“‘Sing a new song to the Divine:’ Refresh the melody to the Divine, always.” - Radak commentary on Psalms 33:3, found in The Torah of Music by Joey Weisenberg.
Rabbi Sarah Bracha Gershuny, our guest musician and teacher for tonight’s Azamra Kabbalat Shabbat service, will lead us in three tunes we have not previously used at Azamra. At rehearsal for this service, Miles Cohen (one of our service leaders) said, “I’m sure I’ve never heard these three new tunes, but I feel like I know them!”
I recently had the opposite experience. I stumbled on an old recording on YouTube of the Sim Shalom tune that I sing in the traditional service almost every single week. The recording featured Cantor Jacob Goldstein, the composer of the tune and the father of Cantor Marty Goldstein, HEA’s long-time musical leader. Hearing the tune sung by the composer completely renewed my excitement about this melody. His creative twirls and accents delighted me and made me feel like I’d never really heard the tune before, even though I’d sung it dozens of times.
I’ve now worked at HEA for just over one year, and the biggest musical question in my brain every day is, “How should I balance musical newness with the power and comfort of tradition?” We live in an era of rapid composition and recording of stirring new Jewish melodies, and I feel compelled to share some of those melodies with HEA. At the same time, I have the voice of my teacher Joey Weisenberg in my head, reminding me that to “Sing a new song to the Divine” does not necessitate singing a brand new melody. Refreshing our relationship with an old melody is also a way of singing a new song.
I created a YouTube playlist of some of my favorite new and old tunes for Shabbat and Holidays. To listen to the playlist, click HERE. I hope that this playlist will give you an opportunity to become familiar with some of the newer tunes, and I also hope these recordings will help refresh your relationship with older melodies. I want to acknowledge that the tunes that feel “old” to me may not be familiar to you at all - we come from diverse cultural backgrounds, and I don’t want to alienate folks by assuming familiarity with the tunes I grew up with. I hope this playlist will help us continue to build shared familiarity.
This is not the only playlist I’ve been working on. To help HEA’s youth get Jewish music in their kishkes, I recently created Spotify playlists of the Jewish music we use in the HEA Preschool and in HEArt Religious School. Please feel free to send me songs that you think I should add to any of these lists!
Now sit back, relax, put in your earbuds, or set up your favorite speakers, and enjoy this tiny fraction of the wealth of Jewish music accessible on the internet. Maybe your listening time can feel like a mini-shmita - a sabbatical where you can let your brain rest.
