statutes, making distinction between holy and profane, pure and impure, good and bad. The expressive force of music and the limiting force of law thus exist in permanent tension with one another, eternal wrestlers on the heavenly ladder. How then can the religious Jew struggle with music and prevail?

Some may claim that there is no tension, that music exists simply a matter of personal taste and not of religious consequence. But as a Jewish music historian, I find such a position untenable. The earliest story of music in the Hebrew Bible, found in the Generations of Cain (Genesis 4), locates music as one of the three “big tech” developments of Cain-ite civilization, yet which ends with bigamy and the glorification of violence. Unlike in pagan cultures around them, the Israelites recognized that music was profoundly human — an amoral occupation which guaranteed neither divinity nor decency among its practitioners.

Rather than rooted in the gods or the sciences, music in Torah is seen as rooted in the human life force, the yetzer hara. This powerful force can be disciplined and channeled, but also easily gratified and abused. Like King David, the bible’s ultimate bard and political innovator, the most musical people in any society are typically both the most creative, but also often the most expressive, whether for good or ill.

Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash

Classical music, that most Western of arts, was a liberating force for Jews throughout the nineteenth-century. In the world of printed music, the Jew could pursue the interpretation of a new sacred canon — the written works of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms emerged as the scriptures of a new religion of national sound into which emancipated musical Jews could receive ordination as conductors, virtuosi, academics, composers, and other secular rabbis of the newly-inclusive West. The sacred texts of this world were its printed scores, given over by the God to His composer-prophets, transcribed into notes and transmitted as musical law to the nation’s musician-priests. This chain of sacred notation and the world of its interpretation offered to these Jewish conservatory bachurs a chance to rise to the rabbinic elite of Western sound – entering the interpretive orchard of its music, learning its aesethetic halachot, observing its dictums and fastidiously debating its principles. Musical notation was also particularly powerful in pre-determining the sonic relationships between the newly emancipated Jew and his stand-partner in the orchestra, commanding both equally and rigidly in the civics of their musicianship. After years of estrangement with the West, a nascent rapprochement could be envisioned in music. There was no Jew or Gentile, but all were one in the performance of Bach.

Cantors, those terrible tempests of faith and music, exemplified the tension between the Jewish particularism and the sonic citizenship in the West conveyed by the world of classical music. In the modern era, musically educated cantors raced to deploy Western forms of musical beauty to uplift their flocks with both religious fervor and national pride; cantorial trade journals from the period show a profession in active experimentation with the sacred limits of classical music while attempting to preserve the separateness of Jewish life. But the children of these emancipated cantors – Fromenthal Halévy, Jacques Offenbach, Julius Sulzer, and countless others could not maintain that balance, leaving the parochial pursuits of Torah and traditionalism for their new ennoblement as composers of national sound.

Cantor Salomon Sulzer, whose Viennese-influenced Torah service melodies are still sung worldwide by nearly every type of Ashkenazic synagogue, was among a vanguard of “modern” cantors who created a Jewish synagogue soundscape buttressed by Western harmony and high culture, attempting to suffuse Western sound in the synagogue as both an act of self-conscious Jewish aesthetics and a musical play for Jewish sound in a new world order. Sulzer himself wrote popular political anthems for Austrian revolutionaries at mid-century, actively cultivating a broader national soundscape for Austria that included his co-religionists. Yet the cantor’s fêted Austrian liberalism was ultimately dissonant with the dark vision of blood-and-soil nationalism that would ultimately overtake the German-speaking world. Even the composer Franz Liszt, himself a Sulzer devoté who served as the cantor’s accompanist at private Schubert art song recitals, found these Jewish musical upstarts as fundamentally foreign and insoluble in the world of European music. With prophetic prescience, Liszt’s writing on Jewish music anticipated both the Shoah and the State of Israel, penned just one year before Theodore Herzl’s birth:

“What the Christians must do is consider giving them their own homeland. They are not going to accept any homeland but their own, so their Palestine, their Jerusalem, and their temple will have to be returned to them. Sooner or later we are going to have to unsheath our swords and drive them away to take it. The feeble ones are going to go down on their knees before our altars and offer their very lives to stay with us. The faithful will run to their "Promised Land," settle there, and believe it was a miracle. Oh, God! That will be a miracle indeed--a true miracle--to see a people that, after twenty centuries of exile, is still so strong that it can still raise five million fighting men, ready to take possession of the Promised Land once again. “

— Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, 1859.

The unfolding tragedy of Jews in European classical music is multi-layered. The inclusive, Sulzerian nationalism of the Romantic era was ultimately replaced by the exclusive and bloody nationalism of the Nazis. And while Jewish musicians have, in every era, clung to their Western musical priesthood and continuously risen in the ranks of innovation and musical excellence, tension with or loss of religious commitments followed. Living in a classical music world whose rigor, routines, and rites moved largely out of step with a life of mitzvot, music pulled one closer to Western civic religion enacted by the safety and powerful succor of the score, perfectly performed with all of the joy and glory of the High Priest exiting the Holy of Holies.

One can appreciate classical music without much tension. Indeed, Jews of all stripers who claim leadership in Western high culture have never failed to champion its musical canon. The orthodox iconoclast Rabbi Nathan Lopez Cardozo, even recently advocated for rabbis to listen to Bach and Mozart before ruling on a halachic problem.

But being a consumer and a producer are entirely different pursuits. To be part of the classical world as a musician, walking the warm sands of musical artistry rather than marveling undersea at its distantly-made trinkets, often requires giving up some of one’s Jewish voice. Cantors, though often ridiculed for being failed classical musicians, thus actually represent a broader category of Jews deeply struggling with the pull of two faiths — Judaism and classical music. Their innovations at the intersection of both traditions attempt, in every generation, to harmonize aesthetic intuitions with existential commitments.

My colleague, Ian Pomerantz, a professional bass-baritone, academic, and cantorial student, recently described the bittersweet life of the classical music world for the observant artist:

“Being a Bach singer as an observant Jew is like entering a radiant garden. The sign on the gate says: “Johann’s Garden–Please Pick the Roses.” And that is when you discover that the roses have thorns and the thorns are aimed at you, your eager hands, your vulnerable heart. Of course you don’t stay surprised. You wince and you ignore and you hold in your arms a bouquet that deepens your knowledge of human nature, that tells of the beauty of centuries passed, that helps you to think, and causes you to feel almost Christian, rich in wisdom and deep and knowing. Also, you are bleeding a little, and some of the other visitors and often even the gardeners don’t always understand why you are bleeding. Some deny that the roses even have thorns because they don’t feel them, and many of them think you either don’t love roses enough to be there or that you don’t truly belong in the garden.”²

Despite the pain, Jews continue to tend this garden. The neighboring orchards of classical music and Judaism both call to the hungry soul, yearning to caress their leaves and pluck their spiritual fruits. In our own day, as Western nations look to their principles and seek moral and cultural revival, what is the Jew to make of his place in this unfolding drama? Is the Jewish embrace a life of classical music largely doomed to repeat this lachrymose history, in which the West rejected the Jewish body while the Jew rejected his own soul? Or is there a priestly potentiality in which the “most musical of nations” can help the West rewrite its story while retaining its Torah-driven mission?

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For the many Jewish gardeners of these classical fields, or others who just come to smell the roses, these questions run like woodland paths through our lives. Yet both roads of classical music and Judaic life ultimately lead towards listening, presence, beauty, and humanity, which are needed course corrections for our weird and wild century. Though one person cannot alter a long-worn trail, many feet can create new roads through the forest.

For time smooths all trails, and God still plays tricks.

1. My thanks to Devorah Goldman for her insightful comments on an early draft of this essay.

2. My thanks to Ian for allowing me to share his remarks, first posted on social media (December 30, 2024).