On Thursday, June 25, I traveled to Roanoke, Virginia with Legislative Assistant Claire Shimberg and other voting rights advocates from the DC metropolitan area. There, we joined with hundreds of concerned Americans to mark the 2 year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and left voters vulnerable to discrimination. Together, we rallied for voting rights and urged Congress, especially House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, to hold a hearing and restore voting rights for all.
It was incredibly exciting to come together with so many passionate and outspoken people of all ages as we advocated for such an important issue. The rally brought together numerous and diverse organizations and reminded me of the power of organizing and working together in coalitions—we are always stronger when we are united. Rabbi Kathy Cohen of Temple Emanuel in Roanoke and I both shared words of Torah and emphasized the Jewish imperative to protect the right to vote for all. My remarks can be found below:
I am Rabbi Michael Namath of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and I am thrilled to stand here today with these leaders, these great activists and advocates for voting rights. I want to thank the Leadership Conference, the local NAACP, and everyone who has worked tirelessly to make this event happen.
I do not stand here alone. I stand here with the many Jews who were Freedom Riders and civil rights lawyers in the South during the Civil Rights Movement.
I stand here today with the 17 Rabbis and Reform Jewish leaders who flew to St. Augustine at the request of Dr. King and were arrested for protesting segregation in 1964.
I stand here with those who drafted significant portions of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism’s Library.
I stand here with those who believed then, and the many who still believe today, that the freedom and protection of our democracy is crucial to the health and well-being of our country.
I stand here with those who believe that the ability to express one’s will at the ballot box is a right no eligible citizen should be denied and is a belief that is reinforced by Jewish tradition. Our texts teach us that “a ruler is not to be appointed unless the community is first consulted” (B’rachot 55a) and to “not separate yourself from the community” (Pirkei Avot 2:4). These texts emphasize the idea that everyone must have a voice in determining how their community is run, and they remind us that voting is a collective responsibility.
I stand here today with all of you as we say to Congress, “We cannot stand idly by while eligible voters are discriminated against and forced to jump through hoops in order to carry out their constitutional right to vote.
Voting is not a partisan issue; it is not a political issue, it is a deeply religious and moral issue.”
This August will mark 50 years since the signing of the original Voting Rights Act. I pray that by the time we mark that anniversary, we will be celebrating the progress that Congress has made to protect and restore voting rights.
Long ago, our ancestors sang a song of celebration. God assembled the entire Israelite people to provide water for them all. The Israelites in return sang this song to God: “Spring up, O Well – sing to it – the well which chieftains dug, which nobles of the people started…”
This song celebrated the Israelites past, present, and future. They sang of those who dug the well: the pioneers who spent years building it and allowing for this moment to arrive. They also sang about water, the substance that allows for wholeness and life.
With last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, we also sing a song of celebration. We celebrate LOVE; we celebrate that Love Wins. We celebrate that everyone in our country, whether you are gay, or straight, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; whether you live in the Great State of New York or the Great State of Mississippi are free and able to marry the person who you love. Love Wins.
Our ancestors’ song was a long time coming. The previous song was sung 40 years earlier when the Israelites safely crossed the Sea of Reeds. In the meantime, there were 40 years of hardship, struggle, infighting, loss of hope, and being stuck in the wilderness with no clear path ahead.
For much more than 40 years, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans individuals have struggled. For decades, those who have a gay son or a lesbian sister or a friend or family member that identifies as LGBT, have struggled. This has been a long, difficult journey! Gay men and lesbians have fought homophobia for generations. We have been fired from our jobs solely because we were out; we have been bullied because of who we are; we have been punished by our state and federal government enduring constitutional amendments and the Defense of Marriage Act. We have been scared to hold hands in public afraid that horrific words would be sent our way or bottles would be hurled towards us, or worse.
As a gay man, I questioned my identity for years and hid quietly in the shadows of the closet, afraid to leave those suffocating walls because I was scared to be me – to be out – to be proud.
Luckily, I was able to come out and to meet the love of my life, Brian. But, when it came time to get married in 2008, New York State did not recognize same-sex marriage. We had a beautiful Jewish Wedding Ceremony, but our rights were not recognized by anyone, except us.
Two years ago, the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down and the US government was required to honor marriages in whatever state gay marriage was legal. Brian and I finally were married legally, with Caleb, our son, serving as our best man.
Our ancestors faced a very long journey, circling back and forth in the wilderness, looking for a path to the Promised Land. Forty years, occurred between that first song of celebration and the second song for the very source of being: for water and for LOVE.
Our society has faced a long painful journey of homophobia and discrimination. But, we have finally touched the Promised Land. Today, gay men in Georgia and Lesbian Couples in Utah can legally get married. Today, gay parents adopting in Ohio can have both of their names added to their son’s birth certificate. Today, Jim Obergefell, can be listed as husband on the death certificate of his long time spouse John Arthur.
There is a long way to go before we truly become a utopia. Even in our celebration, even in our laughter and happiness, there is sadness, there are tears. We are in mourning for the nine innocent people, including four pastors, who were laid to rest, solely because of their skin color, solely because they were black.
As Jews, we know that the journey to the Promised Land is a long one and that the only way for us to get there is by working together to end all discrimination and to fight hatred with Love. As Jews, our voice must be heard; we must not remain silent. We will stand together against hate, we will stand together against violence, we will stand together for justice, and truth, and kindness, and equality. We have tasted the Promised Land and we remember the long, arduous journey. And so, we reach out our hands and hold on firm, and continue step by step, journeying forward, to the Promised Land we know can exist for us all.
Rabbi Andy Gordon serves on the clergy team of Temple Sinai of Roslyn
The dream has come true, but there is work to do! The United States has taken one more step toward fulfilling the dream of a country where people can live their own lives without fear; but as we celebrate the SCOTUS decision that gives every person the right to marry their beloved, we know the right to live in peace is still a far off dream for too many people.
This victory is a milestone on the road to justice and freedom. Even as we celebrate, we hold the people of Charleston and the entire country in our prayers. The poignancy of our celebration is huge because our joy is so great and our grief for our African American brothers and sisters is so deep. We know now more than ever that none of us are free until all of us are free.
At the core of my religious faith is the eternal promise of justice for all. Not for some but a vision that one day all people of good will shall sing in one voice an anthem of peace and liberty. In Jewish tradition, we teach that the Sabbath is a foretaste of the world to come. The Sabbath is a model of how the world might be. It is a world without work obsessions, a world where poverty and violence are gone, a world where children go to bed at night with warm full bellies. The Sabbath is the taste of the ideal where we rest from our labors to enjoy the true gift of freedom and taste God’s bounty at a table set for all.
We know the right to marry will face great resistance. We know the violence against transgender people is rampant. We know the need for an employment non-discrimination law is great. We know the need to work against racism is urgent, but today, TODAY, we celebrate as if all is complete, the Shalom, the peace and wholeness of God’s creation is with us.
This vision of wholeness, of Shalom, reminds us that when the celebration ends, and the Sabbath prayers are complete, justice and equality will only be fulfilled by going back to work to bring everyone to the table in all our glorious diversity.
Rabbi Denise L. Eger is the rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, CA. She currently serves as President of the CCAR
Shiru l’Adonai Shir Chadash–Sing unto Adonai a new song. As worship leaders and worshipers, how many times have we heard this charge from psalm 96? It is a wonderful reminder of the interplay between scripture and liturgy, and their fundamental difference. Scripture does not change. Indeed, even the would-be “mistakes” of the Torah are not corrected. Rather, alongside them in our chumashim we see how certain words really should be spelled and/or vocalized. Liturgy on the other hand has long been fluid–ever changing to match the new hopes, desires, frustrations, and morals of humankind’s maturation. Singing to God a new song is to constantly find new ways to express our evolving expression to God. As a result, change in liturgy and the music therein has been constant not only in our movement, but also in other Jewish movements and in other religions generally. As we pray together each week, we attempt to transform ourselves so that we can meet the moral and spiritual challenges each changing day brings.
One exception to this constant, gradual change is the liturgy and music of our High Holy Day worship. Like a massive ship, the services for the Days of Awe carry many more of our congregants, and meet far less frequently than our Shabbat services. While the liturgy and music of the High Holy Days we know today is quite different from that of even 50 years ago, they are still progressing at a much slower pace. Therefore, change to this grand liturgy is more jarring and difficult when it comes, even when that change is long overdue. But as the High Holy Day liturgy helps us make cheshbon nefesh–accounting for our souls–it is of utmost importance to keep these prayers and their musical expression up to date with humanity’s ever changing moral, spiritual and aesthetic requirements.
What could fill cantors and synagogue musicians with more purpose and joy than to literally follow the psalmist’s urge to sing a new song unto God? Shirei Mishkan Hanefesh, the musical companion to our new machzor, Mishkan Hanefesh, attempts to fulfill the monumental task of creating new melodies to express our liturgy during the yamim noraim. Indeed, the beauty of this new music is that it will make more of our liturgy accessible to our congregations. The goal of introducing these new settings, however, is not to replace the older ones, but to live alongside them so that they add to the richness of our prayer. While liturgy changes, scripture’s grounding constancy reminds us that we must walk a careful path between change and tradition. Carefully updated liturgy and music for our High Holy Days bring our penitential prayers fuller expression, but they cannot effectively do so without the same attentiveness to the established prayers and music that have carried us thus far.
Cantor Daniel Mutlu serves Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, Texas. Cantor Mutlu was also on the editorial committee for Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh.
At its outset, the Reform movement placed great emphasis on aesthetic and decorum. Fitting in, becoming a seamless part of the fabric of the larger society, was of the highest importance. Almost 200 years have passed, during which these goals have been met, most of all in the United States. Some worry that we’ve done too good of a job of fitting in, and are losing ourselves amongst the nations, much like the disappearance of techelet from our tzitzit. Seker, my project for Progressive Jewish outreach in the public spaces of New York City, is directly in response to both the early Reformers and the contemporary Jewish leadership fearing the continued loss of Jewish identity amongst the younger generations of the American Jewish population.
Seker began as a series of conversations between myself and my classmates during our first year of rabbinical school in Israel. These conversations circulated around a fairly simple question: If Chabad is so successful with its public Jewish outreach, why are we not doing it too? A new program at HUC-JIR in New York, the Be Wise fellowship, offers students the opportunity, and funding, to try to answer questions such as this. I applied for one of these grants to fund my project, which mainly consisted of a website, a portable table, a copy of Mishkan T’filah, a couple of sets of t’fillin, a banner and some business cards. Once this seemingly endless winter finally broke, some of my classmates and I hit Washington Square Park, Union Square Park and Prospect Park to speak with anyone interested in learning about t’fillin or Judaism in general.
During five afternoons of tabling, an incredible diversity of people came up to us to ask questions about Judaism, to ask what the t’fillin were, to even try them out. We had individuals ranging from a male Orthodox Jew who just hadn’t wrapped yet that day, to a woman who grew up Chabad who had never been allowed to wrap, to a non-Jewish man who was intrigued by the practice. The goal of this project was not to sell people on t’fillin, or anything for that matter, but rather to raise public awareness of Reform Judaism. The t’fillin were merely the lure to catch the eye of the curious, much like the Seker/Seeker play on words.
One of the greatest lessons I have learned in this project so far is the deep grasp the work of the early Reformers still has on the psyche of the movement. Many people I spoke with, and continue to speak with, about this project are flabbergasted by the use of t’fillin. “But why t’fillin?” is a common refrain. It is as if I am proposing to schect animals in public – people seem simultaneously offended and confused.
T’fillin, although not a part of most Reform Jews’ upbringing, are a distinct, eye catching, and unique Jewish ritual object. Unlike the hannukiah or shofar, they are used on a daily basis. Unlike mezuzot, they involve mindful action and physicality. They are the ultimate immediate and impactful experience. Their interesting construction, with the many tiny scrolls of Torah passages hidden inside, are a mystery and invoke curiosity in even the most cynical investigator. All of these qualities make them an ideal outreach tool.
Unconventional and countercultural as this project may be within the Reform movement, it sparked the interest of the public immediately. If the goal is to raise awareness and start conversations, Seker has been a total success. As leaders within the movement continue to brainstorm new and innovative ways to reach out to their communities, this model can serve as an example of an engaging and different mode of expanding the reach and visibility of Reform communities throughout the country.
Andy Kahn is a rising third year rabbinic student at HUC-JIR. He was with the CCAR as an intern during the last academic year and will be back again as a rabbinic intern during the coming academic year.
“God Bless America!” In these times especially we implore: “God Bless America.” How we need your blessings, O God. How we long for your presence, your grace, your forbearance, in the face of the horrific massacre in Charleston.
In Your house O God, in your own house, the Emanuel AME Church, the murder of your faithful, quakes the very pillars on which our nation stands. Nine citizens of the United States of America gathered to exercise their constitutional right to free expression of their religion, executed, not by some young outlier from our culture, but from the learned hatred endemic in American society. We cannot afford to sweep this under the carpet like we have the white gunman in the Colorado movie theatre, or the white gunman who murdered the Sandy Hook school children. We dare not pigeonhole these murders as the random acts of a crazed loner.
The racist ideas that filled Dylann Roof’s head did not come from random thoughts – one is not born a racist. Racism is a bred response. Roof’s actions reflect his environment. They reflect the Confederate battle flag that hangs outside of South Carolina’s Capital. They reflect the actions of the white policeman who gunned down an unarmed black man running away from him in South Carolina, just weeks ago.
That is not to say that Dylann Roof is not accountable for his heinous actions. The courts will undoubtedly rule swiftly on his guilt. Nonetheless, we have an accounting to make as well. Twentieth Century theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us that: “few are guilty, but all are responsible.”
The mass shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church, comes after a year of turmoil and protests over race relations, policing, and criminal justice across America. Up until now that unrest has been punctuated by a series of police killings of unarmed black men sparking a renewed vigor in the civil rights movement under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Clayborne Carson, founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, framed the Charleston violence: “The reality [is] that racism is alive and well and that we have a problem with guns. People will throw up their hands and say ‘how terrible’ … and then will get back to passing more laws that allow people to carry guns.”
Ecclesiastes teaches: “For everything there is a season… A time to be born and a time to die… A time to keep silence and a time to speak…”
Nine citizens of the United States of America executed, citizens participating in the constitutionally protected right to freely express their religion, gunned down in the service of God, and before the stunned hearts of America. It was not their season to die. Another United States Citizen, not some foreign terrorist, but a 21 year old, soft spoken, white man, sat in bible study and prayer with them for about an hour before he took out his gun and began shooting, reloading time after time.
Today their relatives in mourning rightfully bemoan: “It was not their time to die, not their time.” God bless America, how we wish we could wash over the pain with bucolic mountainsides and sandy beach shores. How we wish that post card of America was not marred by the racist actions of Dylann Roof. How we long for an America that elevates God’s blessings over man’s curses.
“There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.” Do not heed the voices isolating the perpetrator, making him sound like a freak of nature, rather than a product of American culture. The mayor and governor of South Carolina have been beating that drum this week, while they desperately try to console and heal their City and State.
Charleston’s Mayor Joseph Riley said in an interview with TIME: “Whether he was a terrorist and exactly how you define a terrorist, I don’t know,” he says. “I put him more in the [category] of the shooter of the children in Connecticut, the shooter in the movie theater—they’re deranged people.”
“The takeaway, Riley says, isn’t about racial hatred as much as it is about the easy availability of guns. “This guy that obviously wasn’t 100% emotionally stable could get a gun as easily as he could buy a diet beverage. I think this raises that same alarm bell that our country just hasn’t been able to deal with.” He also pointed out that Roof grew up over 100 miles outside of Charleston, noting that this “wasn’t something that emanated from the civic culture of this city.”
While Riley is right on point about the availability of guns and their link to violence, he misses a real opportunity when he denies the racism endemic to his city, to every American city.
None of us want to believe that the civic culture of our city could produce a Dylann Roof. Even in the town where he grew up they deny that he could have learned racism in their back yard. In Mr. Bunky’s Market across from Roof’s father’s home, Preston Rivers Jr., a 68-year-old bricklayer who is black, said even during segregation black and white children got along.
“They came to our house to eat and we went to their houses to eat,” he said. “We didn’t have a problem. We hunted together, fished, no problems. Manager [of the store] Kim Fleming, who is white, said most of the people near the store are black, and she never felt any racial tension. “His issues were his issues only,” she said of the alleged shooter. “I don’t see [racial tension] in this community.”
No, not in my back yard – no racial tension here. I have lots of black friends. We hosted an African American Church in our Temple for three years. I sit on the Triangle Martin Luther King Jr. Committee and am committed with the MLK Committee to spreading King’s message of economic justice and civil rights, not just on the MLK Commemoration holiday, but day in and day out.
And I also have a grandmother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the American Confederacy. My grandfather’s family owned farm land in Mississippi before the Civil War. My grandmother has letters written to her grandmother from a Confederate soldier fighting in the war.
“There is a time to be silent and a time to speak.” As much as I work for Civil Rights, as much as my life and my rabbinate have been influenced by outrage at the racist and classist effects of American society, I cannot be silent about my own part in that society. I cannot deny that I have never lived nor worked in a racist free community. And yet, I have never spoken about the racist culture that so surely had to be tied to that plantation my ancestors owned in Mississippi.
If we are to have a true conversation about racism, we cannot be silent about our own country, community or family. We have to own that we live in a country that has harbored and nurtured racists for all of its existence. We have to admit out loud that we, each one of us, have our own prejudices that plague us.
We must have these conversations both intra and inter communally. We dare not pretend that the racism all around us does not exist, just because the Emanuel Church murderer grew up across the street from a country store that employed blacks and whites.
We have to have these conversations, and we have to act in ways that work to curb the gun violence that pervades America like no other civilized nation. “If guns were outlawed only outlaws would have guns,” they say. And if reasonable restrictions were put on gun ownership, there would still be unreasonable people who found a way to get a gun – but statistics in nations around the world prove there would be a lot less gun violence in America, if we strengthened our laws on who can own guns.
We cannot be silent in the face of repeated fire arm massacres in the United States of America. How many more have to die before their time? How many more will not see the next season, because we did not demand change?
“God bless America, land that I love, stand beside us, and guide us.” If we truly love the America that we ask God to bless, then we must seize this moment to speak up and to speak out. To assure that along with God’s blessing it will be our voices and our actions that transform the racism and violence of our nation.
Rabbi Lucy Dinner serves Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to sit down and talk with Joel Shapiro, the artist behind the images in Mishkan HaNefesh. We met in his bright, airy studio in Long Island City to talk about his work.
Hara: Joel, can you tell me a little bit about why you were interested in being part of Mishkan HaNefesh? From the outset of the project you expressed excitement at the prospect of your involvement.
Joel: How could I say no? I loved the challenge of coming up with meaningful imagery to match such deep content. Visual art can be tricky – the goal is not simply to illustrate, but, in this case, to create images which correspond to profound and historically significant prayers and material. My role here is that of mediator – attempting to capture the meaning I see in the material, and translate it into form.
Hara: Could you talk about your process? How did you prepare yourself to craft a visual response to the content of Mishkan HaNefesh?
Joel: I tried to read the prayers carefully in order to understand the meaning and value of each word and image throughout the text. I wanted to connect the prayers’ implications to abstract form through woodcut — the medium we decided on together when you first approached me.
Hara: And why woodcuts? Why did you choose that format?
Joel: Woodcut is a very unusual process, one that involves creating a kind of visual typeface from scratch. I felt that I needed a kind of looseness to do this. So I began to draw on paper and then cut the paper out. Sometimes I wasn’t even drawing; I would just use the scissors and find a form that connected to the content or feeling of the prayer. Basically, I was cutting paper to find the form, a technique I have used in the past. (I don’t think I was influenced too much by the Matisse exhibition that was happening at the Museum of Modern Art at the same time, but you can’t cut paper and not talk about Matisse!) Then I would take the paper, scan it, and try to transfer the image to the wood block. In the beginning, I didn’t know exactly how I would transfer the paper image to the block, but ended up taking a low-tech Xerox of the image and then using acetone to transfer the image from the Xerox to the wood. From there, I would cut the form into the wood to be printed. Once I had an initial print, I would then reduce and eliminate any excess. The challenge here is to decide how much wood you want to remove – do you want the image to function independently of any kind of frame or background?
I’m really excited by how the woodcuts came out. Even though in some cases it feels antithetical to the feel of the metal type used in the rest of the book [to set the text throughout the book], the materials are comfortable together.
Hara: One of the things we, the editors, love about the use of wood as part of the materials, and part of the reason we were excited about your choice to create the art as wood block prints, is that wood has so much rich metaphoric weight in our Jewish traditions – Eitz Chayim, the Torah is the tree of life, the tree in the Garden of Eden, and so on.
Joel: I thought of that too. I was also moved by the connection between wood and the natural world. The typeface, however, does not share that same connection to nature, creating a kind of balance or conversation within the text.
Woodcut also allows you to use the grain in interesting ways.
Hara: Could you talk more about the choice of wood?
Joel: I mostly used cherry, walnut and mahogany. Cherry is very precise and prints softly, while walnut has a more pronounced and often wavy grain. Sometimes I wanted one sort of wood that gave the cut a complexity and texture. I would pick a piece of wood based on what the grain would mean in relation to the print.
Precision was critical to this project. The dimensions of the page made for a very narrow space in which to work. I was afraid because woodcarving is very dangerous; if you make a mistake it is relatively fatal to the image and you may have to start from scratch.
Hara: Could you talk about the choice of the blue color, in part because at the beginning of the planning process, we were talking about different colors, and we hadn’t settled on blue ourselves yet in terms of the overall design and typesetting of the book.
Joel: Were you talking about red at one point?
Hara: Yes, we were talking about red, maroon, or a purple.
Joel: Blue is so lively and it so prevalent in nature. It is the color of water and the sky, and functions as a contrast to black. I really like red, but red always has some negative connotations for me. And red and black, in a Jewish book, is problematic historically.
Hara: And that particular shade of blue is such a unique shade.
Joel: Blue has a sort of life reference. I did a prior print where we used multiple colors and I did not like it as much, I really like the use of one color – the blue – along with the black and white. The blue that I used is full of energy. It’s basically ultramarine.
Hara: Yes. It’s very close to the color Klein blue, right?
Joel: Oh yes, everyone says it’s Klein blue, which is ultramarine with a reddish tint. Yves Klein was an important, radical artist who used a lot of pure pigment. And he seems to have co-opted blue as a color, so I hear it all the time; I’m used to it. I think you’d find that specific blue in lots of paintings. Ultramarine is a synthetic pigment that was developed as a replacement for lapis lazuli, which is a real pigment from the natural world.
Hara: We had given you phrases for each of the services upon which to base or anchor the art. Was there one piece that was particularly challenging for you in terms of how to respond artistically?
Joel: All of the phrases presented challenges. In order to properly understand these conceptual themes, you really have to be a Talmudic scholar (which I’m far from). Consequently, though I tried to broadly understand the intent of the phrases, it was not easy.
Art for Rosh HaShanah morning, by Joel Shapiro.
I did the first image for Rosh HaShanah based on a connection to the shofar, and you thought it was too scary. And then not only was it scary, but I’d also have to spend a year carving it… There were just so many lines, it was an intimidating task! And so then I came up with another image that we all liked better, but it seemed to be maybe too anatomical.
Hara: With the human heart in it?
Joel: Yes, the heart was a little too sacred.
Hara: I loved the heart imagery. It’s still in there, but now it’s much more subtle.
Joel: Then the second version wasn’t robust enough, and I thought that the blowing of the shofar was such a unique aspect of the holiday – I wanted to convey that. Having listened and listened to it over and over, I initially tried to do something with the actual sequence of blasts – to incorporate that idea in some way with the image. But I wanted to have the sense of its far reach. I thought the sacred heart was just too tender and fragile. So I thought the revised version was much more robust. It still has the subtle heart image in it but better conveys the sense of the shofar blasts.
However, they were all tough to do; there wasn’t one that wasn’t tougher than the others.
Hara: Another image that you redid a few times was the piece for Eilah Ezkarah, the one that’s like a tear or a cry of pain.
Joel: That was a relatively easy piece to conceive of, and then I changed and altered it.
Approaching these prints, I didn’t have a visual preconception of what to do, and I didn’t have an agenda. I would read the prayer and then fall into a more suspended place, and draw it, cut it, and refine it. Cutting, which is a very good way to work, has an immediacy to it – there was not a lot of downtime during the process.
That specific image was hard to create, and then I switched it around. It was like a tear of sorrow and misery, and not just misery but also a kind of brutality. I think that the way you cut the wood is significant in terms of each form. It affects what you actually do. I kept this in mind when I created the other one image, which depicts the little gate: the black and blue one [the frontispiece in the Rosh HaShanah volume].
Rosh HaShanah frontispiece by Joel Shapiro.
Hara: That’s the opening image for Rosh HaShanah.
Joel: Yes, I think that’s really good. And that was about trying to find a gate or an expanse and flipping the wood around. The change in the wood grain reflects this, it’s what it would be like to literally open the window or door. I tried not to be too fussy about it and to stay away from illustration.
Hara: Do you have a favorite?
Joel: I really don’t, I like them all. I was also surprised by how refreshing they were to me. I like the two frontispieces. I love the one for Rosh HaShanah. But I couldn’t redo that again; once you find out what you’re doing, it’s impossible to replicate.
Hara: So I’m going to ask you to help explain one thing because I’m getting a lot of questions about the edging, people are asking: why does the artist do that? What is that there in the margins? I understand the power of it visually, I love it, and I understand how it’s done. But I think that the question is more about what is the visual meaning of keeping it there as opposed to having a clean edge or no edge. Why make that choice?
Image for Yizkor by Joel Shapiro.
Joel: I think the edge functions as a window and as a frame. With a frame, you could have a clean edge, but here I was able to establish the edge. I chose a block of wood, and then I decided what size I wanted the image to be. I then proceeded to maintain the size of the image while adding some edges that I wanted to keep rough. The frontispiece for Rosh HaShanah purposefully has no edge, I wanted to differentiate it from the page. I wasn’t interested in making an icon or a single iconic image; I wanted the piece to give some sense of where the image came from. To accomplish this, I let some residual wood into the white area, because I felt that that this added meaning to it by making the image less grand and giving it a certain humility. This is not the icon of Rosh HaShanah by any means. Perhaps humility is not even the correct word to describe this.
Hara: I like the idea of humility, but isn’t it also about anti-perfectionism?
Joel: Yes. The process and the whole project were really important and meaningful to me. It wasn’t about coming up with an absolute image; there’s nothing absolute. The image leaves you with the sense that it could have been different. It could have been something else; it’s made by hand. Somebody’s thought about the whole thing. And I think the edge helps — it amplifies the meaning. This is a relatively small page, and I had a certain boundary established in the beginning of the project that I rebelled against. I’m not sure if that had much to do with the printer, and it took me some time to work beyond that. Does that help?
Hara: Yes, that helps a lot.
Joel: The edge really frames the image, allowing for greater concentration in its viewing.. Seeing just the image in the center of the page is too much. You really need the edges on these images in order to emphasize their content. As a result of seeing its source in the edging, you know that it comes from a block of wood, and this reinforces a certain type of reading. Did you have this response?
Hara: Yes, that’s good. Do you have any overall reflections now that the process is behind you?
Joel: I was anxious because I hadn’t seen the prints in the finished book until now. It’s one thing to do a print and then another to see the print. And, by then, it’s in someone else’s hands. I did see the layout, and I was impressed. But I still didn’t know about the overall quality and what they looked like in the book. A book is an object; it’s really thrilling to see it. I think it’s exciting though…I feel that I barely tapped the subject; there’s so much more to do. My work on this project has expanded my own understanding of these concepts.
Hara: You talked earlier about your grandchildren seeing it.
Joel: Yes, I can’t wait for them to see it.
Hara: There’s a sense of legacy.
Joel: Yes, it’s deeply meaningful. I was raised in a very secular family. We had Passover and Passover Seders, but it was not a religious family to say the least.
Hara: Did you grow up in Manhattan?
Joel: No, I grew up in Queens, Sunnyside, a mile and a half from here. And my family moved further out.
Hara: We’re very grateful to Jo Carole Lauder for connecting us with you.
Joel: I’m grateful that she did. She’s smart and certainly knows what’s challenging. She has a big vision; I thought it was great; I’m happy to have done it.
Joel Shapiro (born 1941, New York City) is an artist of international prominence. He has executed more than thirty commissions and publicly sited sculptures in major Asian, European and North American cities and has been the subject of more than 160 solo exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. He is represented by the Pace Gallery. His CV is available here.
In September of 2014 a children’s book was published called “The Book with No Pictures.” At first glance, the book probably should have been a flop, but it certainly wasn’t. From the time that publishers could mass produce books with artwork, there probably hasn’t been a book for young children on the market that hasn’t had some kind of pictures. Walk into a children’s bookstore today and it is hard to find anything that in addition to colorful artwork, does not feature some accompanying CD, sound effect buttons, pop-ups, textures, toys, celebrity characters, or other gimmicks to help entice children to engage with books and their families to purchase them. But this book, in addition to having no pictures or characters whatsoever, has no story line and is simply a bunch of hilarious nonsense words and phrases for the reader to say: words like “Blork,” “Bluuurf,” and “Glibbity Globbity.” So how could it have been possible for a silly children’s book of this kind to become a New York Times #1 bestseller?
A video was circulated on the internet featuring the author of the book, B.J. Novak, an actor and stand-up comedian, reading his book to a group of children. The video featured their hilarious reactions to his reading, thereby proving that a children’s book does not need any pictures at all to be successful. The video went viral, garnering millions of views and the book became an instant bestseller. So what was the key to B.J. Novak’s remarkable success? Was it a clever viral marketing campaign? That surely didn’t hurt. Was it B.J. Novak’s celebrity status? I don’t think so. Was it the content? Probably not. Or could it have been because the book was developed to highlight the relationship between the reader of the book and the audience, and the storytelling, rather than placing too much emphasis upon the contents of the book? Now we could be on to something.
The CCAR’s new High Holy Day machzor, Mishkan HaNefesh, took countless hours of time, thought, and resources to develop. The process involved many of our leading rabbinical minds, cantorial voices, and lay leaders collaborating over the course of many years. Because of this, many of us believe that these books have the capacity to shape an entire era of worship and religious thought, so it is particularly important what content is ultimately included in the book. And yet for the large percentage of Jews that only attends a Reform worship service once or twice upon the High Holidays, regardless of what language is used, what commentary is offered, or how the fonts or paginations appear, the prayers on the page may often seem nearly as foreign and nonsensical to the average Jew as the words in B.J. Novak’s book. This is similar to the idea in Dr. Ron Wolfson’s premise of Relational Judaism, where he argues that instead of investing in programming, congregations should strive to invest in building lasting relationships with congregants. We now have an opportunity to highlight the relationship between the readers of the machzor and their congregations. Now that Mishkan HaNefesh is published, we can focus more upon the relationships that are forged between congregants, clergy, and liturgy through the telling of the story.
Just as we publish new prayer books with new language to relate to each generation of worshippers, so too is music for worship continually evolving. This is why the making of new music for Mishkan HaNefesh is so important and why Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh, the musical companion to Mishkan HaNefesh, is such a timely publication. Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh is a compilation of High Holy Day music assembled by the American Conference of Cantors from a wide variety of styles and sources that allows for contemporary Jewish composers to give voice to liturgy from our new machzor in innovative, rich, and meaningful ways. The book includes twenty-five exciting new musical settings of liturgy for Mishkan HaNefesh from the Reform movement’s greatest musical artists, including many accomplished cantors and singer-songwriters.
Even Avinu Malkeinu by Max Janowski was met with skepticism and resistance by discerning musical directors of congregations during Janowski’s generation who preferred a more sophisticated musical approach. Yet hardly anyone today could imagine his beautiful and timeless melody being controversial at all. Some of today’s musical innovators have the potential to become standard repertoire for congregations across all movements, but the music needs to be published, shared, and experienced at congregations in order to stand the test of time. Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh offers congregations the opportunity to give new voices a chance to make their way into the lexicon of High Holiday worship. We have read many of the same prayers again and again for generations. Today we have the opportunity to try to retell the same story, only with new voices.
The Torah provides thirteen chapters of vivid detail on the physical description and construction of the Mishkan, and yet there is no account of the kind of music that might have accompanied its sacred rites – not until the Mishnah was published many generations later. We can only imagine what the worship might have sounded like. The Torah, like all ancient oral traditions, was passed down musically, and yet we did not bother to write down the musical patterns until centuries afterwards when cantillation systems were eventually codified and notated. The Torah is our most sacred book, but like Mishkan HaNefesh, it is a book with no music.
This image reminds me of when I met the head of the cantorial school at Hebrew Union College for the first time. On his ornate music stand in his office I found a very distinguished-looking book titled, “All I Know About Cantoring – By Cantor Israel Goldstein.” I opened the book and laughed out loud when I discovered that every single page of it was blank – a gag gift given to him by a friend. It was hilarious and memorable gift, but upon reflection, music can function a bit like that – it can be the sounds that can fill the pages of a blank book, the midrashic stories that can fill in the gaps between the story lines of Torah, or the images that can be evoked in the minds of children who hear a book read to them that has no pictures.
With the publication of Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh, the American Conference of Cantors tries to help us hear how we can retell our same age-old story in new and engaging ways. Not all books need to have pictures or music in them, but many congregations may wish to use this beautiful book as another useful tool for forging relationships between congregants, clergy, and liturgy for this generation and generations to come.
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Cantor Dan Singer is the Senior Cantor at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan.
Some weeks ago I was sitting in a synagogue in the Upper East Side of New York on a beautiful May morning, listening to the beautiful words of Rosh HaShanah liturgy set to music during the Hava T’filah seminar for rabbis and cantors. Even the sound of the shofar pierced the air as a clergy team shared their model service with the group. In the very capable hands of the clergy and musicians of Temple Israel, eighty rabbis and cantors had gathered to pray the Rosh Hashanah Evening Service from the new CCAR Machzor, Mishkan HaNefesh. Yes, it was artificial by design. But it was real worship and so it was gratifying to see the book come to life.
As has been stated many times, Mishkan HaNefesh calls upon worship leaders to omit much of the service (there is enough material for many years) so that every choice you make is important. I call this the Trader Joe’s method. If you walk into Whole Foods in Lincoln Park, Chicago, you can get lost – there are way too many choices. Trader Joe’s, on the other hand, has just a few items in every category. By design, Mishkan HaNefesh is Whole Foods, offering you many options, but the worship service itself has to be Trader Joe’s. (Do not use this analogy on Yom Kippur).
The experience of the Rosh HaShanah service at Hava T’filah reminded me that the worship experience is very different than just the machzor itself. By all means embrace the machzor when preparing for the Days of Awe. But focus on the experience of the Days of Awe, allowing the machzor to be a sacred implement in your creation of the experience.
The great Bible scholar Uriel Simon once taught, in connection with Joseph, that a dream not interpreted is like an envelope not opened and a letter unread. I would argue that a machzor not employed in worship is the same.
What a pleasure it was to witness this sacred envelope being opened!
I remember the first moments that I sat in the sanctuary at Temple Beth El of Great Neck and heard my cantor, Barbara Ostfeld, sing the majestic Avinu Malkeinu of Max Janowski for the first time. With the organ and the choir joining her, I felt the emotion well up inside of me as I realized the impact that this incredible music had on me. I had those same feelings the first time I sang Kol Nidre as a Student Cantor, and of course Max Helfman’s Shema Koleinu at my first full time pulpit.
I still feel the emotion of the music of the High Holy Days each and every time I put on my white robe and stand before the Kahal to intone the majestic and powerful music of the Days of Awe. It is why I am so proud to have been part of a project to bring new powerful and emotional music to the Reform movement helping to bring to life the beautiful poetry in our new machzor.
After nearly two years of work, the American Conference of Cantors, in partnership with CCAR Press, is proud to present to our movement this book of new compositions for High Holy Day worship. This book brings musical life to many of the magical new texts found in Mishkan HaNefesh while also bringing musical voice to other traditional texts found in the machzor. All of us have our favorite melodies for Avinu Malkeynu, or Shema Koleinu….I know that I do. However, the music contained in Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh provides beautiful alternatives and an opportunity to introduce new musical memories to our communities. Like the new machzor, Mishkan HaNefesh, the music contained in this volume underscores the central value of Teshuvah, accompanying our journey during the Days of Awe, as together we seek repentance, new direction, and a sense of return to God and the Jewish people.
While I would never try to replace the melodies that are part of my life and my inner soul, I am so excited to join these new and exciting melodies to them thus enriching the musical life of the Jewish people for decades to come.
I look forward to sharing these new melodies with my community this coming High Holy Days and hope you will as well.
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Cantor Steven Weiss is the project director for Shirei Mishkan HaNefesh and the Vice-President of the American Conference of Cantors. He also serves Congregation Sha’aray Shalom in Hingham, MA.
