midnight mass

December 26, 2013 by 1 Comment

Early yesterday morning I went to midnight mass at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus. On Monday, I noticed it right across the street from where I’m staying while I’m in New York this week (for Mechon Hadar’s Singing Communities Intensive). I’ve never been to a Catholic midnight mass, though I think I’ve gone to an Episcopalian one before, and I was curious.

Right before I arrived, I posted on Facebook that I was going to the service. I was a little nervous in doing so. I was comfortable in my decision: I think it’s perfectly fine for me to attend another religion’s services (as long as they also think it is), and my hope is to do interfaith work, which I can’t do unless I’m willing to “border cross” (a term I borrow from the lovely UU folks). But I did wonder how it would look, and, truth be told, that factor is made more complicated by the fact of my conversion. I don’t want my decision to be mistaken for nostalgia (which it couldn’t be, because Catholicism was not my tradition, and indeed was as foreign to me as Judaism when I first came to it) or ambivalence about Judaism (which it absolutely isn’t). Simply put, this was cultural tourism — which I hope I pulled off with sensitivity.

church of the holy name of jesus; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

church of the holy name of jesus; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

The service turned out to be a really powerful experience, and in sharing it with a few of my fellow seminar participants, I realized I wanted to write about it here.

It turns out that I was in no way the only Jew who went to midnight mass on Erev Christmas. A group from my seminar went to St. John the Divine for its late service. And a rabbi who was a mentor to me when I lived in D.C. commented that my post made her miss “her” church, the one she used to go to on Christmas Eve when she lived in New York. As it turns out, in an amazing coincidence, this church *is* her church. And the church itself recognized that outsiders might be in attendance: When he offered the invocation, the pastor welcomed the parishioners, as well as “our friends of other religions who have joined us tonight.”

The service was in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, reflecting the diversity of the parish. Indeed, there was a striking variety of race and socio-economic status among the attendees. And the three languages were well-integrated; none was token. Many readings and hymns were only offered in one language, with translations printed in the other two languages. The main reading, the story of the birth of Jesus from the gospel of Luke, was read verse-by-verse in the three languages. It seemed like two of the associate friars were native Spanish and Creole speakers, respectively.

The service was really moving. (My friends said the same thing about the service at St. John the Divine.) The building’s Gothic Revival architecture is strikingly dramatic, and it was decorated with lots of lights and greenery. The music was beautiful, and at the end of the service the choir sang the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.” (The one odd moment was seeing one of the friars carrying an old plastic doll supposed to represent the baby Jesus during the procession.)

I found myself watching the service through a lens informed by the seminar that I’m participating in this week. The annual program at this egalitarian yeshiva is focusing on the High Holidays; we’re studying Torah related to music and the days’ liturgies, melodies, and nusach. Christmas and Easter, I imagine, are the church’s High Holidays. These are the two times a year when it has an opportunity to reach parishioners who don’t come the rest of year. As with synagogues, there is probably enormous pressure to make the service accessible and engaging.

I especially saw this in the pastor’s homily. He talked about the angels’ injunction to the shepherds, upon announcing the birth of Jesus: “Don’t be afraid.” He addressed some of the most vulnerable members of the congregation, including queer folks and undocumented immigrants, reassuring them of G-d’s love and message to them not to be fearful.

Everyone exited the church joyfully, wishing those around them a merry Christmas. I was very happy I went. (So was my mom, who I views any way that I am Jesus-adjacent as a positive.)

Filed Under: holidays, travel Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

columns of consonants

July 28, 2013 by 3 Comments
these color-coded torah portion sheets have been my constant companions; photo by salem pearce via instagram

these color-coded torah portion sheets have been my constant companions; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

Practice reading Torah. Read Torah. Practice reading Torah. Read Torah. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat again.

This is how I’ve been spending a good deal of my time this summer, as I mentioned in a previous post. We’ve held a once-a-week summer minyan at Hebrew College on Thursday mornings, one of the weekdays on which Torah is read. And I’ve leyned (read Torah) every week there since the end of May. I’ve also read four times on Shabbat at Nehar Shalom, the community synagogue in our new neighborhood.

I’ve loved reading Torah ever since I first did so at my bat mitzvah a little more than a year ago. I was part of an adult b’nai mitzvah class, and we each read three or four verses. One of my classmates dropped out towards the end, so I read her part as well — a whopping seven verses! And I worked on those seven verses for about four months.

A few weeks ago I read for the fourth time this summer at Nehar, and I was the only reader — for a total of 30 verses. (Nehar follows a triennial cycle of Torah reading, meaning that, like many other congregations, only a third of the weekly parshah is read each week.) I learned those in under a week. Same thing yesterday: The weekday portion for parshah Eikev is unusually long — 25 verses — and I learned those in about a week, too.

I’m proud of this progress — most of which has been achieved in the past two months by just forcing myself to volunteer. Both the minyans I’ve been reading at this summer use a Google doc for sign-ups, and it’s amazing how indelible it feels to type your name in a shared, editable web document, in a field marked “aliyah 1.”

Indeed, it has been one of my goals this summer to improve my Torah reading skills. This past year I took an entire class on Cantillation, the art of the ritual chanting of Torah, and it’s a bit of a complicated process. The class focused mainly on learning the melodies associated with each trope mark, as well as the technical skills needed to be able to learn a section of Torah for ritual reading.

A printed book of the Torah in the original Hebrew — one used for studying — has vowels, as well as other symbols (called trope marks) above and below the letters that aid in pronunciation and indicate the proscribed melody. But a Torah scroll, what is used in services for the ritual reading, has none of those; it’s column after column of Hebrew consonants, sometimes without spaces between words. Oftentimes a single letter will be elongated in order to make the columns both left- and right-justified. And some of the letters also have adornments, tiny crowns that seem to sprout from their tops. It’s fair to say that all of this presents something of a challenge for the novice Torah reader.

When learning a part of Torah for ritual reading, I use Trope Trainer, which I can’t recommend enough. Depending on how the program is used, it can practically do the work for you, or be just a helpful tool. It gives the dates of each parshah, and you can open just the reading for a particular day, customized by whether you’re in Israel or the Diaspora and whether you follow the triennial or the yearly cycle. Then you can choose melody, voice, and accent. An electronic voice will sing the whole thing for you — or just a word, a phrase, or a verse. (I now only use this feature to double-check the melody of an unusual trope combination.) It identifies each trope mark, transliterates each word, and indicates the syllabic accent. It provides translation and sheet music. It indicates all k’rey, or words that are read differently than how they are spelled in the scroll. What I like most is the export feature, which creates a PDF of the reading, with or without vowels and trope marks.

statges of learning torah reading; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

stages of learning torah reading; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

So: I start by printing the reading with vowels and trope marks; then I highlight the text with various colors that correspond to the different trope mark families (so that the same melodies are the same color). I read the text to fluency and make sure I understand what it means. Then I practice singing, using the highlighted text. I usually practice about 20-30 minutes at a time, until I start making a bunch of mistakes, and then I stop and take a break. A little while later, I practice again.

More than any other skill I’ve worked to master, chanting Torah is a marathon. You just can’t cram. The words and the melody have to have a chance to make “tracks” in your brain, as one teacher explained to me. So I practice, take a break, practice, take a break.

Finally, at least a day before I am scheduled to leyn, I begin practicing from the plain, Torah-scroll-like text. I see what I remember, and I check the highlighted version if I’m not sure. I create mnemonic devices to help me remember the vowels of unusual words and the order of melodies. I practice, take a break, practice, take a break.

On the days I’ve read at school, I’ve been able to come in early and take out the Torah scroll and practice a time or two again from the scroll itself. After a few times stumbling through a reading that I thought I knew cold, I realized that the lettering of the scroll was tripping me up (a phenomenon that I hope will lessen over time, with more practice). Looking at the actual text — being able to see which letters and words in the scroll look different from the typeset — has helped enormously.

I’m particularly proud of my skill at finding my place in the scroll: I used to think that I’d never be able to find the beginning of the parshah in the sea of Hebrew letters, but I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it. This rabbi thing just might work out.

Filed Under: rabbinical school Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

a visit from the goon squad

March 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

a visit from the goon squadJennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is the first work of fiction I’ve read since June — and it’s as good as everyone has said it is. I tore through it in about a weekend, and I feel like I can’t say enough good things about it. Read it!

Parts of the book were first written as short stories for various publications (Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, etc.), and indeed each chapter could be a stand-alone tale, with minor characters in one story becoming the protagonists of the next. The title is a reference to an observation made by an aged and ailing musician, overruling objections to his idea for a tour to promote his final album: “This is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

That is expressed in this Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, about a cast of the characters wondering how they got from point A to point B. (The two parts of the book are in fact “A” and “B,” and the last album of the aforementioned musician is “A to B.”) Amazingly, even while they make, in some cases, horrifying choices, Egan is able to make these characters incredibly sympathetic and compelling. (I will note a trigger warning: There is a short scene of sexual assault, unfortunately told from the perspective of the perpetrator, which survivors may find upsetting.)

The stories center around Bennie Salazar, a washed up former musician and record executive, and his assistant, Sasha Grady. As the setting moves back and forth through time, between the 1960s and the 2020s, we also meet Sasha’s uncle Tim; Alex, a man she dates only once but who will later become one of Bennie’s employees, long after Sasha’s been fired; and Sasha’s college friends, one of whom will eventually become her husband, with whom she’ll have two kids. Then there’s Bennie’s high school friends, one of whom introduces him to Lou Kline, a music mogul who will become Bennie’s mentor; Lou’s many wives and kids; and Bennie’s first wife — and her boss and her brother, whose lives intersect via a has-been (though still young) movie star. In one of the more obscure links, the young Samburu warrior that one of Lou’s kids meets on safari in Kenya grows up to marry Bennie’s ex-wife’s boss’s daughter, who also becomes Bennie’s assistant after he fires Sasha. But the characters can’t see all of these connections, much as they are unable to see their own paths between A and B.

As I began thinking of making this next point, I almost started with: “The novel feels timeless until the last two chapters,” which take place in the 2020s. But that seems patently silly, as the stories, told in a non-linear way and from different perspectives, of necessity are grounded in very specific points in time for the reader’s understanding. I think I was responding to the jarring feeling the chapters in the future inspire. Egan is clearly doing her own connection from point A (2010, when the novel was published) to Point B (2021 and beyond, when the novel’s storyline ends). As with many of the other stories, we as readers are able to see how the characters get there (in this case, to a dystopian future), since that path is based on current events in the post-9/11 world and the security and surveillance state.

But technology predictions always make me stifle a giggle, as they’re hardly ever accurate. (Flying cars are just two years away, according to Back to the Future Part II!) Luckily, Egan’s strong writing and character development carries the day, so even as readers stumble through the completely phonetic language of her future’s quasi-text messages, we can see the significance of the academic work of that same future, where, as one character explains to another, the “ethically perfect state . . . doesn’t exist and never existed”:

Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casing, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words — “friend” and “real” and “story” and “change” — words that had been sucked of their meanings and reduced to husks.

Despite the assessment that we all go the way of these words, the novel nevertheless ends on a hopeful note. Introduced as a young naïf at the beginning of the book, at its end Alex watches a younger version of himself, also new to New York, fumble with the keys to her apartment.

The goon squad visits us all in time, but in the meantime, we live.

Filed Under: books Tagged With: , , ,

crying to the walls

December 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Note: I updated this post on 12/21/11 with a photo that better illustrates it.

On Thursday night I went with my friend Noah to see singer-songwriter David Broza at Sixth & I Synagogue. It was an awesome night, not least because, since the concert was sponsored by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and the Israeli Embassy, it was free! Noah first introduced me to Broza years ago, with the song “Crying to the Walls.”

As with most concerts at Sixth & I, Broza played in the sanctuary, on the bimah. Noah and I were in the balcony, looking down on the “stage.” I followed the lights that were coloring the wall behind Broza to the ark. Two nights ago, I had stood in front of the ark with the members of my adult b’nai mitzvah class while the rabbi explained the significance of its architecture.

david broza at sixth & i; photo courtesy of embassy of israel

And then I had a moment that made sound fade away and time slow down: I realized I was looking at a scene that perfectly expressed the confluence of the past, present, and future of Judaism. Thinking back, it seems so simple; I feel like this should have occurred to me before, at previous events. But of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic recently.

The ark at Sixth & I holds four sefer Torahs, each of which had been hand-lettered by a scribe’s quill on pieces of animal skin that were stitched together into scrolls — as they have been created for generations. The features of the ark itself — the parokhet (curtain), ner tamid (eternal flame), menorot (candelabras), and ten commandments’ tablet — all have their roots in the first temple.

An Israeli, Broza himself presumably led to the search of attendees before the concert — byzantine security measures that have come to characterize any event in the United States having to do with the modern state of Israel. And he sang that night to a crowd of diaspora American Jews in Hebrew before the Israeli ambassador addressed the crowd.

Sixth & I is an unique space: a synagogue, turned church, almost turned nightclub, turned non-membership, non-traditional, non-denominational synagogue. It’s where young Jews connect to their Judaism in often non-religious ways. (I saw Ani diFranco in the same place six weeks earlier.) Attendance at its events continues to increase even while synagogue membership is down.

The ancient, the contemporary, and the world to come, all swirled together in a mix of rainbow lights and guitar strums and stained glass. I looked at the salmon-colored walls of the building and thought, “Remember this.”

Crying to the Walls

Filed Under: D.C. Tagged With: , , , ,

the jazz baroness

June 11, 2010 by Leave a Comment

On Sunday I attended a screening of the documentary “The Jazz Baroness” at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center, the kickoff event of the Washington Jewish Music Festival.

I can’t really remember what motivated me to buy a ticket: I’m not a music person, so I generally don’t even skim the program listings for this annual event. But something must have intrigued me about this documentary.

The film was written, directed, edited, and produced by Hannah Rothschild, whose great-aunt Pannonica, known to everyone as “Nica,” had a long friendship with Thelonious Monk, from when they met in Paris in 1954 until his death (at her house in Weehawken) in 1982.

By all accounts, they were not lovers, although Monk’s son tells the filmmaker that he believes Nica to have been “in love” with his dad. Indeed, both Nica and Monk were married when they met; Nica’s husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, divorced her in 1956, at least in part because of her carrying on with New York jazz musicians.

The relationship seems to have been more one of patronage and caregiving on the part of Nica, who simply adored Monk’s music. In the film, she (voiced by the incomparable Helen Mirren) tells the story of the first time she heard it. In 1951, she stopped by a friend’s apartment in New York on the way to the airport to catch a flight to Mexico, where she was living at the time with de Koenigswarter and her children. He played for her “‘Round Midnight,” and she was completely captivated. She’d never heard anything like it, and she made her friend play the record over and over again. She missed her flight back to Mexico, and shortly thereafter, she moved to New York.

For his part, Monk was a musical genius but suffered from fairly severe mental health issues (undiagnosed in his lifetime, but later speculated to be manic despression, bipolar disorder, and/or schizophrenia). Several friends and his long-time manager also testified to his use of marijuana and heroin. Another friend explained that Nica, together with Monk’s wife, Nellie, shouldered the burden of caring for Monk, as his behavior was too much for one person to manage. Nica even took the rap for Monk when they were arrested for marijuana possession on the way to a gig in Delaware.

Overall, I liked the film. I certainly learned a lot, and I *loved* that Monk’s music played all throughout the film. You really can’t go wrong with his bebop. A few small items distracted me: Hannah Rothschild’s voice sounds remarkably like Helen Mirren’s, so at times during voiceovers it was hard to tell whose experience was being narrated. And a few of the interviewees were only identified during their first appearance in the film, leaving me to wonder in later scenes on what authority they were speaking. (Compounding this problem is that many of the Rothchilds interviewed were old, wrinkly, and therefore practically indistinguishable, women.)

My other complaint concerned the filmmaker’s attempt to show parallels between Nica’s and Monk’s lives. I don’t think that her search was in vain, but when she likened Monk’s upbringing — the son of a sharecropper in rural North Carolina — to Nica’s childhood — a member of one of Europe’s most prominent dynasties — she strained my credulity.

Mostly, though, I very much enjoyed the story of this “beautiful friendship.”

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