Traditional traditions
This post is dedicated in memory of my grandfather, Rabbi Dr. A. Stanley Dreyfus z”l, who died last week. As I gradually return to blogging, I’m also going to write more serious posts in his memory, but I’m not ready to do that yet. My grandfather’s funeral included musical contributions from a choir composed of cantors who had served at Union Temple while he was there and/or had been his students at HUC-JIR, and it was a deeply moving tribute. There is no doubt in my mind that he would disagree vocally and vehemently with most of this post (yet would still be proud of his grandson) if he could read it. I only wish he were still alive so that we could be having this argument in person. So if you write strongly worded comments arguing with this post, even though you won’t be able to do it as eloquently and passionately as my grandfather could, you too will be honoring his memory.
Last fortnight, Reb Yudel posted an article about tensions facing cantors today, and I said I’d write a longer response later. So here it is.
The problem with the article, as I see it, is that even though it appears to present two views/values in tension, it presents them within a single frame, and accepts this frame (promoted by the cantorial profession) uncritically. The frame goes something like this: the ideal form of Jewish congregational prayer includes cantorial music, in a cantorial style, led by cantors. If all of us were wise and all of us were learned in Torah, then all of us would prefer this style of prayer. But because the present generation is so removed from Judaism and Jewish tradition, they prefer different styles (God have pity on their souls - they don’t know any better). And therefore, out of self-preservation, it’s sometimes necessary to adapt. But this adaptation is a necessary evil, it’s a concession to harsh reality, it’s bedi’avad, it’s kiruv for the tinokot shenishbu, it’s eit la’asot lashem, it’s “engag[ing] more unaffiliated Jews”, it’s marketing to get “more people in the door”. So the tension described in the article is between how much you stand up for the ideals and how much you adapt to our less-than-ideal world.
This frame is reinforced by the quote from the sole (anonymous) non-cantor quoted in the article, who says (regarding Friday Nite Live) “I just love that service. I don’t know any Hebrew, I don’t know the prayers, but I love the music.”
But this frame simply isn’t accurate. There are Jewishly educated and Jewishly uneducated people who prefer a cantorial style in their prayer, and there are Jewishly educated and Jewishly uneducated people who prefer a non-cantorial style in their prayer. And I’m not just saying that the way I would say that there are educated and uneducated Reform Jews and educated and uneducated Orthodox Jews (which is 100% true, but everyone knows which way the correlation goes). In the case at hand, the preferences cut perpendicular to denominational lines, and there isn’t even a conventional-wisdom stereotype (let alone more solid data) about which preference is correlated with more education. I don’t know whether there’s a correlation one way or the other, but the article presents no evidence that there is, beyond cantors’ assertions.
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