Music in the Air

June 13, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

There is music in the air at Congregation Jewish Community North. Singing and chanting, the Cantor's voice sending our prayers upward on gossamer wings, the sound of the guitar punctuating our song and lending its rhythmic effect. When it all works, the music causes us to catch our collective breath, which is just another way of saying, it inspires us, for that is the elemental meaning of the word inspire, "to inhale."

We could hardly imagine CJCN without music. When you are part of the synagogue, the melodies become part of you. You would be amazed at how many you have committed to memory, not by studying them, but in the old-fashioned way, by experiencing them until you know them. This intimacy with tunes is one familiarity that does not breed contempt. Just the opposite, it is so strong a pull that rabbis, cantors, and congregations sometimes resist any change to what the community calls our "traditional" music.

How far back does the tradition go? Scholars believe some melodies are ancient enough to have been sung when our people were lamenting the loss of Jerusalem as they sat beside the waters of Babylon. But there are only a handful of these at best. Most of the cherished music which Jews today call "traditional" is only a matter of our childhood and early adult memories. So the most important aspect of any synagogue melody or song is that it must feel "comfortable" -- compatible with enough of our collective shared memories that it brings us some of the joy of youth, sparks some of the cheer of good fellowship, fuels the spiritual flame of the moment, and fires our religious imagination.

If you could stand in the ancient Temple, though, you would be dismayed by its music. Harmony, which is so pleasing to our ear, would have been considered "noise" by the choirs of the First Temple and even the Second Temple. What they thought important was to hear the sound of every word. Their "harmony," when they used any at all, consisted of singers using different octaves but maintaining the exact tune. To them, the beauty of one voice complemented the beauty of one God. By the time of the Second Temple, they also used some of Greek techniques, so that they often divided the choir in two, with one section chanting a line and the next section chanting the next line, back and forth. If some Levite singer had been appointed to make noises like, "tsh, tsh, tsh, t-t-t, tsh, tsh, tsh," the overall effect would sound to us like lilting rap music.

Add to this the one element which took their breath away, the ancient tizmoret, the Temple "orchestra." In this week's portion, we hear the command to create the first formal instruments, the trumpets:

Adonai commanded Moses: Have two silver trumpets made ... of hammered work. They shall serve you to summon the community and to set the [tribes] in motion. When both are blown in tekiyah blasts, the whole community shall assemble before you at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and if only one is blown, the chieftains ... shall assemble before you. But when you sound blasts of teru'ah, the [tribes] encamped on the east shall move forward; and when you sound teru'ah blasts a second time, those encamped on the south shall move forward.

We do not know what the tekiyah or the teru'ah blast sounded like in ancient times. The new translation of the Torah calls the tekiyah a "long blast" and the teru'ah a "short blast." But the authors of the Torah may have had much more in mind. If today we command a trumpeter to sound the "charge" or to play "taps," we are calling for whole melodies. It may be that the tekiyah and teru'ah were also originally whole melodies.

The trumpets were a formal instrument, unlike the ram's horn or shofar that every shepherd might carry to raise the alarm when foxes or lions came too close to the sheepfold. We can see a picture of the silver trumpets on the Arch of Titus which celebrated the Roman victory over the Jews and showed the parade of captured objects from the Temple, including the menorah and the two trumpets, each of which was four or five feet in length.

More of the Temple's orchestra is listed for us in Psalm 150: "Praise God with blasts of the horn ... with harp and lyre. / Praise God with timbrel and dance ... with lute and pipe. / Praise God with resounding cymbals, loud-clashing cymbals. / Let all that breathes praise Adonai. Hallelujah."

The harp was pretty much what a harp is today. It was played by plucking and strumming. The lyre was like a small harp, but it was played with a plectrum, a kind of pick. The timbrel was a tambourine with a stretched parchment drumhead and metal plates that vibrated. And under it all, even when no other instrument was being used, the cymbals kept the rhythm and punctuated the melodies of the Temple.

The Talmud tells us that toward the end of the Temple period, the choir and orchestra used to finish their task at the Temple and make their way directly to the synagogue, where they would perform again for the congregation. The congregation did not sing, except for some very few responses and the adding of an occasional "Amen" or "Hallelujah." The prohibition against using instruments in the synagogue did not begin immediately after the destruction of the Temple, it was a later custom, after congregational singing came into fashion.

So the sound of today's synagogue -- the music of guitars and pianos and organs; and the singing of cantors and choirs and congregation -- is no accident. It is a continuation of a long tradition that began when we came out of Egypt remembering the orchestra, singers, and dancers who performed in its temples and its celebrations.

You might say we express our freedom through music. But you might better say that music reminds us how free we are. God commanded the trumpets for practical purposes. We turned them to music to celebrate God, to make our prayers beautiful and enjoyable. The universe is filled with the music that God created: from the lowly cicada to the most magnificent songbird, from the rustling of leaves in the trees to the clap of thunder in the storm. All this is evidence that God loves music. And our long tradition of music in the synagogue is the evidence that God's chosen people loves music, too. Next time you are singing here, with the music of the congregation all around you, try to imagine our sound joining the sound of congregations throughout the world in a chorus that joins the sounds of all nature. Suddenly you will understand that wonderful phrase that ends Psalm 150: Kol ha-neshamah tihallel Yah, "Let all that breathes praise Adonai. Hallelujah." And let us say: Amen.