The Hymnal as an Index of Musical Change in Reform Synagogues

BENJIE-ELLEN SCHILLER

Coming to America

Between the years 1825 and 1875, roughly 250,000 Jews emigrated to the United States.¹ The vast majority came from German-speaking countries where, decades earlier, Jews had gained their rights as citizens. As newly emancipated Europeans, desirous of conducting their lives in a manner befitting their newly acquired status, they had gradually embarked on a process of modernization that soon made its way into their most ancient and venerated customs and traditions, including, of course, their style of worship.

Already in Europe, Jews had sought to readapt their mode of prayer so that it would resemble what they conceived to be the proper German etiquette for a religious service. As early as 1810 they were attempting in Cassel to subdue “unsuitable traditional singing which interrupts the prayer,”² and from then on, it was not unusual for individual synagogues to promulgate Synagogenordnungen, official pronouncements on order and decorum that prohibited such things as wandering up and down the aisles during prayer, loud kissing of the tsitsit (prayer shawl fringes) and swaying to and fro during prayer.³ Their style of worship until this time had been anything but subdued and reserved. For the most part, Jews had prayed and sung out loud, each at a different pace and volume, a style that must have appeared chaotic to an outsider, even though it did in fact have its own inherent method and cohesive structure.

By the time the German Reform Jews landed in America they had thus successfully discarded the aspects of Jewish ritual that they felt lacked the dignity and decorum reflective of their newly emancipated lives. Their style of worship now incorporated much of the western Protestant tradition. Where traditional Jewish law had governed the entirety of the Jew’s way of life until this century, now a new governing principle of non-Jewish aesthetics and decorum dictated their decisions in fashioning their new style of worship. They were “passing” into the west, “not with civil rights but with bourgeois rites” borrowed from the non-Jewish society round about them.⁴

Formerly, the cantor had led the service by chanting the Hebrew prayers in the nusach (melodic formulas determined by liturgical time and regional style),¹ while the congregation responded in a prescribed, albeit apparently cacophonous, manner. Now a rabbi, who was seen as functioning akin to a Protestant minister, read the service that centered on his sermon. A four-part choir rendered the newly notated music of the prayers, which themselves were often translated into German, while the congregation prayed silently. Whereas formerly the chanting of the liturgy for a Sabbath service had taken several hours, now the reformers abbreviated the service both for theological and aesthetic purposes, so that a tasteful, appropriate, and “tolerable” service in the modern, non-Jewish sense would result. “Even synagogue architecture was affected by the decorum movement…. [Reformers wanted to tidy up visual irregularities, just as they wanted to replace individual cantillation with uniform prayers.”⁵

Though these modifications in worship had already occurred in Europe, yet to be seen was how they would fit into an American mold, and what norms of American culture reformers would appropriate, now that they were becoming respectable American citizens. By the mid-nineteenth century the governing principle in America was individualism: “As propagated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, this doctrine meant a willingness to break sharply with the past, to rely on the sovereign self and almost never on tradition…. [Religion] would have to be more the product of individual experience than inherited law.”⁶ The American individualism that Emerson celebrated became fertile ground for Reform Jews seeking to readapt their religious way of life in the new world. Their religion could now be practiced out of individual choice because for the first time in Jewish memory, Jews were free to change the shape and scope of their religion, and as individuals, to choose their own desired level of observance rather than to be governed by the mandates of the community at large.

Many Jews took advantage of their new freedom and abandoned Judaism completely. Those who remained steered their individual courses toward the model prescribed by the predominant religion of the American upper class. “Everywhere, absolutely everywhere, we see how deeply the American model of mainline Protestantism governed what Jews did, from the fetish for decorum, to the passion for preaching, and even the adoption of family pews…. Americanized religion for Americanized Jews.”⁷ The yearning to be part of the American religious landscape was particularly evident in the modernization of synagogue music.

The First Union Hymnal (1897): Defining Musical Taste

By the 1870s, musical sophistication increased as congregations amassed sufficient wealth to hire prestigious choirs and to acquire organs. At the same time, the choral repertory expanded to include abundant hymns, the texts of which were English translations of Hebrew prayers or adaptations of Protestant favorites. Rearrangements of European classical music were used as musical settings. The cantor, the embodiment of Jewish musical tradition, became a relic of the past and was replaced by professional musicians, usually a choir director and an organist who were not necessarily Jewish but who, in conjunction with the rabbi, chose the music for the synagogue.

Thus the style of worship had slowly but surely become tasteful and proper by the standards of the American bourgeoisie. For example, the Reform service’s preference for hymns betrays its “Protestantization”: “In denominations that concentrate more on preaching, on the spoken word, hymn singing is the predominant congregational contribution to the music.”⁸

Just as classical Reform Judaism was establishing its dominance in American life, another part of the equation that was to shape synagogue music entered the American Jewish scene: the arrival of eastern European Jews. Their numbers, unprecedented in Jewish history—2.3 million men, women, and children between the years 1882 and 1924—greatly reduced the impact that Reform synagogues would ultimately have. Eastern European Jewish culture differed sufficiently from the German Jews’ that a schism inevitably developed between the two groups. The reform of religion was itself an alien concept to Jews from Russia, Lithuania, or Poland, who were either Orthodox (bound strictly to Jewish law), or had abandoned religion altogether in favor of an ethnic and cultural display of their Jewish identity combined frequently with socialism or even atheism as well. They barely spoke English; instead, they preferred Yiddish, the very Judeo-German dialect from the Middle Ages that German Jews had emphatically replaced with High German and then English in their rush to become emancipated. Following the railroads and the industrial expansion of the Midwest, German Jews had boldly spread themselves throughout America, thus successfully acculturating as merchants and entrepreneurs even in tiny cities all over the country. By contrast, eastern European newcomers constituted the cheap labor of large cities, where they clustered in tightly knit neighborhoods and preserved a culture all their own.

The influx of eastern European Jews precipitated an identity crisis for Reform Judaism in America. It is surely not mere coincidence that at the height of new immigration, Reform leaders, hitherto sharply divided, finally came together. In 1885, a platform of Reform principles was adopted at a conference in Pittsburgh, and five years later the first meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) was held. Our study of Reform music from this time forward will be largely based on the proceedings of the Committee on Synagogue Music whose discussions have been preserved in the yearbooks of the CCAR.

Given the wide divergence of practice typical of Reform’s highly decentralized structure and its dependence on individual rabbinic whim, the CCAR turned immediately to the need for uniform standards in worship. A Union Prayer Book was projected, and, already in 1890, “several motions were made by members to the effect that a means be devised for establishing uniformity in the mode of public and private worship of congregations and individuals adhering to the Reform principles of Judaism.”¹⁰

Toward this end, a committee on hymns was established. To achieve uniformity, it published a hymnal from which every Reform congregation in America would choose its music.

Published in 1897 by the CCAR and the Society of American Cantors, The Union Hymnal contains 129 English hymns for four-part choir, many of them taken from smaller hymn collections of individual Reform congregations from Europe and the United States. Dominating the collection are works by secular composers, such as Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Haydn, combined with those of the Jewish composer and cantor Alois Kaiser (1842–1908), a major figure of synagogue music of this time. The musical style is European romantic, borrowed directly from the Protestant chorale tradition. The few Jewish motifs that do exist are successfully hidden harmonizations thoroughly embedded in nineteenth-century secular music.

The book features also an appendix of twenty Hebrew musical settings, fourteen of which are prayers within the body of the liturgy, while the remaining six are closing and opening hymns. Fully half of the Hebrew settings are composed by Kaiser, who was known for adhering to the sophisticated musical taste that was lauded so highly by his congregation, Oheb Shalom of Baltimore, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The remaining Hebrew settings were written by Jewish composers from Europe who, like Kaiser, adapted western romantic music to fit the Hebrew texts of the prayers. The music was majestic and glorious, well-suited to the Hebrew texts, all of which praise God. The same majesty, however, seems less appropriate when set to texts such as this one:

Speak gently of the erring one,

And let us not forget

However darkly stained by sin,

He is our brother yet.¹¹

Preoccupied with praise and glory of God and humanity as the sole themes, the editors did not concern themselves with presenting a varied repertory that would allow for the musical celebration of the entire Jewish calendar, with its variation of mood and tone—from the solemnity of Yom Kippur to the carnival-like festivity of Purim.

Clearly the Union Hymnal was designed for use by the professional choir and rabbi alone, and was not to be circulated among the congregation, which was still viewed as a passive assembly rather than the active traditional individualists of the premodern synagogue. Since the Reform service centered around the rabbi’s discourse, the hymns were arranged by themes, so that the rabbi could choose from one hundred “anthem texts” (i.e., scriptural readings in English in the back of the hymnal), and then select the hymns that best suited the theme of his sermon.

The editors adopted extreme measures to ignore Jewish music, even modern Jewish music of their time. Salomon Sulzer, often called today the “father of modern synagogue music,” is hardly represented here. Sulzer, like Kaiser, utilized the same European classical styles. His fame rests, however, on his skillful preservation of many traditional Ashkenazi motives. Even though he wove these into the rest of his romantic style, they were too noticeable for the tastes of the editors of the 1897 hymnal!

Uniformity, the intended goal of the hymnal, was achieved, but at the cost of congregational participation. The repertory was uniformly upgraded to meet the highest western standards. Each service was designed to be intellectually and musically sophisticated, with the result that “the congregation’s role, already restricted to docile, decorous hymn-singing in early German modernism, was cut back so far that by 1892 the CCAR began to worry that the spirit was going out of congregational worship by comparison to Christian practice.”¹² The hymnal only made the problem worse.

The Second Hymnal (1914): Adding Devotion to Aesthetics

Already in 1904, Kaiser himself recognized that this lack of active congregational involvement was deadening the spirit of his congregation’s worship, but he was ahead of his time.¹³ Only in the second decade of this century did Reform Jews catch up to him and express the need for emotional as well as intellectual involvement within their worship.

In 1913, for example, Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, the convener of the Pittsburgh platform meeting twenty-eight years earlier and chief architect of its very rationalistic contents, conceded to his colleagues:

We have been too intellectual and too little emotional … [W]e should touch the soul more. I heartily endorse the idea of giving greater care and attention to a hymn-book, and such a hymn-book as is offered to us whenever we enter any church where over the text the notes are given to make the people sing.¹⁴

These rabbis sensed that music could potentially provide spiritual nourishment, but they did not know exactly what kind of music they were looking for. One participant expressed the frustration that many rabbis shared:

Few of our congregations are alive to the need of music which serves a devotional end. We are not all clear about the kind of music we ought to hear in our synagogues and too many look upon music as an external decoration rather than a fervent outburst of an inward God-seeking spirit. And owing to the indefiniteness of imagery conjured up by music, many songs have entered the synagogue which disturb and stifle rather than stimulate the spirit of devotion.¹⁵

With the accent now on “devotion,” we see some development in the rabbis’ aesthetic theory. The music’s purpose is presumed to relate to the worship itself. Should a song be superior according to the standards of classical music but still not be conducive to prayer, then, according to the ideals set for the second Union Hymnal (1914), the song is inappropriate for prayer.

The Union Hymnal of 1914 contains 246 hymns, almost twice as many as in the 1897 hymnal. However, the new hymnal’s significance goes beyond its impressive size.

First, a substantial increase in arrangements are cited as “TRAD,” denoting a Jewish source. Forty musical settings are harmonized to suit western harmonic practice, but even here, a quote of Ashkenazi nusach, or a traditional prayer motif can be heard in the melody line.

Second, even though the majority of the pieces are still composed by, or readapted from, the works of non-Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Beethoven, there is a marked increase in Jewish composers. On the other hand, the section of twenty-four Hebrew hymns and responses hardly changed from the 1897 book.

Third, we note a great difference in the section entitled “Children’s Services.” While the 1897 hymnal contained only twelve hymns for religious school, the 1914 hymnal has expanded to include eight separate children’s services.

Fourth, this hymnal is designed to be used by the congregation instead of by the professionals alone. The music is therefore slightly more singable, even though all but one of the settings remain scored for four vocal parts. Where the musical strength of the 1897 hymnal lay in its harmonic richness, the focus has begun to shift toward the melodic line in order that each hymn text be clearly and convincingly expressed by the worshiper.

Fifth, whereas the hymns of the 1897 hymnal were selected with the rabbi’s sermon in mind, the 1914 themes correspond to Jewish holy days and rites of passage. The early reformers “had exalted reason and denigrated ritual, identified most strongly with the larger community of humankind and pressed toward the boundary of Jewish identity. In retrospect, one can see signs of the new trend, to look inward and backward as much as forward…. More than one rabbi called for a new emphasis on what Rabbi Louis Wolsey called the ‘specially Jewish aspect of our religion.’”¹⁶

The response to the 1914 hymnal varied. Because of their ambivalence toward musical traditions from their Ashkenazi roots, Reform rabbis were not unanimously in support of the hymnal’s underlying philosophy. In their report to the 1918 conference the Committee on Synagogue Music referred to this music as “sickly ghetto wailings and the fantastic chazzanut,”¹⁷ by which they had in mind traditional cantorial fantasia, melismatic and often improvisatory in style. They cited specifically traditional renditions of liturgy that the Reform rabbis had eliminated on theological grounds, namely, petitions for the return from exile, and the subsequent reestablishment of the sacrificial cult.

On the other hand were those aspects of the tradition that the Reform rabbis sought to restore: an increase in the amount of Hebrew in the children’s services, for example, which went hand in hand with their congregational participation in the central prayers of the service. As time went on, the committee proposed simplifying the musical arrangements of these traditional hymns, in order further to facilitate congregational participation. By 1921, transposition to a lower key was suggested to achieve the same goal.

The Union Hymnal (1932): Jewish Identity for Second-Generation Families

Already by the 1920s rabbis were unabashedly looking inward, as they tried to evaluate their music and consider its future.

Before we can have Jewish music, we must know what Jewish music is. And to know it in spirit we must not only busy ourselves with historical and aesthetic questions, but we must free the devotional song spirit so that it blooms again and creates new forms. We must not only promote investigation and teach the leaders of Jewish congregations our liturgical song but efforts must be made to induce the gifted musicians to turn their talents to glorifying the religious life of the Jew.¹⁸

By this time the chasm separating Germans from eastern Europeans was narrowing. Eastern Europeans were becoming Americanized while, simultaneously, German reformers now felt secure enough as Americans to reassert a distinctively Jewish orientation. Jewish musicians were thus encouraged to compose new music rooted in Jewish sources rather than borrowed ones. The motto of the twenties could have been: “Music that speaks to the Jewish spirit within us.”

But sacred music never changes overnight. As World War I ended, the synagogue itself had begun to change. It was “no longer the spiritual home just for immigrant men; it was now meant to serve families as a rallying point of identity.”¹⁹ The second-generation Jews, born in America, acculturated from birth, were moving with their families to new areas, where an altered agenda for synagogue music included the following goals:

1.  to stimulate congregational singing;

2.  to inspire Jewish devotion;

3.  to revive values of Jewish melody;

4.  to exclude, as far as possible, non-Jewish music and poetry;

5.  to provoke in the children of our religious schools a love for Jewish poetry and song;

6.  to encourage an earnest study of Jewish music in the religious schools.²⁰

Note the preponderance of the word Jewish in this list. The 1914 hymnal had admitted a little traditional Jewish melody and incorporated the talents of several old and new Jewish composers—a big leap from the preceding hymnal—but the majority of its musical settings were still written by secular composers. By 1930, however, Reform rabbis spoke of a yearning for their own uniquely Jewish sound expressing the soul and the heart of Judaism. They had a musical problem, however. On the one hand, they said they wanted Jewish-sounding singable music for worship. But they did not realize just how deeply immersed in non-Jewish melodies they were; it would not be easy for them to get used to a musical sound so different from what they were accustomed to. In the preface of the 1932 Union Hymnal, the Committee on Synagogue Music thus states clearly, “It has been our aim to combine Jewish and general musical values.”²¹ But western music and Jewish nusach do not easily complement each other. Furthermore, these Jews no longer were acquainted with Jewish congregational singing. Decades of effort and patience would be needed to find ways to help congregations feel comfortable enough to sing aloud together.

Only ten years after the 1914 hymnal was published, work on its revision began—for the first time with a professional musical editor, the well-known composer, author, and teacher Abraham Wolf Binder. One of Binder’s lifelong concerns (his students sometimes called it an obsession!) was the utilization of the proper nusach in accordance with the corresponding prayer representing a particular season. Certain tunes, or motives, or both, had long been crystallized into Ashkenazi tradition so that they were inextricably linked with the particular holy day on which they were sung. Binder resurrected some of these most well-known misinai tunes and motifs (as they are known—that is, tunes that ostensibly go back all the way to Sinai), using them again in the flow of sacred time.

In pursuit of this and similar traditionalizing ends, Binder assembled a committee of outstanding cantors and composers. Behind the inclusion of cantors was the sociological fact that by the late 1920s, the role of cantor was gradually emerging anew in Reform synagogue life—a result, certainly, of the integration of eastern European Jews into the ranks of Reform leadership.²² To be sure, the majority of Reform congregations still employed a choir director and an organist, not a cantor. But the more Reform Jews would search for authentically Jewish sounds (as opposed to a musical style taken from western host cultures), the more relevant the sacred Jewish singer became.

The hymnal of 1932 thus incorporated the works of more than twenty Jewish composers, including the great masters such as Sulzer, Lewandowski, and Naumbourg, as well as contemporary composers. Fully 209 of its 292 offerings were written by Jews, many of whom worked directly with Binder, such as the cantors Beimel and Jassinowsky, Samuel Alman, Joseph Achron, Jacob Weinberg, and Rabbi Jacob Singer. Binder saw his own dramatic breakthrough as not simply recovering the past but making it “artistically worthy.”²³

It was also the purpose of the Committee to blaze a new path in the musical style of hymnology. Up to this time hymn tunes were in the old Lutheran chorale style. From this we have entirely departed and have substituted instead melodies which are, first of all, melodious; easy to teach; delightful to sing; within the range of the average human voice; inspiring and uplifting…. [T]his arrangement will also be suitable for unison singing.²⁴

Binder’s appraisal was accurate. Every musical setting is in a realistic range for the average voice. Upon hearing any of these pieces one is immediately drawn to a singable melody.

Binder took Reform music in a second new direction, too. As mentioned earlier, the predominant expressive tendency in the previous two hymnals had been one of majestic praise and joy. Of the 1914 hymnal, it was said, “All melodies for the Sabbath [should] be in joyous strain, in major rather than in a minor key.… If 214 tunes are in major and twelve in minor, it was because of a very definite conviction that the Jew has come down to a modern day in a spirit of victory, and that the atmosphere of the American Reform congregation should be a reflection of the position, the culture, and the attainments of the Jew in this free and joyous land.”²⁵ By contrast, representing his committee in 1930, Binder reversed the Reform obsession with major keys, explaining, “Many traditional Jewish melodies … are in major and the minor ones are not necessarily sad and wailing, as is commonly misunderstood. Melodies in minor very often reflect the deep and subtle religious spirit of the traditional synagogue.”²⁶

Already in the 1914 hymnal, the education of children had been prominent. Reflecting the continued shift of focus to education, the 1932 hymnal expanded its “Children’s Services” to nineteen! The children’s services of this hymnal thus became part and parcel of an increasingly child-centered Judaism designed above all to ensure that the next generation would become dedicated members of the Jewish people.

Typical of the seriousness with which the rabbis made musicoliturgical decisions is the heated debate from the 1930 CCAR convention over the inclusion of Kol Nidre in the hymnal. On the one hand this “plea for absolution from enforced vows, born of Jewish persecution, continued to move worshippers with its strange words and haunting melody.”²⁷ But many of the rabbis associated Kol Nidre’s exoneration of unfulfilled vows with the old attestation of “Jews’ duplicity in making promises.”²⁸ Binder was one of many present who recalled the power of its emotional impact upon the congregation when he sang it on Yom Kippur. “Everybody was enthusiastic about it. It was not a question of words, it was simply the feeling that at this particular moment throughout world Jewry, all are united in one song.”²⁹ The committee eventually voted to publish Kol Nidre—but only as a song without a text, thus getting around their reservations about its traditional lyrics.

Another philosophical discussion revolved about Hatikvah (later to become the Israeli national anthem), the song expressing hope for a homeland. Reform Jewish leaders were divided over Zionism, but, nonetheless, even many of the non-Zionists resonated with the underlying message of Hatikvah, as expressed by a leading proponent of Zionism, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise: “We are a living people, and this represents the aspiration and the dreams of a living people. If you omit Hatikvah, it is as though you are saying to Jewish people: we are a church and nothing more.”³⁰

The twin cases of Kol Nidre and Hatikvah—especially the latter—demonstrate the crucial role of music in the expression of heart and soul. Rabbis who objected on theological grounds to the lyrics of both works nonetheless heard in the music an underlying symbolic message that transcended theology. There had been no argument concerning the inclusion of the “Star Spangled Banner” because American patriotism was not in question for American Jews of the 1930s. The Zionist theme, however, was another story. But by the end of the heated discussion on Hatikvah, the committee voted to include it.

Through Depression and Holocaust

The 1932 hymnal was issued just as Americans were entering the Great Depression. Ideological concerns took second place to economic ones. Looking back, however, we can see that throughout the 1930s the recovery of tradition in song and ritual was moving Reform Judaism closer to the other branches of American Judaism. As Michael Meyer puts it: “The interwar period did witness a progressive diminution of differences between Reform Jews and their coreligionists. The rapprochement appeared in the broadening sense of Jewish identity, the progressive reappropriation of traditions, and the turn toward Zion.”³¹

The reclamation of an authentic Jewish sound was to continue from then on. The desire to present such music inevitably threw into question also the decision by earlier generations to abandon the cantorate. Once again, this traditional transmitter of Jewish song found a place in the American Reform synagogue. Modern cantors, however, would have to master the tradition of the past and to attain the musical capacity to adapt that tradition to modernity. Indeed, the hymnal’s success depended on the parallel success of the cantors whose American-style artistry matched the hymnal’s blend of tradition and modernity.

At issue was the Reform movement’s very deep-seated desire to arrive at a musical sound that was, on the one hand, undeniably Jewish but, on the other hand, distinctively American. The leading figure, Binder, and cantorial composers like Walter Davidson were now joined by others: Isidore Freed, Hugo Adler, Max Helfman, Herbert Fromm, Heinrich Schalit, and Lazar Weiner. As music directors in large Reform congregations, many of the composers—like Binder himself—could actively implement their new musical styles in the repertory of their congregations’ prayer service. These and other out standing composers not only recovered, but also integrated, traditional melodies into their own work in such a way that they upgraded the standard of synagogue music to a level of artistic excellence beyond compare in all of Jewish history. In 1943, Rabbi Jacob Singer, a leading member of the CCAR Committee on Synagogue Music, was able to evaluate the long-term project that had been undertaken as nothing less than “a gradual emergence of a distinctly American nusach or tradition in synagogue music. Out of the many elements of which American Israel is composed, we are shaping a song which is becoming articulate and distinctive, and yet traditional withal. Our effort is stimulated by our new sense of responsibility for Klal Yisrael [the totality of the Jewish people] since so many centers of Judaism have been laid low by the despoilers of our times. By discarding the banalities of the ghetto and yet retaining its valuable elements, we shall create a Jewish song in this country worthy of our tradition and our opportunities.”³²

As Singer noted, this “new song” was stimulated by the desire to recognize the Holocaust, which, even as it was happening, was raising Jewish consciousness in ways no one could have predicted. It would soon become commonplace to commission new works for synagogues, often in the form of entire Friday night or Saturday morning services. The great masterpiece that served as a model for this genre was Ernest Bloch’s Avodat Hakodesh (Sacred Service) which had been published in 1933. Although written for cantor, professional choir, and orchestra, it is most often performed with organ, due to the financial constraints of most American synagogues during the thirties but continuing on even now. The new compositions that followed in the decades after Bloch’s epic work tried to maintain his own standard, so that they too were designed for choir, cantor, and organ, even though, of necessity, they were composed only with the large “cathedral-style” Reform congregations in mind, the very places, that is, that could afford to commission such a work in the first place.

Had the recovery of tradition been limited to masterworks demanding enormous sanctuaries and musical forces, it would hardly have survived the postwar years except as a collection of cherished musical relics to be heard and enjoyed in the great old synagogue spaces that first-generation German Jews established in the inner core of America’s largest cities. By the fifties, however, post-Holocaust generations were joining Americans in general in opening up the suburbs. Hardly able to satisfy the musical demands of the great sacred services such as Bloch’s, they developed a simpler musical style designed for organ and volunteer choir or cantor, often with the congregation singing along. “It is high time we break the conspiracy of silence in the synagogue,” urged Reform rabbis at their 1944 convention. “Congregational singing need not and ought not be limited to hymns alone. We have many occasions when zemirot [traditional Jewish melodies] and folksongs of Jewish origin can be used by a volunteer adult or junior choir.”³³

Especially during the turmoil of the Second World War, Jewish leaders cared very deeply about musical participation, which they associated with the spirituality typical of educated congregants at home with Jewish identity. Jews were under siege in Europe, and therefore Jews here in North America were anxious to borrow from no “folk” other than their own. As they saw their ancestors’ homelands destroyed by the Holocaust, they yearned to hear and to sing the sounds of their own people, to add their voices to those of their ancestors.

To take responsibility for the continuity of Jewish culture here, beyond the reach of Hitler’s destructive forces, Reform Jewish leaders sought educational methods to enlighten their flock to the task of rediscovering themselves as Jews. They thus devised an annual synagogue program entitled a “Sabbath of Song.” Reform Jews were urged also to adopt family rituals with traditional music, so as to promote Jewish identity beyond the synagogue. And in the synagogue, meanwhile, the movement implemented an annual Jewish Music Week at which Jewish music, new and old, would be featured.

In addition, in 1945 several leading cantors, musicologists, and rabbis formed an organization called the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music, which was designed “to provide standards for Jewish Liturgical Music; to fix methods for writing authentic Jewish melodies; to publish lists of available music; and to encourage the composition and performance of such music by holding contests, making recordings, and by other means; to further the knowledge and appreciation of Jewish music.”³⁴

The Professionalization of the North American Cantorate

The recapturing of traditional Jewish music, the growth in new compositions in which nusach and traditional motives were utilized, the growing accent on the congregation’s singing the music rather than merely listening to complex versions of it, and the emphasis on educating the laity in musical sophistication are all facets of what Mark Slobin calls the “professionalization” of American Jewry, a response to the Holocaust that was characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s.³⁵ With the death of its parent culture in eastern Europe and in Germany, American Jewry was forced to claim a sense of its own authenticity and was no longer compelled to look toward another, older, Jewish cultural center for legitimacy.³⁶

Perhaps the most significant example of this postwar trend toward cultural and religious independence was the Reform movement’s decision in 1947 to establish a School of Sacred Music to train cantors. In 1951, the Conservative movement followed suit, as did the Orthodox in 1954.³⁷ More than any other institution, the new cantorate has shaped the course of Jewish music over the last several decades. The Reform movement’s school proved paradigmatic, in that it was built around a core faculty that included musicologist Eric Werner, hymnal editor Abraham Wolf Binder, as well as several of the composers mentioned above—Isidor Freed, Lazar Weiner, and Max Helfman, for instance. Growth was by no means steady, but by the 1980s, the School of Sacred Music had come of age, openly voicing its goal: to train cantors both academically and professionally, and thereby to raise up generations of fully professional cantorial clergy, charged with continuing, developing, and enriching the Jewish musical heritage.³⁸

The Union Songster (1960)

The impact of the Holocaust and the recognition of the substantive difference between the pre- and the postwar years were recognized as early as 1947, when the CCAR’s Committee on Synagogue Music began planning for yet another hymnal. Unlike its predecessor fifty years earlier, which had sought a musical repertory that was inspirational and triumphal, this committee faced the challenge of salvaging the Jewish musical heritage and educating laypeople to appreciate and sing it. The committee aimed, not only at educating children and returning Jewish music to congregational song, but also at developing a Reform theology that went beyond triumph to incorporate the experience of the post-Holocaust years.

By 1954 this committee, which now included Eric Werner, Abraham Wolf Binder, and Malcolm Stern, determined that their future Union Songster, as it came to be called, was not to take the place of the 1932 Union Hymnal—in fact, it pointedly did not reproduce many of the hymnal’s songs.³⁹ In addition, it eschewed four-part choral music in favor of simple, singable melodies more appropriate for families and religious schools. With the Judaism of the past having gone up in flames, the Songster’s architects sought to ensure Jewish survival through their only guarantors: the many children of the baby-boom era.

The distinctiveness of the Union Songster was the singability of its music and its inclusion of texts and music for a broader range of holy days within the Jewish and the American calendars. We find here for the first time a Havdalah service (the standard ritual marking the end of the Sabbath); services for Purim, Chanukah, and Passover; a Consecration service; and a Mother’s Day service.

While a mere thirty years earlier the editorial committee had debated the inclusion of Hatikvah, the post-Holocaust (and post-Israeli-statehood) Union Songster included an entire religious service honoring the existence of the state of Israel. Deeply committed to the establishment of the state of Israel, postwar Reform Jews did not hesitate to express their pride and support for a Jewish state and, therefore, to pray for it and sing the songs suggestive of it in their worship.

Within a decade, the impact of the state of Israel was to be felt in ways that the Songster’s authors could not have predicted. Though the Songster openly supported Zionism, it predated the efflorescence of Jewish culture that Zionist theory predicted and that a Jewish state now delivered. An intensely musical culture, enriched moreover by ethnic traditions of Jewish immigrants from all lands, Israeli Judaism has pioneered its own large and varied repertory of songs, not all of them (or even most of them) self-consciously religious, but many of them (like Hatikvah) expressive of the religious yearnings of Jews as members of the Jewish people. By the 1970s, particularly after the 1967 Six-Day War, many of these songs were finding their way to the American synagogue, often with Hebrew lyrics that people sang without understanding. The very melody and the existence of Hebrew reminded people of their peoplehood in an age when the Jewish people had almost been destroyed, but now had miraculously been reborn on its age-old biblical soil. Many of the Songster’s offerings were systematically overlooked, even deemed irrelevant, as, for better or for worse, American Jews found themselves singing Israeli music born not in the synagogue at all but in song competitions and popular Israeli culture.

Moreover, the preference for Israeli music over the songs of the last several generations of Reform Jews was part of a larger phenomenon yet: a countercultural movement spawned by the sixties and seventies in general in this country, and evident in a new-found critique of the synagogue by the baby-boomers come of age.

Countercultural Judaism of the Sixties and Seventies: Chavurot and the Youth Movement

As we approach the age of the third-generation American Jew, we come across a continuation of the identity crisis that their parents experienced several years earlier. These American Jews were still recovering from a decade when the monumental events in Jewish history had occurred within a few years of one another: the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. They had watched from America as one Jewish world died and another was created. In each instance, the American Jewish response was self-examination. Third-generation Jews knew they had survived and prospered here but now had to ponder the dilemma of being a post-Holocaust Jew of the Diaspora.

At first, and in keeping with the early sixties, these young Jews lost interest in institutional Jewish life, seeing its synagogues as typical bourgeois expressions of comfortable living amid the inequities of Vietnam, the enslavement of African-Americans, and third-world poverty. The sixties and seventies therefore began to see a decrease in affiliation among American Jews.⁴⁰ But the Six-Day War changed all that, as even young and critical Jews faced the sudden possibility of a second cataclysm that would end the state of Israel as abruptly as it had been born. Turning inward to their own Jewish heritage, they began exploring ways to retain their Judaism, but not in their parents’ mode, which they perceived as shallow and without substance.⁴¹

By 1968 the Chavurah movement was thus born. A Chavurah was a countercultural community, usually of young Jews intent on radical democracy, equality, and cultural self-sufficiency. Its members worshiped and celebrated in an informal setting, celebrating smallness of size, personalized relationships, a recovery of tradition, and the importance of participatory worship. Influenced by the Chavurah’s critique of large, impersonal, and nonparticipatory worship, more and more synagogues of the seventies and eighties began questioning the musical heritage of the hymnals, especially the elaborate harmonic structure that underpinned standard Reform hymns. Moreover, more and more small Reform congregations that had developed in suburbia faced budgetary restraints that precluded hiring a cantor, thus necessitating that, Chavurah-like, they develop their own brand of “do it yourself” Judaism. Together with the populism of Israeli music, the Chavurah cultural style favored informality, popular culture over high culture, and a certain disdain for the very professionalization that had marked earlier postwar attitudes.

A third tendency of the period, supportive of the other two, was the burgeoning of the Reform Jewish youth movement, known as the National Federation of Temple Youth (NFTY). While older (college-age and beyond) brothers and sisters founded the Chavurah, younger teenagers still at home began attending NFTY summer camps in record numbers. There at camp, with the support of large numbers of their peers, they leveled their own critique at formal synagogue life. To the Israeli melodies and the do-it-yourself traditionalism of the Chavurah, they added their own brand of popular music, namely, the folk-rock sound of simple songs composed by guitar-playing teenagers.

As we have already seen, sacred music reflects cultural, social, and political contexts. Liturgical music of the 1960s and 1970s thus accommodated itself to these three shifts: Israeli consciousness; the Chavurah and its yearning for a populist version of traditional authenticity; and the emergence of the youth movement. The music gradually became simpler, thoroughly democratic in its singability, largely Hebrew, and playable on guitar.

To be sure, established composers, such as Gershon Kingsley and Raymond Smolover, sought to tap the new market with more sophisticated sounds, like jazz or folk-rock, thus capturing the essence of the teenage cultural revolution. This new style was not necessarily simplistic and overly informal; it provided sophisticated rhythms and lyrical melodies where before synagogue music had been more sedate.

In such an era, the Union Songster never fully succeeded. Shortly after its publication—and certainly following the 1967 Six-Day War—American synagogue pronunciation of Hebrew changed from Ashkenazi (northern European) to Sephardi the translated lyrics of all the Hebrew songs in the Union Songster were quickly unusable.

The Music for Gates of Prayer: Eclecticism

By 1975, the Reform movement’s new liturgical series was inaugurated. Given the problems of the Union Songster, a committee was composed to plan a hymnal. It was to accompany the new prayer book, Gates of Prayer, which included an appendix containing seventy Hebrew and English hymns as well as English transliterations for twenty-four worship responses. While deliberating on the final shape of that volume, an interim book called Shirim Uzemirot was issued.⁴² It contained melodies only for the most basic responses and songs.⁴³

The final hymnal, Sha’arei Shirah: Gates of Song, was published only in 1987. The makeup of its board of editors bears witness to the successful professionalization of the cantorate in the Reform movement and the growing number of graduates of the School of Sacred Music. Each hymnal since 1897 represents the work of rabbis of the CCAR with musical suggestions from a single music editor such as Binder. By contrast, the editorial committee of Sha’arei Shirah was composed of members of the American Conference of Cantors (ACC), the CCAR, a music editor (also a cantor), and a professional Jewish music publications editor.

The 173 selections in Sha’arei Shira cover the entire Sabbath liturgy of Gates of Prayer and a wide variety of Sabbath hymns and songs. Like the Union Songster and Shirim Uzemirot, the book was intended from the outset for congregational use. The music is singable, with settings in a moderate vocal range. All the older arrangements reappear in Sephardi Hebrew. There is an alternative to the usual organ arrangement in order to allow an amateur organist, pianist, or guitarist to accompany the cantor, choir, and/or congregation.

Another unique feature is the number of musical settings for Hebrew prayers within the Shabbat service; each major response has three and often four selections from which to choose. Sha’arei Shirah contains neither children’s services nor liturgical readings; it serves solely as a musical compendium for use by the congregation (aided by cantor and organist) in order to encourage congregational participation in worship. Both the content and form of the book typify Reform synagogue music in the late 1960s and 1970s. Its wealth of musical sources reflects the eclecticism of these times. In a single compendium one finds Israeli melodies, Hasidic tunes, works by nineteenth-century European masters like Lewandowski and Sulzer, Sephardi melodies, Yiddish folk songs, and a wide range of contemporary American compositions.

What we have is the first collection of an expanded musical canon, complete with pipe organ, guitar, and drum; cantor, choir, and congregational singing. Michael Isaacson speaks for many when he talks about the contemporary synagogue as having traveled from the postwar experimentation stage and a free-for-all period of folk settings to the point where we should be “optimistic that the next decade will … synthesize the popularism and relevance of today with the classicism and rich heritage that has been handed down to us.”⁴⁵

Toward the Twenty-First Century

In the 1980s, the Reform movement estabished a Joint Commission on Synagogue Music, representing cantorate, rabbinate, and laity. Diversity of taste continues to direct the committee’s discussions as its members create a myriad of programs designed to educate Reform Jews about Jewish music.

An increasing number of works composed for use in North American synagogues is published each year by Transcontinental Music, the music publishing company of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. This music represents an array of synagogue composers of our era, such as Ben Steinberg, Simon Sargon, Samuel Adler, Stephen Richards, Michael Isaacson, William Sharlin, Bonia Shur, and Charles Davidson. All of these had established themselves as composers before the time when women cantors, as well as women rabbis, began to make their mark on the Jewish community in the area of liturgical expression. By 1990 the works of Andrea Jill Higgins, Rachelle Nelson, and my own have begun to enter the canon. Composers of the 1980s fuse musical aesthetics with the need for effective congregational worship, sometimes by stressing traditional modes, other times by leaning more or less heavily toward the classical Reform choral genre, or by weaving a simple congregational refrain into a richly textured setting for cantor and choir. Diversity of voice is a concern, too, especially given the rising number of female cantors who require music written in a vocal style appropriate for women.

The popularity of the folk genre of sacred music has not decreased. The influence of Israel is still felt, varying with the repertory in vogue at any given time. American folk composers (Debbie Friedman, Michael Isaacson, Jeffrey Klepper, and Daniel Freelander are names that come to mind) continue to create singable, uplifting songs that gain rapid acceptance.

But people feel strongly about their musical tastes with the result that they argue vehemently over what is an appropriate musical language for synagogue use.⁴⁶ Many critics have responded negatively toward the incorporation of the folk idiom within a worship service, seeing the growing popularization of new idioms as threatening to erode centuries’ old standards of Jewish music for worship. On the other hand, the popularists have become attached to the warmth and informality of their preferred style, maintaining, in fact, that in some cases, it is this very music that draws them to prayer after years of adult absence from the synagogue; it has become “their music.”

Perhaps the future of Reform synagogue music will synthesize all these styles. Cantors will continue to expose their congregants to the richness of Jewish musical tradition in an effort to familiarize them with many different musical languages. Recognizing the popular appeal of Israeli and American folk music, as well as its capacity to involve worshipers in an active yet worshipful way, Jewish composers will utilize its rhythmic liveliness to enhance their own melodies. Congregations will grow more and more accustomed to participating in many kinds of Jewish music as they grow to appreciate the more formal styles of the past, the traditionalism of modern solo chazzanut, and the richness of a tradition that goes beyond the moment. They will become choirs in themselves as their proficiency in singing improves, even as they appreciate the capacity of cantorial presentation that can move them in ways that unison singing does not. In addition to the organ, other musical instruments such as the flute, tof (Israeli drum), piano, and guitar will accompany our music. We will strive for a sacred music that is both inclusive and transcendent, ancient yet contemporary, stately yet inviting, practical yet inspired.

NOTES

1. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford, 1988), p. 236.

2. Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (Urbana and Chicago, 1989), p. 18.

3. See lists of regulations in Jakob J. Petuchowski, Prayerbook Reform in Europe (New York, 1969), pp. 105–27.

4. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York, 1974), p. 38.

5. Slobin, Chosen Voices, p. 19.

6. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 226.

7. Lawrence A. Hoffman, review of Jack Wertheimer, The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, in Religion and Intellectual Life 6/3–4 (Spring/Summer 1989): 241.

8. Slobin, Chosen Voices, p. 50.

9. Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community (New York, 1970), p. 1.

10. CCAR Yearbook 3 (1892): 96.

11. Union Hymnal (1877), no. 85.

12. Slobin, Chosen Voices, p. 45.

13. CCAR Yearbook 14 (1904): 52.

14. CCAR Yearbook 23 (1913): 148.

15. CCAR Yearbook 28 (1918): 58.

16. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 295.

17. CCAR Yearbook 28 (1918): 58.

18. CCAR Yearbook 28 (1918): 59.

19. Slobin, Chosen Voices, p. 55.

20. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 90.

21. Union Hymnal (New York, 1932), p. vii.

22. Cf. Slobin, Chosen Voices, pp. 45–46.

23. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 91.

24. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 97.

25. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 91.

26. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 91.

27. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 321.

28. Ibid., p. 321.

29. CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 101.

30. Report by Committee on Synagogue Music, CCAR Yearbook 40 (1930): 101.

31. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 298.

32. CCAR Yearbook 53 (1943): 167–68.

33. CCAR Yearbook 54 (1944): pp. 127–28.

34. CCAR Yearbook 54 (1946): pp. 92–93.

35. See Slobin’s chapter, “Post-War Professionals,” in Chosen Voices, pp. 94–111.

36. Ibid., pp. 94–95.

37. Ibid., p. 94.

38. See statements in promotional literature designed by Lawrence A. Hoffman in the 1980s, during his tenure as director of the School of Sacred Music.

39. Rabbi Malcolm Stern, chairman’s report of the Committee on Synagogue Music of the CCAR, CCAR Yearbook 63 (1954): 96.

40. Slobin, Chosen Voices.

41. On the Chavurah movement in general, particularly for its contextualization amid countercultural, generational conflict, see Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, 1990).

42. Jack Gottlieb, ed., Shirim Uzemirot: Songs and Hymns for Gates of Prayer (New York, 1977).

43. These were published in an addendum to the back of Gates of Prayer.

44. Charles Davidson, ed., Sha’arei Shirah: Gates of Song (New York, 1987).

45. Slobin, Chosen Voices, pp. 248–49.

46. See, e.g., the symposium, “The Discussion of Music in Lawrence A. Hoffman’s The Art of Public Prayer,” CCAR Journal 38/3 (Summer 1991): 1–23.