The Sabbath of Song.

A synagogue named for a great-grandfather

Three weeks before this sermon he had sung in Beth Jehoeda in The Hague — the 1726 Portuguese synagogue, one of the few in the Netherlands to survive the occupation intact, rededicated in 1976 under the name of his great-grandfather Levie Levisson, who founded Dutch Liberal Judaism in 1931. Three generations of the family were in the room, and his son Max.

The piece he sang there, Eitz Chayim Hi, was written by Victor Schlesinger, who in 1913 was offered the cantorate of Shaar Hashomayim and turned it down.

Read

On their right and on their left

Five words repeat in the Torah reading, verbatim, seven verses apart: the waters formed a wall for them on their right and on their left. Rabbeinu Bachya reads it as meaning the water stood on every side, and cleared only a step at a time — nobody could see the whole route through.

Delivered as a conversation with the presidential historian Gil Troy, on finding a way forward between two crashing currents.

Read

Six days in December

The Vilna Gaon counts six days from the start of the portion to the crossing of the sea: six days from slavery to a song. This sermon offers six days in Israel, in the hundred and fourteenth day of the war.

The El Al security officer who asks why he is going now, and answers the question for him. A rocket siren stopping the chazan mid-improvisation at the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, and the singing continuing in the stairwell. A couple from Kiryat Shmona reunited at Ichilov after forty days apart. A minyan formed among the photographs at the Supernova site, punctuated by artillery. And a man in an orange sweater who came down three floors to say that he had been a prisoner of war in 1973.

Read

What a choral synagogue is

The phrase turns up in every description of The Shaar — one of the last vestiges of the European choral synagogue tradition — and this sermon asks what it actually means. The answer runs through the Haskalah, a scathing 1830s account of disorder in traditional worship, the invention of the robed khor-hazan, and Franz Liszt, who wrote unpleasantly about Jews and then heard Salomon Sulzer lead the High Holy Days in Vienna and could not find words grand enough.

Ends with the same melody sung twice: once as a plain line, once in Conor O'Neil's new arrangement. A charcoal drawing, then a watercolour.

Read

The shortest one

Written a year into the shutdown, and about a page long. Zoom classes, vaccines, a vandal with a can of spray paint. Someday, he writes, his sons will tell their children about living through this, and it will seem impossibly long ago. When that day comes, it will truly be a time to sing.

Read

How did they know how to sing it?

Nobody held a national choir rehearsal at the shore of the sea. So how did several hundred thousand freed slaves manage to sing the same song? The Talmud offers three answers — Moses sang and they repeated one phrase, or every phrase, or they all sang together after the first line — and each is a theory of how to teach a room to sing.

So he tried it. He asked everyone in the back to move forward, handed out the music, and turned the sanctuary into a rehearsal room. Dedicated to Senator Leo Kolber and to Armando Rodrigues.

Read

Every young chazan needs a zayde

The first sermon given in the sanctuary after Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat's funeral, from the place he had occupied longer than anyone in the congregation's history.

Its subject is Serach bat Asher, the only person who went down to Egypt with Jacob's family, crossed the sea, and was still counted in the census in the desert — and who alone remembered where Joseph was buried, so that the promise could be kept and the people could leave. Every generation, however great, needs someone who was there before.

Read

Best and worst rock performance

Delivered the day before the ceremony at which You Want It Darker won Best Rock Performance. The sermon announces the Torah's own nominees in the category, and gives both to Moses: the rock at Chorev, which he strikes as instructed, and the rock at Meribah thirty-six years later, which he strikes in a temper and is never forgiven for.

The service that morning was an all-Finkelstein Musaf, with three premieres.

Read

Three things converging

A full moon, a lunar eclipse and a comet all fell on Tu BiShvat that year, and the Patriots had come back from twenty-eight to three. The sermon proposes a second convergence: a name, a GOAT, and a motto, connecting the Sabbath of Song to the week's other events.

Raymond Goldstein — Zelermyer's teacher, in whose Jerusalem home he had been ben bayit — was in the congregation, for the premiere of a new Kedusha he had written for the choir's 130th anniversary.

Read

Can I get an Amen?

Written days before the choir sang at the United Nations. The word amen means I believe it, and the sermon follows it from a Baptist congregation to the Belzer Rebbe's tish in Jerusalem — thousands of Hasidim around a table longer than a basketball court, a whispered blessing, and then the loudest unison oomayn imaginable.

It ends with Elie Wiesel's Ani Ma'amin, and the melody Wiesel learned in 1943 from a man who had escaped Poland and would answer questions about it only by singing.

Read

Lift every voice

Every January, ten thousand people enter Japan's All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition, in which contestants take a three-minute call on a stage under bright lights and are judged on tone, pace and pauses. The audience gasps when someone falters. Different societies prize different specialised skills — and the Shulchan Aruch devotes a chapter to the qualifications for leading a congregation in prayer, of which a pleasant voice is the last item on the list.

The sermon closes with a boy with autism who chanted his own bar mitzvah and, through a keyboard, said this: I found my voice that day.

Read

Picked up pieces

Modelled on the sports column of loose fragments: Les Misérables and the song of angry men; Beyoncé miming at an inauguration in the cold, who should try doing a funeral at The Shaar cemetery atop Mount Royal; Lance Armstrong set against Moses's protests of unworthiness; Deborah the prophet, and the Pentagon taking three thousand years to grasp what Barak understood at once.

And, at the centre, the argument that Mi Chamocha is the Jewish liturgical anthem — said three times a day, and with a different tune for every season.

Read

Repetitive spiritual injury

The cantor, he proposes, is in the business of religious aesthetics — and, on reflection, of ergonomics too. Ergonomics exists because doing the same thing often and carelessly damages you. Now consider praying the same words three times a day, every day, for a lifetime.

The remedy, and the subject of the rest of the sermon, is nusach: the requirement that each service, each season and each hour has its own mode, so that nothing can be sung on autopilot.

Read

Vayar, Vayiru, Vaya'aminu

Six weeks after singing the anthems at the Bell Centre for the first time, he found that everyone asked the same question, and it was not about the players or the tickets. It was: were you nervous?

The answer runs through three verbs in a single verse — they saw, they feared, they believed — and lands on his first Kol Nidrei at The Shaar in 2004, when the president stopped him on his way to the bimah, said not yet, took out a tattered index card, and read him a commission in a voice only he could hear.

Read

The man who could not remember

Henry Molaison lost the ability to form new memories after brain surgery in 1953 and became the most studied patient in the history of neuroscience. He could tell the same story three times in a quarter of an hour, each time differently, each time as though for the first.

Which is, the sermon argues, exactly what Heschel meant by radical amazement — and exactly the cantor's problem, since he must say the identical words every week and make them new. The four verbs of redemption from the Haggadah are then matched to four modes of cantorial expression: the cry, the journey, the song, and the silence.

It ends with Rabbi Mark Loeb, who telephoned before every concert to say the same three words: give 'em heaven.

Read