[Previous sermon: "Rosh Hashanah - 5769 - Children's Service 9/30/08"] [Next sermon: "Erev Yom Kippur 5769: Tzedekah"]
High Holiday 5769 – Seeking God
I invite you to listen, to really listen: to give the following piece. You may like what you will hear, you may truly dislike it (even hate it), but please be open minded for the full of its 5 ½ minutes: Click here to listen - source: http://www.rebbesoul.com/listen.html.
An amazing, awesome even, work – whether you liked its aesthetic value or not, it is hard to argue with its artistic creativity. Incorporating a blend of rock sensibilities, world-fusion stylings, and of course that age-less and familiar folk tune of our High Holiday Avinu Malkenu, Bruce Burger, better known as ‘Rebbesoul’ in the Jewish music world, has challenged us to be moved – he has challenged all of our expectations in his expression of this prayer.
Bruce Burger is far from the first to incorporate what might be viewed as radical musical impulses into liturgical prayer. Our High Holiday worship is fully inflected with the secular minstrel song of medieval Germany. Solomon Di Rossi brought the music of the Italian Renaissance into the synagogue in the 16th century. Solomon Sultzer, a 19th century Viennese Jewish composer, set Jewish prayer to the waltz musical form, a style that, by the way, in its day was quite controversial. The waltz was said to lead to lack of discipline and moral decay. The mid-twentieth century saw composers such as Michael Isaacson and later Debbie Friedman striving to counter formality by importing American folk-rock idioms for musical settings of Jewish prayer. So is it really any surprise that now young 21st century musicians would be drawing from the musical influences in which they were raised such as hard electric rock, rap, world beat, and new age trends? Hardly.
At the Union of Reform Judaism’s most recent national biennial gathering, Synagogue 3000, a non-profit organization devoted to the study and re-vitalizing of synagogue life in North America, unveiled its self-described mega-Church approach as a way to re-energize worship. Basing its program on the services held at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California – a church so influential that both presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, put in appearance there last month – this biennial service featured live instrumental bands, vocal ensembles, over-head multi-media power point presentations that replaced prayer books, clapping, singing, and dancing in the isles – ultimately it presented a multi-sensory experience intended to draw in the unaffiliated and disaffected among us.
Indeed, there is a lot to be said for the creativity and excitement of this model. We, here at Temple Emanuel, albeit on a far smaller scale, have experienced a taste of such creativity when visited by Jose Bowen or Mattan Klein over the past number of years; innovative music, whether aesthetically pleasing to individual tastes, always offers new ways of thinking about and experiencing the words of our tradition. Power point siddurs replacing bound paper filled books not only has environmental advantages but also allows for a continuing evolution and fluidity of the text. There was debate even years ago at the start of the planning of our movement’s new prayerbook Mishkan Tefillah that was finally printed a year ago, whether hard copy books should still be normative.
Ron Wolfson, the co-founder of Synagogue 3000’s predecessor, Synagogue 2000 and now president of Synagogue 3000, firmly believes that these techniques are necessary, stating, “you’ve got to grab them spiritually and emotionally right off the bat.” No question it “grabs us”, but it remains questionable whether such broad changes, as Synagogue 3000 promotes, will keep us engaged long after we are in the door? And a bigger and far more important question from my vantage point: where is the line between entertainment and worship?
Worship is thought to be the means through which we seek God. How many of us have truly entered this worship space seeking God? The Spanish Medieval poet, Yehudah HaLevi, may inspire us by his search for God, words reprinted in our machzor, Gates of Repentance:
Adonai, where shall I find You?
Your place is high and hidden
Yet, where shall I not find You,
Whose glory fills all space?
Far space is Your dominion,
Yet You dwell in the human heart
You are the refuge of those close by,
The haven of those far off.
You are enthroned in Your house,
Though unconfined by the heights;
Your hosts adore You, but You transcend their praise
All space cannot contain You,
Still less an earthly house!
Yet though exalted above us in high and lonely majesty,
You are closer to us than our own spirit and flesh.
I have tried to reach You, I have called with all my heart
And on my way toward You,
You have come forth to meet me!
In the wonders of Your creative power,
I perceive You.
In the holiness of Your sanctuary, I find You.
Who say they have not seen You?
The heavens and all their host,
Voiceless declare Your glory.
Does God truly dwell in us?
Our origin is dust, how can we presume?
As for You, Holy One, we can, for You dwell wherever we sing of Your glory.
An enviable expression of faith in a transcendent but ever present God. While any belief in God requires a certain leap of faith, at least a modicum of trust in the unknown, HaLevi’s belief system was not founded on blind faith; his philosophy and belief system grew out of his thorough education in the maths and sciences, and his daily work as a physician. He was a modern thinker; he used Spanish and Arabic – the then avant garde tools of poetic meter and genre to express himself. Bruce Burger’s Avinu Malkenu with which we opened could certainly be classified as a modern expression of faith in God similar to HaLevi’s – he is firmly grounded in the modern language of his day and culture. The techniques proposed by Synagogue 3000, too, can be viewed as attempts to seek God, but its goals smack of feel good marketing with the sole desire of getting large numbers seated in the pews.
We moderns, like HaLevi and Burger, are seekers; however if we are honest with ourselves, I think we may be far less clear than they, about what we are actually seeking. Perhaps we moderns have too much doubt in God’s existence to presume we can seek it here. The well-known joke, shared last year at this season by Rabbi Meiri to spark sacred conversation, underscores that doubt. You may recall: “Two men go to shul: Max, who prays fervently and Joe, a declared aetheist. When asked why he goes, Joe responds, I don’t go to shul to speak to God, my friend Max goes to talk to God, I go to talk to Max” – the humor arises from our identification with the doubting Joe, not the God-fearing and reverent Max. And, our doubt, our reduced expectations for the power of what worship might offer prevent us from seeking the challenge and substance of that worship.
Unfortunately, as products of the media soaked 20th century, our impatience gets the best of us; we expect to be immediately entertained because our society has trained us so. Indeed, our increasingly short attention spans are behind Wolfson’s demand that we need “to grab them…right off the bat”, in his model, there is absolutely no time to spare. And perhaps he is onto something significant if not necessary for younger and younger generations raised on text messaging and quick and easy internet access.
An example of a very successful ‘grab ‘em’ model is New York City’s Bnai Jeshurun, popularly known as “BJ”, that was featured this past year in The Baltimore Jewish Times. This synagogue succeeds in entertainment. Its services are a feast for the senses – filled with music, instruments, dancing, and swaying. But as Professor Mark Kligman, an enthnomusicologist who has studied the “BJ phenomenon extensively, notes, it is unclear whether Bnai Jeshurun’s model of worship succeeds in sustenance or whether its high numbers are a function of consistent turn-over, a continued ‘grabbing them’ but not necessarily a continued ‘keeping them.’
As a vibrant and compelling congregation, we must strike the balance between what grabs us and what enriches us. Ironically, one of the reasons why the waltz, a now classic and old musical form, was considered so raunchy and immoral in its day was because its ¾ rhthym was so quick to learn that it did not require the patience and discipline demanded of other styles – it grabbed them. Ein chadash tachat ha-shamayim. Kohelet might be right – there is nothing new under the heavens. Yet, one of those Waltz settings has become one of our most enduring, and endearing, liturgical melodies used every Shabbat in congregations around the world: Shema. Can we even imagine our worship if we had never let that in? Worship needs to be compelling, entertaining and open to new ideas.
Worship also needs to be substantial. It must engage the community in the substance – of Torah and prayer. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, quoted by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman in his recent book on revisioning synagogue life, notes that people assemble in many arenas, they gather, for example, for concerts, sporting events, or lectures, but there is no sense of permanence because of the absence of continued community, of connectedness. Worship certainly entails music, and lecture, and if you’d like we can all run around the sanctuary to add a sporting component, but worship also requires the ongoing conversation of the community. It is built on the assumption that a synagogue community’s worth is measured in sacred acts, mitzvot, and in the relationships that connect us to one another and to God, however we may perceive of God. It is predicated on the assumption that the people who attend care about each other as well as the congregation in its entirety.
What makes worship successful and fully participatory is not the style of music, the types of instruments, the amount of singing or reading along, whether clapping or dancing occurs, but rather true participation is a function of how involved one is emotionally and intellectually in the service, and how connected one is to the community within which one prays. This kind of participation should be our goal.
Like physical exercise, worship is rarely a vehicle for instant gratification. It requires ongoing practice that changes the experience as one becomes more and more proficient allowing for a deeper appreciation of the activity and the results. Preparation, intent, and practice not only make worship more fulfilling, but also allows us to be more open to new ways in which to worship.
Synagogue 3000’s worship model offers us much upon which to reflect. It offers creative ideas many of which are becoming mainstream such as synagogue bands and the infusion of new styles in Jewish music. But, it doesn’t necessarily offer the answer to making our synagogues vibrant places of worship. No. Instruments and popular trends are important tools to help engage (and even entertain), but without substance they can’t build a thing.
The Avinu Malkenu with which I opened these remarks. For some of us, it may have been very entertaining – it may have grabbed us in our seats. For others, perhaps not at all; maybe even turned us off. Yet was it prayer?
While not at first, rather after repeated listening and studying, I find Burger’s Avinu Malkenu remarkably prayerful. Written not so differently from a Chassidic niggun – starting meditatively, reaching up towards its climax in what could be characterized as a moment of dvekut, clinging to God, and then returning quietly to the reality of humanity. Burger’s work is a profound and creative expression of this text.
Appropriate for communal worship? I leave that for you to decide.
Cantor Silverman
