Jewish Theological Seminary Downsizes Its Cantorial School
by David P. Goldman
The Tablet (www.tabletmag.com) reported yesterday:
As part of a major restructuring effort, the Jewish Theological Seminary announced last week that its cantorial school, traditionally separate from the rabbinical school, will be integrated into the rabbinical school. Henry Rosenblum, the well-regarded dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School, will be laid off. The move provoked an outcry from the seminary’s cantorial students, who fear that the shift will mean an end to the automony that they and their school previously enjoyed.
The shift comes at a delicate time for the institution and for the Conservative movement, for which it serves as spiritual incubator and intellectual home. The school is reportedly millions of dollars in debt. At the same time, the once-vibrant movement has seen a steady shrinking of its membership rolls and a parallel diminution in what sets it apart from Judaism’s Reform movement.
Cantorial preparation, the school thinks, simply isn’t as important as it used to be. According to Marissa Brostoff’s Feb. 11 note in The Tablet:
These tensions come to the fore in the institution of the cantorate. In the immediate postwar years, most Reform and Conservative congregations boasted a charismatic, operatic cantor, who sometimes even eclipsed the rabbi. Reform Judaism began a move away from this model toward more participatory services in the 1960s and ’70s. The Conservative movement has been caught in something of a bind: while it has more recently embraced the shift in an effort to lure a younger audience, doing so has served to further blur the line that divided it from the Reform movement.
Traditional chazzanut, or Jewish cantorial art, plays a crucial role in Orthodox liturgy, particularly in the Eastern European (Ashkenazic) tradition. It is perfectly acceptable to pray without the leadership of a cantor, or chazzan, but a skilled cantor adds a dimension to prayer. Conservative congregations are important more popular music into liturgy: Israeli folk music, pseudo-Hasidic melodies, and material derived from Hollywood. This suits the “lightly affiliated” Jews who make up the bulk of the membership at Conservative synagogues. To contemporary ears, traditional synagogue chant sounds jarring and anachronistic. “Participatory services” are about participating, not about praying. Having thrown out the bathwater, the Conservative movement now is throwing out the baby.
It is a dreadful loss, in my opinion.
How is it possible to repeat the same prayers every day and every Sabbath, and yet hear them in a fresh way? Yet that is what the rabbinical authorities require. The great 11th-century Torah commentator Rashi derives this injunction from Exodus 19:1; in in that chapter the Israelites gather below Mt. Sinai and hear the voice of God declare the Ten Commandments. The verse reads, “ In the third month of the children of Israel’s departure from Egypt, on this day they arrived in the desert of Sinai.”
Rashi asks, “On the New Moon (Mechilta, Shab. 86b). It could have said only, ‘on that day.’ What is the meaning of ‘on this day’? That the words of the Torah shall be new to you, as if they were given just today.”
Judaism above all else is the recreation of the moment of revelation at Sinai in all of time, such that time itself dissolves into a single eternal moment. The reading of the Torah in its annual cycle and the study of Torah, which the rabbis called the most important of all obligations, is sacramental rather than scholarly: all Israel continues to stand before God at Sinai.
In practice, to hear the Torah each time as if it were given just today, and to pray with all the devotion and concentration that the prayers require, is quite difficult. That is why chazzanut is of such signal importance: the cantor’s melismatic improvisation during the repetition of the Eighteen Benedictions, the central prayer of Judaism, does in fact make the prayers new.
There is a great deal to be said about how Ashkenazic chant so beautifully enhances the Hebrew liturgy, which I hope to have time to say before long. In the meantime, suffice it to say that the downsizing of the cantorial program at JTS is bad news for Judaism.
