Choir

[chanaleh]

I'm joining the synagogue choir at Town & Village this year, and the first rehearsal was tonight! It was great.

I went there for Day 1 of Rosh Hashanah last year (diligent readers may recall that justom has close family friends who belong there and invited me/us). And in addition to really liking the service and the rabbi (who later, in a classic "small Jewish world" moment, turned out to be a childhood buddy of SCO#1, but that's another story), I actually really enjoyed the cantor and the choir. Which is a big thing for me because I normally am turned off -- almost by definition -- by anyplace that has a cantor, let alone a choir. But this cantor was a terrific young(ish... younger than me, anyway!) woman with great kavannah and an amazing voice that just, I don't know, fits really well with my personal davening style. And the choir was a lay choir performing from the bima (no microphones, no instruments) for just a few selected sections of the liturgy... which, not for nothing, happened to include two or three of my favoritest pieces from my own longstanding High Holiday choir gig back in Boston.

Side note: I had that choir gig (up in Swampscott/Marblehead) from 1997 clear up to 2009, skipping only one year in all that time. I joined originally because I was dating Cantor Ken, who was then at Temple Israel, and they needed an alto in the choir, and it was a paying gig, and he was going to be there the whole time anyway, so I said "heck yes!" The following spring when we broke up, the first thing he said was "You're still going to be in the choir, right??" And indeed, within another year, he was gone from there and I was still coming back, year after year, through two rabbis and three cantors and a synagogue merger -- until they finally discontinued the paid choir for good as of 2010.

So for almost the entire time that I was a member at tremontstreetshul -- which was, mind you, almost my entire Jewish life -- I never attended the main High Holiday services there. And from the beginning it was always sort of a concession, you know: Well, I signed up to do this thing, it's really not my style, but it's a fun gig and good money and the people are very sweet to me, so.

But it was only after I stopped doing it that I realized how much I missed the music -- how much it had shaped my experience of the High Holidays, which are in themselves a formative spiritual time of deep meaning for me. I would turn to prayer after prayer in the machzor and realize that I could not read the words without hearing them illuminated by the musical settings I had learned them in. And no one knew those melodies but me. And I had pirated photocopies of a bunch of them over the years -- I even thought about arranging one or two of them for Honorable Menschen -- but for all I imagined, I might never be in a place where I would hear them used in davening again.

... Until now!

And we did one in that category right away tonight: Samuel Naumbourg's "Ana Tavo" (a.k.a. Ono Tovo) -- though I don't know if I'd have heard it there on Rosh Hashanah, because it's particular to Yom Kippur, the introduction to the Vidui, or confessional.

Ana tavo l’fanecha t’filateinu v’al titalam mi-t’chinateinu, she’eyn anachnu azei fanim u-k’shei oref lomar l’fanecha, "Adonai Eloheinu v'elohei avoteinu, tzadikim anachnu v’lo chatanu" -- aval anachnu chatanu.

Let our prayer come before you, and do not turn from our pleas. We are neither so arrogant nor so stubborn as to say to Your face, "Lord our God and God of our fathers, we are righteous and have not sinned" -- rather, we have sinned.

It's a poignant little passage that often gets zoomed past on the way to the Vidui, and the musical setting here lends all the more poignancy to the text. I'd link to it for you all if I could find a sample. Maybe Cantor Shayna will send me the MP3.

(Or, y'know, if anyone needs a place to go for holidays, you could come and hear it.)