Sacred music from Sepharad
Yosef Goldman and Yoni Battat’s Kedmah in concert in Teaneck
Jews live all over the world. This is not news.
Nor is it news that Jews pick up influences from the cultures in which we live — Jewish food in Italy, say, isn’t the same as Jewish food in Morocco.
The Jewish music with which most of us are most familiar has been influenced by the world around us, and the world from which most of our families immigrated (or escaped) — by jazz, by Western classical music, by the sounds of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
It’s also been influenced by the sounds of Sepharad and the Mizrach, the Jews who were expelled from Spain and moved east to Arab lands, and the Jews who never left those lands.
The mainly Ashkenazi American Jewish community — which is Ashkenormative, to use a word that some people find compellingly descriptive and others find pedantically irritating — increasingly is exposed to Sephardi and Mizrachi music, and is increasingly moved by it.
On Thursday, June 12, Yosef Goldman and Yoni Avi Battat will lead their ensemble, Kedmah, in a concert at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck; Rabbi Goldman will stay in Teaneck that Shabbat, as Beth Sholom’s musician in residence. (See box.)
Both Rabbi Goldman and Mr. Battat have one parent with a Mizrachi background and one from Ashkenaz; Rabbi Goldman’s not only got smicha but is a cantor as well. They’re both used to combining identities to produce art.
“Kedmah is both a musical ensemble and an educational initiative that lifts up the spiritual and cultural heritage of Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews,” Rabbi Goldman said. “Yoni Battat and I co-founded Kedmah.” They released an album, Simu Lev, on Rising Song records, “and we have been performing and teaching at synagogues, day schools, universities, and cultural arts institutions around the country.”
Rabbi Goldman has connections to many parts of the Jewish world, and all of them work together to strengthen each other. He has been a pulpit rabbi with a strong interest in music and now a full-time musician with a strong interest in the pastoral and teaching aspects of the work of a pulpit rabbi. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s cantorial school before he moved over to its rabbinical school and was ordained there in 2013. He’s also got strong ties to the Orthodox world in which he grew up, and he taught students about Sephardi and Mizrachi piyyutim — poetry that is part of the liturgy and meant to be sung — at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan. Most recently, he and his wife, Rabbi Annie Lewis, shared the bimah at Shaare Torah in Gaithersburg, Maryland; now they and their two children live in Brooklyn, and she’s the director of recruitment and admission and assistant dean at JTS.
“I am a senior advisor to Hadar’s Rising Song Institute,” Rabbi Goldman said; Rising Song’s website says that it “cultivates Jewish spiritual life through song. It is a meeting place and incubator for creative musicians and prayer leaders who hope to reinvent the future of music as a communal Jewish spiritual practice.”
Put all of these pieces together, and you get a rabbi with a vision of bringing Jews closer through music, and the practical tools used to work toward that goal.
Rabbi Goldman talks about his work with piyyutim, which “is really exciting to explore,” he said. “Not just the repertoire, but also the history of Jews from the Middle East, and how to read these sacred poems. The piyyutim and their performance embody so many layers of experience and emotion and spirit and history.
“Piyyutim are sacred Jewish poetry, written to be sung,” he said. “That can include liturgical poems that are included in synagogue services. We can find many of them in our siddur, like Adom Olam and Lecha Dodi. They were composed and added to over generations; they were originally written as fluid additions to the siddur, to introduce different parts of the service and to bring different feelings to the arc of the service. Many of them have found a permanent place in the siddur or the machzor. And there are also piyyutim that are not in our liturgy. They may be zmirot, sung at the Shabbat table, or they might be for specific moments in the life cycle or the yearly cycle.
“Many of them include references or allusions or quotes from other Jewish texts, be it Tanach verses or midrashic ideas or even poetic expressions of halacha, like the Shabbat song that talks about the laws of Shabbat. And then, particularly in the Sephardic tradition, there is a lot of poetry that is rooted in kabbalah. Lecha Dodi is an example of that.
“I’ve been studying piyyutim for 15, 20 years now. Many of my teachers are in Israel; there has been a revolution in singing piyyutim from both the Sephardi and Mizrachi communities there. At the same time, Mizrachi music in Israel has taken its place in the mainstream, and there are more people who are singing and playing it.”
Rabbi Goldman talked about maquam, the musical system that underlies Arabic music — the word is related to the Hebrew word “makom,” which means place; HaMakom, the place, is one of the names of God — and “includes scales, melodic tendencies, and motifs. Each maquam is its own mode and can evoke a different range of emotions.
“These are the building blocks not only of all Arabic music but of the music of Jews from Arab lands. That includes the songs and prayers and Torah chanting. Many of these modes are microtonal, which means that they are sung, but we cannot find them on a piano or in the frets of a guitar, but we can find them on fretless instruments, like the oud, or violins.
“It is both a challenge and a calling to bring this music to the broader American Jewish community.”
This might make Rabbi Goldman’s work sound purely academic. It is not. The music is visceral, moving, deeply joyous.
“We have two audiences,” he said. “There is the mainstream community of the Ashkenazi majority, and we also give expression to and center the voices and talents of Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews. This is an interesting moment. There has been an increase in the percent of American Jews who are Sephardic or Mizrachi — more and more are coming from Israel and Latin America, and some of them are French Moroccan — and more and more communities are exploring how to integrate the music.
“Some of it sounds familiar to American Ashkenazi Jews, and some of it sounds very foreign. This is a wonderful opportunity to expand people’s experience with Jewish music and Jewish spiritual expression.
“The aim is to bring people an authentic experience,” he said.
The Thursday night Kedmah performance “is a concert, but our concerts are also participatory,” Rabbi Goldman said. “Yoni and I often teach a refrain to a song and have the audience sing with us. We also weave in our stories; as hybrids, half Ashkenazi, half Sephardi; we are both on a journey to reclaim and integrate that part of our heritage through music, and also to reclaim the context of these piyyutim, so that people can really feel their power.”
On Shabbat at Beth Sholom, “I will teach about embodying Jewish prayer. Part of that also will be exploring piyyutim and the Shabbat liturgy. I’ll lead tefillah and sing some zmirot.
“Prayer is cooking with gas. There is something transformative that happens in real time, in real space, in ourselves, in the community. We can feel the presence of the divine. We certainly are honoring the pathways of our ancestors, but our collective memory becomes real, in the present, and we enter into that pathway of song, and the story becomes real for us.
“So there is an opening for the prayer to actively change us,” Rabbi Goldman said.
Who: Kedmah
What: Will be in concert
When: On Thursday, June 12, at 8:15 p.m.
Where: At Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck
Sponsored by: Beth Sholom, Bergen B’Yachad, Netivot Shalom, the Jewish Center of Teaneck, and Ron Prywes in memory of Ilana Sasson.
How much: $36
To register: Go towww.cbsteaneck.org and click on events
AND
Who: Rabbi Yosef Goldman
What: Will be musician in residence for Shabbat June 13-14
Where: At Congregation Beth Sholom
To learn more: Go towww.cbsteaneck.org and click on events
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