The Troubles with Cantors

The Trouble With Cantors

Rabbi Jonathan H. Gerard

Two quick disclosures. I was raised in an observant Reform family on the north shore of Long Island by parents who both sang in the choir of a synagogue they helped create. They cared a lot about the music in the service and passed that value on to me. Secondly, I confess to the belief that the music, not the sermon, determines the quality of a worship experience—even though I also look forward to the learning experience of a drash.

I suppose I didn’t pay much attention, as a kid, to what was going on up on the bima because I was quite startled one Shabbat by my parents who, upon returning home from services one morning in the 1950s, complained to each other about the behavior of the rabbi while the cantor was singing. He wasn’t an invested cantor; he was an Israeli for whom the prospect of singing on the High Holidays in front of a congregation of wealthy American Jews made him so anxious that he inevitably and punctually succumbed to a rhinovirus every September. (Eventually, he found a path to health by becoming a stockbroker like half his congregation.) Anyway, I’ll never forget the oddness of my parents’ complaint that the rabbi would “undress” while the cantor sang. By this I understood that he loosened his tie, pushed the cuffs of his robe up above his wrists, and perhaps even loosened a button or two on that robe. But it was primarily the facial gestures that gave away his attitude towards poor struggling Natan.

I carried this sympathy for cantors with me to HUC in New York and actually had an opportunity to manifest it during my senior year. It was a small school in which all activity took place on two floors of a small building near Lincoln Center. Except for lunch. In the basement was a dark den of a lounge with huge white pillars breaking up the sight lines across the room. The cantorial and rabbinical students—none of whom spoke with each other upstairs—sat every day eating lunch at tables on opposite sides of the lounge acting as if the other group did not exist.

Fourth and fifth year students at HUC read the Torah and delivered a student sermon Mondays and Thursdays at the daily chapel service. My senior year that task fell to me during tazria/metzora.After the reading I rolled up our little Torah and set it aside. I looked out at the congregation of students and faculty and perhaps Dr. Steinberg, paused, smiled, and, pointing in their direction, said, “You know, we have lepers right here at HUC—it’s the cantors!” I’ll never forget the reaction of my beloved rabbi, Eugene Borowitz, who laughed so hard I thought he might fall off his pew.

We hear the occasional lament about how poorly rabbis and cantors get along “in the field,” I said. “But how can we expect any improvement when we don’t even talk to each other here, as students?!” Spontaneously, as soon as the aleinu concluded, Danny Freelander and Jeff Klepper rushed downstairs to the lounge and pushed all the lunch tables to the center of the room, where they remained for the rest of the spring term.

My first pulpit—in Brownsville, Texas—came with a lay cantor—a gentile songleader, actually, who arrived Friday evenings with his piano playing wife on his Harley. They were terrific. They knew nothing about Judaism and nothing about Jewish music so they sang everything I gave them pretty much exactly as I asked them to. For three years I lamented not having a professionally trained cantor while virtually every other rabbi in America would have envied me, if they even knew who I was, or where Brownsville was.

It’s a big problem that I can’t sing. Maybe that’s one reason I so admire cantors.

My next two pulpits had the same “blessing”—song leaders who knew so little about Jewish music that they were happy to try to fulfill my every liturgically musical fantasy without any opinion of their own.

In my last pulpit before retiring I again inherited gentile musicians. An organist and three soloists who sang in a choir loft up and behind the bima. A rear view mirror from a bicycle, strategically affixed, was meant to keep the choir and me in synch. After six months of missed cues and frustration I retired the 80 year old organist and his entourage and brought two of the singers down to the congregational level from where they now led the singing. Then fortune intervened. A Catholic woman who sang with her Jewish husband at the Amato Opera in New York came to see me about conversion. She loved the music so much that she completed her conversion, learned Hebrew, sang every Friday evening with the gentile soloist, and eventually took charge of all the liturgical music—even learning to chant Torah b’sotto voce while I translated into English like I belonged at the UN. Until she focused more on me than on the music, all was good. But that’s another story.

A more troubling cantor-incident came around the same time. As vice-president of DVARR I organized a meeting in which we invited some cantors from our region to come join us in dialogue. The cantors who participated sang a pretty sad song. It was clear that they were not happy with how they were treated by some rabbis. Then, as president of DVARR I became a member of the CCAR Executive Board. At one of our meetings the agenda listed a major program with two members of the ACC. It turned out that I was not the only person out here concerned about rabbinical/cantorial relations.

For two hours we rabbis listened to one story after another from cantors held in high esteem by their peers—but not by their rabbis—stories of rudeness, humiliation, and degradation. For example, the president of the ACC told us about a cantor who took a job at a congregation that had two lecterns on the bima—equally spaced on either side of the ark. When he came to sing on his second Friday evening he found that the rabbi had moved his lectern a few inches back. Each Friday night after that he subsequently discovered that the lectern was moved further back until eventually he found himself singing almost up against the front wall of the pulpit.

At the end of the give and take session that was all give and no take the cantors left. Someone relieved two hours of oppressive tension in the room by saying “Who do those cantors think they are?” “We’re in charge of the service,” another responded Many laughed. And then we went on to the next topic on the agenda.

What leads me, now, to put these words to print is a happy experience I had in my own “neighborhood.” A cantor at a large nearby Reform synagogue, who had served happily and for many years with several different rabbis, was suddenly in a very unhappy, even disturbing relationship with a new rabbi. This cantor had significant support in the congregation and quite a number of members left—eventually forming a new congregation. The rabbi got raises; the cantor was asked to work half time. The cantor left. The new congregation then asked this person, whom they loved, to become their spiritual leader. A shiddach was made.

I had been friends with this cantor for a decade and a half and went to the new congregation to see what it was like, how my friend was doing. I should not have been surprised. The cantor, having served several rabbis over the course of a career, had assimilated the best ideas and professional style and leadership skills from each of them to create a service that was, for me, more spiritual and more satisfying than services at any of the other eight synagogues in our corner of the golah. The congregation was warm and welcoming. The sermon was informative and funny. The music was lead by a congregational group, “The Wandering Jews.” The large room, in a local private school, was filled. The oneg was delicious. The cantor is happy, not least because of much well deserved positive feedback. In six months the congregation has grown to 85 families with 55 children in the religious school.

That some rabbis sometimes mistreat our cantorial colleagues is a shanda. That we often ignore or neglect the great contribution they can make to the liturgical experience—beyond their singing and song leading—is a very sad thing for our movement. Cantors should be given the opportunity to give sermons, to teach about music they never get to sing, to lead discussions and discussion-sermons, to have a presence on the pulpit and in the service that reflects the learning they have acquired and the kavod they deserve. Over the course of my career I have seen very healthy and positive rabbi/cantor teams. They are a minority but we can learn from them. Our worship services and American Judaism would both be richer for it.

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