Making Meaning
Personal Statement
Change is hard but being changed expands our lives. Music has the power to change us without our even realizing. By hearing a song of tradition, we are transported to childhood. When learning a new song with the community, we form a bond through experiencing the discomfort and then the elation of accomplishment together. As a Cantor, I help enable moments of this type of transformation, moments that add meaning to our lives.
​
Susan was a student in our Everything You Wanted to Know about Judaism but Were Afraid to Ask three-day seminar class. During a class break, I asked her what had brought her into our class. She told me she was raised Catholic but was currently dating someone who was Jewish but not practicing. He was not interested in telling her what Judaism was about, but she wanted to know more. After a few more classes she started working towards conversion - much to her boyfriend’s disappointment. As part of the process, she began regularly attending Shabbat worship. This attendance coincided with our introduction of monthly Rock Shabbat services. She was seeing first-hand the diversity and variety of worship experiences and the way in which Temple Rodeph Torah was introducing these experiences to the community.
​
One month, Susan was finally able to drag her boyfriend, Bob, to a Rock Shabbat Service. Bob had grown up in a “Conservadox” style community. He had gone to Yeshiva and knew a lot about Judaism but became disillusioned and walked away after High School. It was more than 40 years since he had been to synagogue but, to please Susan, he came to Rock Shabbat. To his surprise, he loved it! Two years later, Bob sponsored a Rock Shabbat in order to propose to Susan from the bima during the service. A year after that, Bob became the President of TRT and Susan the President of our Sisterhood.
​
Rock Shabbat started as an experiment and a dream. Our Temple President returned from the URJ Scheidt Seminar for Presidential Leadership Training and told me about the worship he had experienced there. He said, “I was prepared to hate it, with guitar and that ‘spiritual’ feel, but I loved it and I want our community to experience something like that here.” And so, we started the conversation together with the rabbi and the worship committee--a conversation that continues to this day.
We are constantly trying to ask: why do we do what we do? Should we do it that way? What can we do differently? What could worship look like? How do we invite our community to look at prayer, music, and God differently? We are always trying to find new pathways to connect people with God, to connect people with prayer, to connect people with each other; all to create a meaning-filled community.
Rock Shabbat inspired us to re-imagine other innovative worship experiences and to strive to make creative worship a core value to enhance methods of engagement. Our creative worship now includes several special services. “Eat, Pray, Learn” is an integrated dinner, worship and study experience. “Roll your Own Shabbat” challenges our congregants to a choose-your-own-adventure style worship where they tell us why they are here, what is in their lives they want to thank God for, what help they would ask of God, and what their prayers are for the world.
“Sacred Texting” is an anonymous conversation-via-text-messaging to allow for difficult conversations to be woven into our prayers. We’ve covered topics from cheshbon haNefesh and the inauguration of President Trump to the balance between #MeToo and teshuva for the sinners as well as what to do with their enduring creations, such as the music of accused Jewish composers. Each creative worship experience gives us an opportunity to teach about Judaism and prayer, to model different prayer modes and to let people explore what works for them while encouraging connection with each other.
These experiments, which started with the springboard of Rock Shabbat, led to one of my greatest joys: Temple Rodeph Torah has become a community of singers! When I first started at TRT, everything was done without accompaniment. Whether classical, contemporary or choir we sang a capella. I tried to teach new songs, I invited and encouraged people to sing, to clap, to learn something. I would introduce and teach melodies week after week with minimal success.
Now, through Rock Shabbat visiting artists, we introduce new music that my community openly embraces. I continue to be surprised, inspired and energized by their willingness to try new things. When I teach, they respond. When I start singing something they’ve never heard before, they still try it. They have come to expect creativity and positive challenge throughout temple life.
As we’ve allowed for and encouraged more flexibility and creativity in worship, we came to realize that these experiments led to more meaningful connections. Because of this, I began the conversation to re-evaluate our B’nai Mitzvah goals. We created an additional program to encourage our students to personalize their B’nai Mitzvah with creative projects that resulted in students performing choreographed dances, performing with their middle school jazz band, and even creating a Minecraft Mishkan that was shown and explored using our Visual T’filah screens. These personalized projects are created by exploring a student’s Torah portion and the things they love in their life. This exploration helps to bridge Torah with their life to make the B’nai Mitzvah process personally relevant and meaningful.
Face to face in times of struggle or celebrating with the whole community for a simcha, these moments are the ones people anticipate when they become a member of a temple community. My hope and my prayer, is that my work, be it worship experiments, teaching, having a conversation or singing will enable people to have meaningful moments added to their life beyond the anticipated markers in the Jewish calendar. I believe a relationship with God and with Jewish community is value added to one’s life and I believe creating and maintaining such relationships are hard to do without practice. I seek to be part of a community dedicated to creating connections with God, with prayer, with the Jewish people. I hope always to be pushed and supported to find new and creative ways to enable these connections.
I became a cantor because I believe in music as a tool for connection. At its core, my mission is to enable connections: connections in a communal setting so that the members of a community will strengthen their connection with God, with those around them and with Am Yisrael, our people, historically and around the world. Additionally, my mission is to enhance connections on a person-to-person level by striving to help comfort people in pain and help them know they do not have to carry that pain alone. Helping people find compassion for themselves and others, recognizing that we are ONLY human, but also that we must always strive to BE human (mentschlich).
Temple Rodeph Torah has been an amazing incubator of creativity. It has fostered an ideal environment for clergy partnership, and for working with a Board and engaged volunteers. I am now at a point in my life where I am excited about working even more in-depth with my community. Thus, I am seeking a full-time cantorial position. I am ready to share my ideas of connection with more people. I look forward to new challenges and new inspiration as I hope for partnerships that lead to all of us being and doing better. Together, we will create worship that successfully connects us to God, prayer and each other. We will design educational experiences that stay with us for a lifetime and we will develop programming and teachings that inspire our community’s passions and ideals. Together we will help people make more meaning in their lives.