Shalom everyone welcome to the Light Lab Podcast! My name is Eliana Light. I am thrilled to be joined once again by our regular podcast co hosts Cantor Ellen Dreskin.
A pleasure to be here!
And as always, and Rabbi Josh Warshawsky.
Hello, hello!
So great to be back with the two of you and my friends. Do we have a very special episode, because we have very special guest! He is a pioneer, one of the pioneers of Jewish song leading and liturgical folk, one half of Kol B'seder, co founder of Hava Nashira, the Jewish song leader conference that changed my life and perhaps the lives of the other people on this call, and many, many others. Cantor Emeritus of Temple Sinai in Sharon, Massachusetts, writer of many melodies that you have probably sung at some point in your life. And if not, you'll get to sing at least one of them today. Welcome Cantor Jeff Klepper!
You talking about me?
Yeah, that's you!
Great, great to be here.
Thank you so much for joining us. So excited to have you on the podcast today. And as usual, we like to start with a question just to hear what's going on in each other's lives. And the question for today is, where are you feeling abundance? Right? We often ask very simple yes or no is here. No. Where are you feeling abundance in your life? Ellen, why don't you start?
Well, you know, as we're recording this, it is the week before Passover. And so I'm been reflecting on narrowness and wide spaces in my life, and where the narrow places now. And so when I saw this question for today, what's popping up for me in my life in general, the question is, where am I not feeling abundance? For better or worse, I think that comes from the challenges that the world is facing, that our worlds are facing these days, and an acknowledgement of enormous gratitude, and privilege and abundance. And so it's, it's lovely, and it's troubling at the same time.
Thank you. Yeah. When we think of the beautiful and the goodness, and what we're grateful for, and what we have kind of in there is the lining of its opposite. Where are those things not present? Important to bring up. It's the world in which we find ourselves. Josh, how about you, were you feeling abundance, or not in your life?
I think it's important to bring it up. And it's important to be able to hold on to both of those pieces at the same time that there are ways to notice the lack of abundance and to find space to hold on to our own abundance too. And I'm grateful to be feeling an abundance of friendship these days, I was we were just talking before we started the podcast last week, I was in Sharon, Massachusetts. And I got to stay with Paul, my whole family with me, and we say with a very dear friend who's the Rabbi of the community there. And then I got to play music with some very dear friends who I got to travel around the country and do this work with and I'm just feeling grateful to be doing what I'm doing with people that I love, and getting to see it and interact with people through it in a really meaningful and powerful and relational way. So I'm feeling a lot of abundance in that regard, and feeling grateful for it.
Beautiful, what an absolute blessing. Jeff, how about you? Where's abundance in your life?
I am grateful every day for the things I have. And I feel very lucky. And when I think about what I have, I also think about how many people don't have the things that that we have and it is as Ellen reminds us it's important to remember that we hold things in that balance and but for the grace of God as the expression goes.
Beautiful, I love that we're bringing this up so much of this journey in our T'fillah has been how do we hold to things that are true in a challenging world? When I wrote this question out the outline my initial immediate response was pollen. The answer is pollen. You know I'm looking out my window and I see the trees kind of abundance of pollen like it's dripping down these little like I don't know how else to describe them like mustard yellow. They're about I know I'm showing my fingers you can see there's, but yay big and they're everywhere. Right now in North Carolina, they're on the ground, they're hanging from the trees it actually looking at reminds me of when I went to New Orleans after Mardi Gras and the trees were just like dripping in beads. This is that but with this little these little pollen things and they're in the air and when it rains it's bright, greenish yellow on the ground and it's on the car and it's, so often, it's a scourge to me, like we call it the Pollening here in Durham. It's it's just a lot and everybody's sneezing. And there were years where I couldn't go outside like the first COVID year, when the only thing to do was to walk around outdoors, I couldn't go outdoors. Now, you know, thanks to some marvels of modern medicine in a really intense nasal irrigation system I have, I can go outside. But right, it's easy to think of this as a negative thing. But then yesterday, I was walking around in downtown North Carolina, and I came upon the House of Bert. As in Burt's Bees, their headquarters is here in Durham, and I knew they were there, but I was wandering around the American Tobacco campus. And I saw this little, it's not a hut, I guess, like this little home and they took, there was a guy, Bert and he lived in Maine. And they brought his house here, just like they fully took his house and they put it here. And now surrounded by all of this, like brick and industrial stuff is the home of Bert and like you can look inside and see how simply he lived. And you can go to the other side on the wall and roll a door aside and see the bees, just like building.
An abundance of bees!
An abundance of bees! Just there and I thought wow, you know, even though pollen season is wacky, and are all of these trees local to this area, we don't know. Gosh, it's good that we have it because we need these trees and we need these bees and the bees are in trouble. So we need to support them and help them so that we can have an abundance of food and an abundance of flowers and an abundance of life and I'll pay the price of some sneezes for the next month to be able to make that happen. We have gone through an abundance of the Amidah together listeners for a very long time and just so you know where we are here's a little recap we have gone three steps back in three steps forward we have explored what a blessing is Baruch atah yud hey vav hey, what is yud hey vav hey? You'll have to listen to that episode to will not find out because it's an ongoing conversation. We called upon our ancestors, we explored powers, holiness, and then the petitionary blessings, knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing time and space, in gathering, justice, yay, boo heretics, yay righteous people, rebuilding Jerusalem, what a kingdom of David is, and redemption, we asking God to hear our prayers, accept our prayers and then we move into the gratitude section with gratitude, the priestly blessing, and in our last episode, we explored the morning blessing for peace, Sim Shalom. And now we have the evening, the afternoon and evening blessing for peace, Shalom Rav. So Ellen, why don't you kick off our little text study here and share the Hebrew and translation you have for Shalom Rav.
I'd be happy to! The Hebrew I think is the same as it would be in any Siddur just about, but I'm the translation that I'm bringing is a little bit different today a Siddur I haven't brought to the table before this is Siddur Romemu Adonai. It's from a local New York City congregation who on the move, their spiritual leader and their founder is Rabbi David Ingber. And so the translation that we'll be doing in a moment will be from that siddur. In Hebrew, we read shalom rav al yisrael amcha tasim l'olam ki atah hu melech adon l'chol hashalom b'chol et u'vchol sha'ah bishlomecha. Baruch atah adonai hamevarech et amcha yisrael bashalom. And the interpretive translation here is, May there be a wide deep peace for this G?d wrestling people, a forever peace, for you are the guide and the way to every kind of peace. And it is good in Your eyes to bless us in all moments in all places with Your peace. Blessed are You breath of life who blesses the god wrestling people and all people everywhere with peace. I'd love to hear the response to that translation which I had a real response to that caused me to bring it this morning and and some commentary from everybody else.
That's beautiful is that Jill Hammer's translation? Rabbi Jill Hammer?
I'm gonna have to look that one up.
She did, she did translations at least for the most recent version of the Romemu siddur. So that might be her and I love - Yes, I love how it divides and follows the Hebrew that Rav is an ask and that tasim l'olam is an ask those separate. So in the Siddur I'm looking at. Siddur Sim Shalom, it says grant true and lasting peace, taking those and kind of putting them together. But the idea of Rav as being wide and deep, Rav, something to do with having a lot of something, an abundance of something, and tasim l'olam, may it be put or placed or be eternally as we talk about a lot olam, being now in modern Hebrew meaning world. kind of abundance or a forever in space, and in Biblical Hebrew being infinity or a forever in time.
I go back and forth with the the request translation. Tasim l'olam, if I take it non poetically, is just your you are constantly showering Shalom upon us. So we spoke in our last episode about what that means, the inclusion of everything completion, a wholeness, the whole ball of wax as it were. So it's very interesting to me that that's constantly I did that that's constantly coming at us. So I'm still reflecting that.
I find that really interesting also, and but I'm getting that actually from b'chol et u'vchol sha'ah, right, that at every moment and every time we're getting peace to me, the tests seem like alarm feels like a placement of peace now that just lasts forever, right? That feels different from a peace that needs to be reactualized every moment and it every time. So I think there's sort of this interesting juxtaposition happening in the language there between the foreverness of like a peace that's just lasting, and a peacethat needs work. And so I think there there might be a give and take on how we actualize that peace through the give and take. And so I think there's something really, really questionable going on there with those two things. I'm also noticing that the translations that I'm seeing in the Siddur, as I'm looking at with this, the Sim Shalom and the Lev Shalem are both are translating Leolam as to the Earth, or all who dwell on earth, as opposed to as forever which I think, L'olam, which should probably be translated for thinking literally, it's tasim, peace, for forever, as opposed to for the world. But I guess it could be either those ways that we're reading now is for forever, but I'm here seeing in all these places just for those who dwell on earth. So I wondering about that, too.
I think it's also important to mention, we're talking about peace. I guess that would be the object of the prayer. But the subject of the prayer is who is the peace for? And I've noticed that there are variations in different prayer books where as the original just says amcha yisrael, people Israel, but there are translations that that ask for peace for everyone, which I think is a beautiful idea as well.
It's interesting here because particularly in this chatima, the way, and it is Jill Hammer's, translation. Thank you Eliana, the translation of this chatima that takes that phrase v'al kol yoshvei teivel, and the inhabitants of, of all the lands, that we have heard added to Oseh shalom in recent times, in a lot of congregations, al kol yisrael v'al kol yoshvei teivel. And the fact that the Siddur chose to do that with a chatima of Shalom Rav is another reason that I brought it to the table.
I'm also wondering about the word Adon. And thinking about what it means to be a master of the peace. Well, you know, when I hear the word I don't, I'm taken to two other places. One is to El Adon, which is a particular prayer that we say on Shabbat morning, a God who is master of all these different things in creation. And the second is to Adon Olam, right, master of the world who was created all these things from the beginning. So it's somebody who's that it seems that a master is someone who really understands the thing. And here it says Adon L'chol Hashalom, which makes me think that the peace is complicated, right? There's a lot of facets and aspects to peace and it takes a master to really try and understand the ways of peace, darchei hashalom. Which also takes me back to Torah right, v'chol netivoteha shalom, all of its pathways are peace. But again, lots of different pathways, lots of ways to get to peace, and it takes someone who really understands it to be someone who's going to actually put that into practice.
And both Sim Shalom and Shalom Rav, I noticed that the there two kind of I don't know if it's two kinds of peace that you mentioned, Josh, there's Shalom. And then there's Bishlomecha. And so I wonder when we're saying to Adonai, what's the difference between give us peace and then, also having some relationship to specifically your kind of peace? And I'm sitting here thinking now about all of this being around us all the time. And to be an Adon, to be a master of it, perhaps is in something that going back to our very beginning of our conversation, they being able to hold the Rav-ness of it all, as even when it seems very challenging and contradictory. And so maybe there's a, a mastery of being able to hold and bring blessing to and manipulate, I don't know, it's all going through my head now.
I want to bring up Josh, because what you said about Master, I've never thought about it that way we so think of God as Lord or God as master, as the subjects being us, right? In that metaphoric relationship. But the idea of being a master of something like a master woodworker, or a master of karate, like having command of these tools, and being able to utilize them in the world, that's very powerful. So often, in our songs, and in other places, especially later in Tanakh, we see that God as Lord or God as Master is described not as using those powers for destruction or for war, but always towards peace, always towards justice for the orphan, and the widow and the stranger, which is a reminder to us, perhaps, of what it would take for us to be Adon Hashalom, or to be receivers and transmitters of that peace. If indeed, we think of it as an abundant flow, what is stopping that flow? I've been thinking about this a lot as we head towards Pesach. You know, folks, it'll be way past that when you listen to this, but the holidays keep coming back around. And it's part of our story all the time, no matter when the holiday is. And for me, Pesach is a reminder that human beings created oppressive systems and human beings can bring them down, always. That we actually have enough, in our world, enough food and enough water and enough air and enough peace. And the reason not everybody has what they need is not the fault of something else. It's it's up to us. We are the restrictors, right, the narrowness, the mitzrayim, we restrict that flow. And what does it mean? How can we recognize the abundance the ruggedness of peace, that justice for one group does not mean justice being taken away from another, but a world in which we all have what we need?
That reminds me of a beautiful song by Tom Paxton, the singer songwriter called Peace Will Come. It's not a Jewish song per se, but it's almost a companion piece almost a little Midrash on Shalom Rav because the the song says peace will come, but it has to start with me. Let it begin with me.
Thank you for bringing up that song. Jeff, so beautiful, and I think it connects to the T'fillah in that our good friend My People's Prayer Book pointed out that the phrase Shalom Rav comes from the Psalms. Psalm 119, verse 165, gosh, it is a long Psalm. Perhaps there's a reason we don't sing that one as part of Pseukei Dezimra. But Holy Moses it as long. Shalom rav l’ohavei toratecha v’ein lamo michshol, which Sefaria translates it as Those who love Your teaching enjoy well-being; they encounter no adversity. So it's really about the individual. And shalom, as we discussed in our last episode on Sim Shalom, has so many different meanings, wholeness, well-being, kind of taking it from this personal place of peace in me well being in me, and using that phrase to mean peace for everyone. Because sometimes, if we're just focused on personal well being, we can forget about the world. Ihink that's the reason the loving kindness meditation came into existence. And I'll look it up because I don't remember the name of the teacher who developed it, but we'll put it in the show notes who said, wow, if we're really just meditating on our own well being and our own centeredness, it can become really easy to be self centered. And to think all I need to do is work on myself. All I need to do is peace. And something I really love about the Jewish tradition is it says, work on yourself, yes, find Shalom in your heart and gratitude and love. Yes, but you also need to go out into the world and change it. It's not just about your inner peace. It has to also be about outer peace.
For me, it opens up this idea of doing the Amidah, the entire Amidah, privately. And it's our own personal audience with God, perhaps it can be described in that way. And yet, our liturgy remains in the, in the plural. That even when I'm in my deepest place with God, in the midst of our liturgy, I am constantly reminded that I am appearing as part of a of the human race or whatever group that I feel that I'm the most part of them.
And that piece is really Shalom is the simplest blessing. And as the rabbis said, All things are contained within shalom, we'll put that in the show notes as well. In My People's Prayer Book, it pointed out in the commentary that in Sim Shalom, something that's easy to notice is that Sim Shalom is much longer, because we're asking for so many other things, Tovah u'vracha, chein v'chesed v'rachamim, compassion and loving kindness and all of these things. And it says in the morning, we asked for more. We're getting ready for the day, we're seeing what's possible. We have it in our hearts, we ask for all of these things. And then by the end of the day, and I think, given what's happened, what's happening in our world, you know, I would say we're recording this right after the school shooting in Nashville. And it would be wonderful to think listener that by the time you hear this, that was the last terrible tragedy that happened in our country. But I can't promise that. None of us can promise that that. We've been through the day. And we've seen the way that people are treating each other and treating our planet and we get to the end of the day and we say just peace. Just Shalom. I only have it in me to ask for one thing and it's actually the most important thing. All we really are asking for is shalom.
It's reminiscent in the evening also of Hashkiveinu. Of that we asked to, to lie down in peace. And then I wouldn't it says then Hashkiveinu and reawaken, awaken tomorrow morning to life renewed, has that energy. I think of what you were saying about Sim Shalom before of okay, I'm going to wake up tomorrow, it's going to be a new world, there's going to be a new opportunity. I'm going to put everything in my toolkit. And off I go again today.
Your point Eliana about Shalom Rav and Sim Shalom being at the end of the Amidah, it is important to remember that, you know, we're kind of saving the best for last, in other words, food, shelter, you know, those are, of course, the necessities. But, But the big one, the big one, and perhaps I hate to say the unattainable one, in some respects is, is saved for last.
Yeah. And it's saved for last and a lot of different to tefillot. It's saved for last in the Kaddish. And it saved for last in Birkat. Yeah, and the grace after meals, as kind of containing all of the rest, like the finale number has little bits and pieces of all of the music and dance that we've seen before. This is this is the main one. And you know, when I do Oseh shalom in particular with kids, I'll ask them has it worked yet? You know, and we'll we'll talk about what it means. We pray only for things that are possible, right? Meaning the abundance of peace is there, the opportunity for peace is there, and yet, we need a reminder of it. And we call upon that which is greater than ourselves to support us, because we know we can't do it alone. And what's what's coming to my heart now is how grateful I am for the Siddur that we're not left to figure out the language each on our own. But when I sing, Shalom Rav or any T'fillah of peace, I can imagine my actual ancestors and my spiritual ancestors, praying with me and singing along with me and breathing this T'fillah and this blessing into the world.
beautifully put.
And with that, we'll be right back.
Welcome back, everyone. We are so so grateful to have Cantor Jeff Klepper here with us. And Jeff, I wanted to just ask you some questions about your liturgical prayerful musical T'fillah journey, as we like to do on this podcast. Can you start with your upbringing? What was your relationship with T'fillah when you were growing up?
Well, to start to start way back, I'm from New York City, from Manhattan, which tells you immediately, you know that my childhood was spent on concrete streets with a few trees, but not enough trees, a few open spaces, but not enough open spaces, and a lot of smoke and noise and dirt. It's city, gritty city, which I think created a certain atmosphere in, in my world, it's city life is different than country life. It's different than suburban life. You know, they talk about kids being street smart, and all that. And I grew up in a time in the 1960s, which fewer and fewer of our listeners, remember. So the old, the old folks will certainly remember it was a very different time. I know that's a cliche. But it certainly was, it was a time when you know, kids went off to school with a lunchbox, and nobody worried about whether they were going to be hurt or harmed. The you know, the worst thing that might happen would be a fistfight in the schoolyard, that kind of thing, and sure that stuff kind of happened. But my background in terms of Jewish life was really very simple. And I, I have to say honestly, kind of minimal. My family belonged to a Reform synagogue in Manhattan, a very famous synagogue actually called the Steven Wise Free Synagogue, it was called free because there were no dues. And because if you wanted to sit in the front row, you didn't have to pay for the privilege. Although as a kid, I, I didn't sit in the front row, I sat at the top of the balcony of the Stephen Wise free synagogue, and the services were what is euphemistically called Classical Reform. Which, which, as a kid, I, I interpreted as boring. Services held very little, you know, delight or enthusiasm for me. I mean, let's be honest, you know, when you're a kid, and you're wearing shoes that hurt your feet, and you know, a tie that's strangling your neck. And you know, even as I say that today, kids come to shul in a T shirt and jeans. But back then you had to put on a suit. Like I said, times were, were different, you had to put on your little bar mitzvah suit. And your your tie and such, what I mean to say is, there wasn't a lot Jewishly to to captivate me. And I think that that was the thing that propelled me on the journey that that we're going to talk about.
I was gonna say, as a follow up, what captivated you then? Was there a place a time a person that showed you that it could be different?
Well, I'm glad we're going in that direction. I have to say, just to add to to the thing I said a moment ago, at home we had again, compared to today, you might call it minimalist, but there was a very strong Jewish identity. Very strong Jewish feeling at home, we lit candles, we sang songs, especially Hanukkah, and especially Pesach. We had Pesach Seders where, you know, we would just spend all night singing the old fashioned songs, of course, because it was the 1960s, but it didn't fill me with a very strong identity of who I was as a Jew. But not captivating in the sense of, you know, going to a Bruce Springsteen concert, not that kind of captivating. But that happened in my teenage years when I went to summer camp. My first summer at a Union for Reform Judaism camp in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, called the Eisner Camp, and I tell the story a lot because it is so important. I went when I was I think 14 and comes the first Friday night. And you all know what I'm about to say. And suddenly out of the cabins come a hundreds of Jewish people of all ages, mostly kids, all dressed in white. I had never seen such a thing before, and the song leaders are playing guitars, walking in the you know, down the slope of the hill. It's almost a poetic, almost like a scene from a movie and singing Mah yafeh hayom shabbat shalom. I was transported. And that was the moment that I think changed my life because I said, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Well, I love that image of of you experiencing for the first time all the children, all the children and adults and everybody coming down to Shabbat dressed on white singing together. I'm wondering if if you realize that the time you know, in the time in America and the time in Jewish American practice, also, did you realize that we were in the midst of this sort of T'fillah shift of direction of where the music was going and how we were going to connect it to the liturgy? What was that like?
Well, it happened incrementally. Step one, which was not unique to me. You come home from camp, you come home from a peak experience. And the first time you go back to your synagogue, what happens? You realize, uh oh, we are not at Camp anymore. And the Nirvana that I experienced at camp was not to be found in my local synagogue at this point, by the way, we had moved from New York City to Albany, New York. So I was attending a synagogue, Reform synagogue and in the Albany area, and that distinction was was immediate. And as much as I loved camp, when I returned to my home synagogue, and had to sit with my hands folded, and my mouth shut at the synagogue services, which people don't understand. Today, kids, younger people who grew up since the 70s, don't understand that in services in the 1960s, we are talking about the late 60s, you listened, you sat still, you didn't move, you didn't clap, if you were to sing it might be a couple of times in a service. So I think these the changes today should not be taken for granted. But so that's part one of my answer to Josh's question. And part two is, so what are we going to do about this problem? And it took it took a few years to figure it out. And I have to then credit, our beloved departed Debbie Friedman. Because Debbie, who was my song leading teacher at camp at the NIFTY camp in Warwick, New York, she was the first you know, I'm reminded of the Baal Shem Tov story, I guess that's appropriate to this podcast. You know, we're the Baal Shem Tov, and some children are lost in the woods. And, and he just takes a child by the hand, and that child takes the next kid by the hand, and they all hold hands. And together, they find a way out of the forest. And that's what we had to do. We had to hold each other's hand. And it just so happened that music was the key, you know, music was what unlocked that, that log jam, to mix my metaphors. And it was really Debbie, who showed us that changing the music would change the atmosphere of synagogues. And that was an experiment and, and I, I tried it in Albany, New York. In other words, I got together with my my youth group, pals. And we, we changed the service and we just started on our own, we held our own services. In the synagogue, we just took a classroom, and the kids had their own services to sing the music that we loved. And my partner, my singing partner, Dan Freelander did the same thing in Worcester, Massachusetts. And, and a number of other song leaders did that all across the country. So now to get to the, I guess, step three, of what you're asking, Josh, and I have to be I have to be frank here. We did not invent what we created. Sounds a little strange. We we took the tools we took the the sounds we took the the zeitgeist of that time, and and re formed it almost like sculpture like clay into what was needed at the time for us. In other words, we took the great, great music of the 1960s, which really started with Pete Seeger. And what was Pete Seeger all about? Pete Seeger said that music is is what you create. It's an art form. But it doesn't change until people sing together. And when people sing together, magic happens. There's nothing, you know groundbreaking about that it's been for centuries for millennia. Magic happens when people sing together. And that was, you can quote me on that, by the way. And that was what Debbie taught us. And it just from that point on, like, like a stone rolling down a hill, what a terrible metaphor. Like an avalanche there, that's a better it really was an avalanche, which which changed the culture of Jewish life, and certainly of liturgy.
Jeff, I'm, I'm so happy to be having this to be part of this conversation with you today. And I want to give you kavod, give you credit for also taking it one step further, was going from song leader to Cantor and to take that folk song culture of the 60s and bring it back into, let's say, formal religion as it were outside of the campfire outside of camp to say, I'm going to bring it right to the doorstep of the institutions and say that as a, as a liturgical, religious leader, when let's let's start melding those worlds. And I know that I'll say it to all of our listeners, I came into cantorial school, only one year after you were ordained. You were ordained, you said in 1980. Right. And I applied in 1981, and really felt already that you had begun to pave the way for guitar players like me to say, our liturgy can be elevated by bringing the folk song culture of building community back into our prayer book and back into our sanctuaries. And I wonder at the time, did you know, did you know what you were creating? I guess that follows on on Josh's question.
Did I know what I was creating? Ah no, absolutely not. And I'm drawn back I don't I'm getting all these images in my in my mind as we talk and there's another great Baal Shem Tov story. I had a professor in college who taught us the the stories of the Chasidim by the Baal Shem Tov, and they're so beautiful and poignant. And and then one of them he says, someone asked the Baal Shem Tov, why does he daven? You know, move, shuckle moving back and forth, and forward and backwards with so so much intensity? And and the answer was, he said, I'm a drowning man, I'm drowning in the water all the time. And the only way to stay afloat is to move, to not drown. And that's sometimes the way we feel in the world that if we don't keep kicking, with with great intensity, we're going to be swept under the tide. No, at no point, did I, or I think any of my friends, pull back and see the big picture and understand what we were doing. That would have to be later on when I was working with people like Dan Freelander, who helped us craft the meaning the intellectual meaning, the historical meaning, of what we were doing to put this into perspective. But in 1969 1970, we were in the midst of it, and not to extrapolate too deeply. But it was it was a struggle. And when I say struggle, there was a sense of opposition of the generations that we were the younger generation. And the first part of that struggle was simply fighting for a place that the table and trying to create community for ourselves for younger people, because we were not allowed to eat at the adults table. Back then, you know, we had to have our own services in a classroom or the library, or on the youth group retreats and conclaves that we had, so we we created our own culture by ourselves with a little help from some younger rabbis. I -It's sad to say not not much help from Cantors, there were a few Cantors who supported us ah, Ray Smallover, who created the first rock and roll service and others. There were certainly rabbis of all generations who, who understood what we were doing. But I think this was a young, it was the young generation of the baby boomers, which I know sounds kind of funny, because now we're all old. And this was 50 years ago. But it was a campaign. And so so the first step was simply to, to work on creating new tunes, new rituals, to establish ourselves as, as a as a new style, a counterculture Jewish community. And then and then it took on from there, took off from there, sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors, again.
Can also take on from there. It's incredible to think that you were may be invited by the times at hand, to write your own melodies, for people to write their own melodies, because they didn't exist for all of the pieces of the liturgy that you wanted to do. How did that start for you going from song leading to writing? And what were the musical influences you had at the time?
Well, that's an important question. And thank you for asking. And I realize now I didn't even answer Ellen's question about how I became a cantor, that I can cover in a couple of seconds. I originally wanted to be a rabbi. And I was very much caught up in the social movements of the 1960s, beginning with civil rights. And then in the late 60s, ending the war in Vietnam. There was only one little problem in my becoming a rabbi, I dropped out of college, and you can't go to Hebrew Union College without a bachelor's degree. Luckily, for me, number one, I was so wrapped up in the music at that time, during my college years, that I started to entertain the idea of becoming a cantor. Number two, Hebrew Union College did not offer a master's degree to Cantor's only a bachelor's degree, meaning that I could go to cantorial school, without completing college. And then number three is perhaps it's the most personal of all these reasons. But as I was composing new songs, and realizing that it was going to take time for these songs to sort of filter through the air, even if they even did, I mean, I'd never even fantasize that, that my simple little songs would be sung in, in synagogues, and in the greater Jewish community. But I very quickly realized that I needed to have a certain authenticity in terms of my own life and my own work. And I realized that I needed to be and I, I realize even as I say this, it won't apply to everybody. You don't have to be a Rabbi or Cantor to do this work. But I felt that I that, that I Jeff needed to be a rabbi or a cantor in order to have a certain kind of, you know, heft, a certain kind of import in terms of what I was doing. So that led me to cantorial school. Here's the thing I want to say about the 60s, and especially the music, it was a very exciting time. Certainly, it was a very fraught time. You had riots, you had a war that tore families apart, you had young soldiers dying in Vietnam, you had young people in the South and North being beaten for no good reason, because they were trying to make this country a fair and just country. So there was a lot of pain at the time. But the music was, in a sense, the redemption from that pain. So I talked about the war in Vietnam in the late 60s, you had rallies in Washington, DC of hundreds of thousands of people. And Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary got up and sang the songs that brought some solace. Some these were prayers, you know, when Pete Seeger sang, if you love your Uncle Sam, bring them home, bring them home, it was a kind of a chant. When John Lennon sang all we are saying is give peace a chance, these were prayers. So what we were doing was taking the energy of that music and that culture and simply bringing it into our Jewish world. Which brings us to Eliana, as you said before the music that we were writing. So a song like Shalom Rav has absolutely influenced by the music of the time I'm, I'm not afraid to admit it. I mean, you could you could deconstruct the tune of Sholom Rav and you can see echoes in in James Taylor, Peter Paul and Mary, Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was not that we invented something new. It was that we reformulated it for a new purpose that of of strengthening the Jewish community.
And we'll explore a little bit more about Shalom Rav in particular, when we come back.
Welcome back, everyone. It's really beautiful, I think to have that context of liturgical music that takes shape and is influenced by the music that is around us in our society, because all the melodies we're going to talk about today, and all of the other liturgical melodies that really we've ever covered on this podcast, the ones that are originated here in the States or in other places in the diaspora. I don't think they would exist if it weren't for that shift that Jeff, you so beautifully outlined for us and were yourself a part of, so let's share some of our favorite melodies for Shalom Rav. Ellen, why don't you go first?
At this time, I'm particularly enjoying Elana Arian's Shalom Rav, and I know that, you know, Ilana is definitely a for, for me, and I think for Jeff, possibly, as well as a real symbol of the next generation being second generation song leader, folk singer, composer, in contemporary Jewish music. And I like her version because she makes use of one or two lines of English, that are a particularly it's not a literal, but an interpretive translation. And as our liturgy, as we expand the idea that liturgy is poetry, both in the Hebrew and can be in the English as well. I like hers because it begins with I'll just mention the English, and we can put the whole link in the show notes of course, the English is - Make us a house for all people, gather us in hope for all people, surround us in peace for all people, in wholeness and in love. And the rest of the text is the full Hebrew text Shalom Rav. And I highly recommend that everybody listen to that one.
For me, it's it's hard to tear away sometimes the words from a melody that feels iconic to my childhood. So for me, I know we're gonna talk about this more a little, I like, when I think Shalom Rav, I only think of Jeff's melody, but I took some time to think a little more about some other melodies that I'd heard and I and I came upon Craig Taubman's melody, which I hadn't heard in a really long time, but it's just such a sweet lullaby. And I don't know if we'll be able to share a clip but it's like Shalom Rav al yisrael amcha v'al kol yoshvei tevel. Just very sweet and lovely. Just feels like a nice thing to be singing right before you go to sleep.
I'm thinking about some more recent melodies from our friends and colleagues, Abby Strauss has a beautiful Shalom Rav, Lucy Greenbaum has a beautiful Shalom Rav, and I want to play a clip of Sue Horowitz's Shalom Rav. She's such an incredible folk singer and writer and I really liked again, we're thinking of the English that comes into these liturgical pieces as its own Midrash its own commentary on the T'fillah, and a prayer that the songwriter is singing for us, and letting us into that world. Part of the English in her version says: A gentle peace will find its way to us as we gather here to pray, really bringing us into the moment and saying it as if it is a fact a peace will find us. And then she sings Shalom Rav again and says, may we carry it inside of us as we go along our way. This idea we talked about on the podcast a lot that T'fillah is meant to change us in some part and that we can leave a little different than where we came and take what happened in T'fillah out to the world with us.
So, without further ado, Jeff, you are on this particular episode of the podcast because as Josh said, your version of Shalom Rav is iconic and really is connected to this piece of text in such a full and true and unbreakable way. And I'd love to hear you tell us a little bit about the writing of Shalom Rav, where did this particular melody for this particular piece of liturgy come from you?
Oh my. Where do I begin? Well, let me comment on the the comments that that you made about other tunes for Shalom Rav, and it occurs to me if you are a song composer, you're going to bring your best composition to Shalom Rav or Oseh shalom, you know what I'm saying? For Hamotzi, you don't need to bring your best tune to write a Hamotzi, you know or something like that, but but peace. My gosh, you really want to bring your A game to the idea of peace. So maybe that's why we have such beautiful melodies for Shalam Rav and Oseh Shalom. But thinking back to 1973, I can sort of 73, 74 I'll paint two pictures of for you which are maybe three pictures for you, which describe the creation of Shalom Rab. So number one is that summer camp, and Dan Freelander, who is in our Rabbi Daniel H. Freelander and I were counselors at the Eisner camp. And late at night, when the campers go to sleep, the counselors have to stay up according to a schedule. And we are called the Shomrim, the Guardians. And we have to we have to guard what does a guardian do you guard you protect the the welfare of the kids and emergencies at night and whatnot. So when you're in an in a camp office at midnight, on a summer's evening, you know, the crickets are cricketing and you're just sitting there by the telephone waiting for an emergency to happen. It can be very boring at times. So Dan, and I would come to the the office for our midnight Shomrim work. And I would bring my guitar. And we would create little tunes and Dan would have a prayer book and he would look up prayers. And I distinctly remember Dan, because he was the Hebrew guy. I was not the Hebrew guy. I was the guitar guy. Everybody did their special thing. I played the guitar. Dan was the Hebrew guy. He was also the the vocal guy, he had the beautiful voice. So a lot of the lines that became melodies were really his lines as he improvised to the Hebrew. In other words, so the picture I'm painting is sort of Dan, sitting there with a Union Prayer Book. In case you've never seen the Union Prayer Book, because it has been retired since 1974 75. The Union Prayer Book was the size of a little paperback. And it had all the prayers mostly in English. But certainly the the Hebrew liturgy of the important liturgical pieces were in there and Dan would take the book and literally flip the pages as if he was skimming through the book. And he would look for interesting Hebrew passages, not English, because English songs even though there were a few at the time was not really a happening thing until Abbie Friedman in the 1980s, but his finger on this particular evening just happened to stop at Sholom Rav, and he said here's a really nice piece about peace, p-i-e-c-e about p-e-a-c-e, and Dan's Hebrew was much better than mine, because he was able to translate the prayers. You know, if you're going to write a song in Hebrew, it's really a nice thing to know what the meaning of the words are that you're setting that didn't always happen back in the day. So that's the picture of camp. Then we come home from camp. And it's the autumn of 1973. If my memory serves me, right, and we are now in my apartment in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dan and I would meet because Dan also lived in Boston, we were both in between our academic years, I was a college dropout. And Dan was doing the kind of a gap year between college and and rabbinic school. So we would gather once or twice a week in my apartment, and we would tape record the songs that we were working on on a cassette tape. And I still have the cassette tape that says Shalom Rav on the cassette.
Wow.
And the cassette has stops and starts I think we even have a clip.
Let's listen to it. Let's listen to a little of that.
I mean, I just have to say it's so incredible. When you first sent me these clips, I listened to it in the airport. And I really got misty eyed, like, there was a time when this melody for Shalom Rav did not exist. And you and Dan, were sitting writing melodies, like the rest of us write melodies who did not write Shalom Rav, but you know, just imagining the two of you in this kind of creative peripheral pursuit. I don't know. It's, it's making me emotional.
It, well, thank you for that thought It - It is a magical kind of, you know, no one knows how we create, how artists create. It's a spark, it's inspiration. It's the result of of certainly a lot of practice and hard work. But when you're searching for that one note or that one chord, until you find it, it can be nerve racking, you know, because it doesn't sound quite right. Leonard Bernstein used to talk about that he called it the inevitability of music, that great music has to have that. That one special note that one special chord, when you hear it, it sounds amazing. But what we can't see is the the effort that went into creating it. So the third picture that I'll paint is the first time that we sang Shalom Rav. And I remember that scene very clearly in my mind, because it was a winter retreat. So it must have been in very early 1974. And we were in what what used to be called NEFTY, N-E-F-T-Y, the New England Federation of Temple Youth. And we were probably in a song session, or maybe it was before an evening service. And Dan said, hey, everybody, we have a new melody to teach you. And he passed out song sheets. And here are the words. Let's go over them, Shalom rav al yisrael amcha, and we taught the tune. And people sang it immediately. Within minutes were singing, it was as if the kids were hungry, as thirsty, and we were handing out water. And they just drank it up and sang it with such enthusiasm. It was really, it was an emotional time. It was as if we had kind of cracked the code, you might say. And I know that we were simply following what Debbie Friedman was doing. And I don't want to minimize what anyone else was doing. But at the time, it was mostly Debbie, who was creating incredible music. And this was our turn to do the same. But, but we knew, and I don't want to be, I don't want to bring this down in the level. But we knew that we had a hit. Even when and I say that with finger quotes.
I mean -
We knew that.
I was going to ask you how, you know took off really immediately. How did that feel?
Well, we were very lucky. And this is what I want to say anytime we talk about about this time. We were very lucky to have certain things happen. Certainly in the writing of the tunes, we were blessed with inspiration. But at the time, Dan Freelander worked for NFTY. So we were able through I don't know, if it was what we call in Hebrew, protectzia, you know, kind of being able to, to get a stage pass kind of thing. We were able to have the song and a few other songs we were writing at the time of put out on record albums called Songs NFTY Sings. So within a very short time, we had kids, and I say mostly kids, camp kids, youth group kids, singing our tunes, we were just really lucky in that respect. And then it kind of took off.
I'm so so grateful that it did. And at the end of the episode, friends will play that recording to kind of lead us out from the 1974 Songs NFTY Sings album. As we wind our episode down to a close, Jeff, I was wondering if you could share, perhaps a blessing with us. Just anything that's coming to your mind based on our conversation today, to bless us here in this virtual room, but also, anyone who might be listening to this podcast?
Well, as I look at your faces, because the people listening to this wonderful podcast can't see the faces, they can only hear the voices, we'll have to do something about that. But that's okay. I'm looking at at three wonderful creators of of Jewish music yourselves, three incredibly inspirational teachers. And I think the blessing is what a world we have created within this Jewish community. Let's be honest, we're talking about a slice of the Jewish community. This is the North American, you might say non Orthodox Jewish community, but because we are non orthodox does not mean we are any less serious in the work we do, in the commitment we do. So to arrive at this shehecheyanu moment in our lives, even b'chol zot, even with all the troubles in the world, I think it is just so wonderful that we have come to this time and so many of you, you three, and so many others who are part of this work is just so profound.
Wow. Wow. Wow, thank you so much for bringing that blessing, that feeling of Rav, of abundance, of music and of T'fillah, it all, it all comes back. May we have that, that Rav, that, that abundance that came from folk traditions from camp and grew to include and go through all of us. So thank you so much, Jeff, for being with us today. And thank you so much, Ellen and Josh, as always what a blessing to be with you.
Amen.
Great to have been part of this conversation.
And thank you friends so much for listening. Our editor is Christy Dodge, Thank you Christy. Our show notes are done by Yaffa Englander, thank you so much Yaffa. Find us on socials, join our Facebook group, take a deep breath, and sing along or listen to Shalom Rav. We hope to see you very soon.