The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen
qualities as a site of religious learning and transmission, as well as a place for acquiring knowledge of “Jewish” music—aspects not highlighted in the “Western music” narrative dominating studies of more “secular” music schools. Most importantly, however, the institutional structure served as a backdrop for meaningful interaction through which students, teachers, and administrators negotiated their own paths to musical competence.
At the heart of this study, then, lies identity in transition. What does it mean to become a cantor? What does it mean to see one’s self as a sacred vessel of Jewish music? The most recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, despite its twenty-nine volumes, includes no entry for “sacred music”; likewise, the New Grove’s “Jewish music” entry (Seroussi et al. 2001) backs away from Curt Sachs’s elegant but highly problematic 1957 definition of Jewish music as music “by Jews, for Jews, as Jews” (Bayer et al. 2007: 637).13 Emanuel Rubin and John Baron attempted to provide a “working definition” of Jewish music in 2006 as “music that serves Jewish purposes” (Rubin and Baron 2006: xxvi), carefully acknowledging the evasive, ever-changing nature of “Jewish” sound. From an academic perspective, these careful assessments implied, the idea of “Jewish music” resists imposed boundaries. Yet to cantors and others who see “sacred music” and “Jewish music” as forms of spiritual and cultural capital (including, to a surprising extent, the above scholars—who depend upon these boundaries for their livelihood), these concepts have become the basis of countless discussions, articles of communal scholarship, editorials, political conversations, and religious policies. The need to define the “Jewish” and the “sacred” in music provided a significant impetus for the School of Sacred Music’s existence in the first place, and remained a crucial element of its continued mission into the twenty-first century. Understanding the stakes in fostering, enforcing, and describing boundaries to music’s sacredness and Jewishness, as well as the methods by which cantorial students, teachers and administrators internalized those boundaries, will become central concerns of mine as I examine the process of attaining musical competence and cantorial investiture.
Tradition in Change
As matriculants into a Reform Jewish institution, cantorial students at the School of Sacred Music obtain their credentials, and represent Jewish musical tradition, within a religious movement predicated on change. In May 1999, a few months before I started my fieldwork, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR)—Reform Judaism’s rabbinic organization—ratified the movement’s fourth document of collective self-definition since 1885. Entitled “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” the document asserted in its preamble: “The great contribution of Reform Judaism is that it has enabled the Jewish people to introduce innovation while preserving tradition, to embrace diversity while asserting commonality, to affirm beliefs without rejecting those who doubt, and to bring faith to sacred texts without sacrificing critical scholarship” (“A Statement of Principles” 2000: 3). When the movement’s rabbinic journal officially published the Principles the following year, moreover, it supplemented the five-page document with ten essays outlining various levels of support or opposition, illustrating the intensely dialogic nature inherent in Reform Jewish identity. As Mark Bloom, one of the contributors to this issue, noted, the Principles seemed both to address and inspire the next round of “Reform Judaism’s endless quest to define itself” (Bloom 2000: 52).14
Cantors, who had no official role in crafting this document,15 nonetheless could relate to the conditions described therein. In line with a world perceived to be changing ever more rapidly, and as part of a movement that defined itself based on that change, cantors felt constant pressure to claim a collective place as the movement’s vessels of sacred sound. Yet even as the movement’s President (a rabbi) emphasized the importance of music to Reform Judaism’s twenty-first century worship initiatives (Kaplan 2003: 71), and movement publications highlighted the cantor’s “changing roles” (Schwartzman and Shochet 2000) or spoke of the emergence of a “new cantor” (Robinson 2003), cantors struggled to fulfill their self-defined charge in ways that met the movement’s expectations.16 Reform Jewish leadership increasingly supported the cantor’s status by using pluralistic phrases such as “rabbis, cantors, and educators” in their official addresses. Cantorial students and teachers, however, often saw in this support a pressure to compromise their own full sense of cantorial identity and conform to a more democratic perception of religious sound. While Reform Judaism tried to define itself, in other words, its cantors often felt the need to address their own concerns and ideas about what constituted “tradition” and “innovation” in order to preserve their own history and mission.
Maintaining a cantorial tradition while serving a “modern” (or even, in some views, postmodern) Jewish population presented important questions about the relationship of music to personal identity, particularly if those congregations represented their own distinct line of religious musical discourse. Mark Slobin’s assertion that, “the existence of the cantorate has helped anchor American Jewry by providing a highly traditional institution that could act as a shock absorber for social and cultural change” certainly reflected values instilled in cantorial training (1989: 283). Yet laypeople, rabbinic leadership, and much of the scholarly community implicitly challenged that position by bundling music into their attempts to characterize recent shifts within American Jewish identity (Cohen and Eisen 2000: 169–170), belief, and religious/ritual practice (Hoffman 1999, Ochs 2007). Reform synagogues at the turn of the twenty-first century actively engaged in well-funded national initiatives such as Synagogue 200017 and Synagogue Transformation and Renewal (STAR), which claimed grounding in social science, placed great rhetorical value on music, and openly invited cantors as important participants—but not ultimate authorities—in congregation-wide conversations about musical transformation. For cantors, these developments demonstrated the complexity of their responsibilities: remaining true to the past and to repertoire that served as their legacy; remaining true to their self-described roles as synagogue musical leaders; keeping their value as musical authorities to their congregants; and all while addressing vocabularies of prayer and music that emerged from outside their inherited ideas of Jewish tradition. The taught reality of the cantor as the musical representative of Judaism thus remained constantly vulnerable and in flux.
The cantorial school, in this view, served as a strategic site for assessing and reconsidering the meaning of musical authority. Christopher Waterman, in addressing questions of musical tradition, has noted that “the temptation to read contemporary categories into the past, especially when authoritative scholarly sources and informants do it as a matter of course, is strong” (Waterman 1990: 369, emphasis in original). Cantors, a well-constructed category within organized liberal Judaism’s religious consciousness, benefited from that temptation: both as the communal voice of “tradition,” and as recognized members of what Reform Judaism described as “the clergy team.” Yet that category needed constant reconstruction based on contemporary ideologies of Jewish sound. In this respect, cantorial training existed as one side of a dialogue: What did a cantor need to have—and what skills and repertoire did the cantor need to acquire—to remain a voice of tradition to Reform Jews? This question would resonate throughout my fieldwork, in various sites across the movement, and most intensely among the developing cantorial students themselves.
Mapping the Cantorate
Cantorial training starts with the premise of travel: to become spiritual representatives of the Jewish people, cantors must first experience a sense of Jewish geography and history. The setting of Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music therefore offers a fascinating interpretation of both the spirit and intention of George Marcus and Michael Fischer’s call for multilocale (or multi-site) ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 91). Existing primarily in two locations (at the Hebrew Union College campuses in Jerusalem and New York) the School integrates its activities through an overall organizational schema that assigns each location a role in the cantorial enculturation process. Students applied to the School with an understanding that they would spend their first year of study in Jerusalem, and then complete their training in New York. By linking these sites as intimate components of the educational process, the School of Sacred Music cultivated a dual appearance as both a small, enclosed,