Dear Family of Friends,
There is a beautiful passage in the traditional morning liturgy, one of several in which we imagine ourselves singing with the choir of ministering angels who forever intone “holy, holy, holy” before the throne of glory: “Each of them is beloved, each of them is pure, each of them is mighty and each of them perform with awe and reverence the will of God.” The angels “lovingly invite one another to sanctify their Creator,” as they proclaim the sanctification “as one.”
It is the practice of my teacher Rabbi Ebn Leader to look up from his prayer book at this point in the service, and take care to look at each of the people in the community with whom he is praying, as he says the words “each of them is beloved, each of them is pure… and they lovingly invite one another….” “It’s fairly easy to proclaim beautiful generalities about inviting each other to sing with the angels,” he explains. “But I find it becomes a spiritual practice on a much deeper level when I contemplate the individuals around me – whatever relationship I might have with each person, whatever I might think of them, and to genuinely invite them to sing with me, and to feel invited by them.”
Our tradition teaches that each one of us is unique, a whole world created in the image of God. The paradox is that this individuality only shows up – only becomes fully relevant – in community with other unique individuals. The more distinct we are, the richer the melody we make together. The 19th century Lithuanian scholar Yechiel Michel Epstein (Aruch HaShulchan) wrote that the beauty of the Talmud is precisely in its polyphony of disagreeing voices, which, like a song, “is beautiful when all of its voices differ one from another.”
In the liturgy, when the individual angels sing “holy, holy, holy,” they do so “as one.” This, too, when done right, can become a deep spiritual practice – as those of us who attended Sam Tygiel’s workshop last Shabbat surely experienced. During the High Holidays, Sam shared with us this wisdom from the Hasidic masters: “in story after story,” he told us, “the prayers only ascend when the last and the least of the community joins in.” There is a magic that happens when our many voices come together “as one,” and the spell is as real as science. Researchers have found that when we sing together, our biological stress levels drop, and our brains produce neurotransmitters that increase our sense of wellbeing and connection with each other.
Of course, if you’ve ever sung with other people, you already knew that.
I was delighted (but not surprised) to find in the results of the Adult Education Survey that there is quite a bit of interest in communal Jewish signing in our communuty. And so, I’m glad to say that we will gather to sing at least once a month on Shabbat afternoons, following kiddush. Our next singing gathering will be, quite appropriately, on Shabbat Shira – the Sabbath of Song: the day we read about the crossing of the Reed Sea and the song that Israelites sang with Moses and Miriam when they reached the other side.
I hope you will join us as we invite each other, as individuals, to join together as one in song.
~Reb Josh
