Dancing About Architecture, Vol. XVI

Vol. XVI

Tonight’s Episode: Tizmorim

March 7, 2008, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Del Cerro, CA

I am now done. I sang like the fat lady, as they say in the ad biz. In the past several days I have bought a house in Philadelphia, sold my apartment in San Diego, and played what was therefore my last gig in this ole town, at least as a resident. Oh no, wait…there’s one more month to go! I forgot! OK, so let’s say I played my second-to-last gig here. I suppose I’ll be playing again on the first Friday next month, my little swan song, right after walking out for the last time from the job I’ve had for the last 8 ½ years. Hooboy.

This past Friday I played for the synagogue’s monthly Simcha Shabbat service. It’s supposed to be for families, kid-friendly and all, which means it is designed to be brief. It always goes by rather quickly for me at least, because I am standing up on the raised bimah in front of everybody, playing music for most of the time. This month it was just me on clarinet and Sandy on piano; guitarist Ted was MIA. The crowd was of a respectable size, maybe 75 people or so, many of whom I didn’t recognize. Our rabbi leads the service, typically from a podium placed on the floor level in front of the seats or strolling down the center aisle as he deems fit. As usual, he had to come over to the piano to yank Sandy out of his private reverie and make him stop playing some jazz standard so we could start.

The rabbi got things going with a little nign, a wordless melody. This one in particular is at an andante pace, and it’s lilting and pretty except for the bridge which I don’t really like, and it also serves as the tune for one of the prayers in the service. If it were up to me, though, I’d introduce a new nign every week, or at least rotate through a collection of them. We Jews know a good tune when we hear one and it’s sort of part of the Jewish experience to be open to learning new ones, or pulling old ones out of the armoire. Consider Shlomo Carlebach, the superstar Hasidic singer/songwriter, said to have written a nign on his way to every single concert. Either way you approach it, the point here is you’re supposed to sing something. Done right, a nign can provide the foundation for reaching a kind of ecstasy. You sing it as a group over and over again, and each time each singer can find some new part of the melody to shift, expand, alter, or otherwise develop, so that with every iteration the spontaneous melody-harmonization gets more complex and intricate, and usually more beautiful. However, standing up there removed from the vox populi, it’s often hard for me to tell from that vantage point and over the rabbi’s mic-ed voice whether or not people are singing, or just moving their lips and breathing softly. Whichever it was, the congregation was certainly not reaching towards ecstasy. That’s the trouble with American Conservative Jews – we don’t know how to be spiritual. Even though we went through the tune several times, the singing never changed. Everyone just sat there sort of half-singing, some just moaning. So it was, as usual, up to Sandy and I to swirl it upwards to a climax before a soft dénouement. We did a fair job of this, but we did not reach near the heights we can get when Ted is also playing. There are two reasons for this: 1) Sandy has a great ear for tone but he does not ever, ever listen to what’s going on around him, and 2) my powers of musical expansion are limited. Not zero, mind you, but I listen to enough music to know how much farther I could go in this regard. This nign made a decent intro to the service, but it wasn’t too special.

We really raced through most of the rest of the service. Even though this is about the only real synagogue service I’m attending these days – I haven’t been on a Saturday morning for many moons – these Simcha Shabbats are not spiritual experiences for me. It’s Friday night and I have to leave work super early and deal with about 30 miles of traffic to get home, pick up the family and get all the way out to shul, so I’m usually not in the most meditative mood. That’s why I like Saturday morning services: at three hours in length, it’s just the right amount of time for me to get my pray on and stay in that groove for a while. These Friday night jobs are just that: jobs. This perspective is enhanced by the nature of the service, too, besides its brevity. Before each prayer the rabbi will curtly describe in English the main punchline of the Hebrew text, as in, “We welcome Shabbat into our lives as though we are welcoming a bride,” and then Sandy and I launch into L’cha Dodi. And so on. That prayer in particular has a variety of very beautiful tunes to sing it, but we always use the same one every time. Part of the fun of this gig for me is supposed to be that I can get into these tunes and find new modes of expression, in front of a friendly audience. So I do appreciate the opportunity to play tunes like this over and over, but novelty every once in a while would be welcome, too.

Actually this time there were two breaks from routine. For Oseh Shalom, we went back to a more traditional melody, which I really like, instead of this modern one by Debbie Friedman that has a bridge I just can’t wrap myself around. This was a relief also because without Ted on guitar, it’s hard to build the Friedman tune to a big sound, which the rabbi always motions for us to do and it’s apparently why he likes the tune. And we sang the Shehechiyanu prayer, which we normally skip, using this ole chestnut melody that I think every Jewish kid learns in summer camp. Sandy didn’t know it (he’s a Republican – probably never went to summer camp) but he picked it up right away, mostly I believe from following me, and it came out pretty good. One other nice part of the service was when everyone with a birthday or anniversary or whatever in the coming month came up and stood under the chuppah for a blessing and a chorus of “Happy Birthday”, Rachel and Jackie came up so Rachel could announce her step-mother’s 30^th birthday, which is actually today, as I write this.

I’m starting to get a tad sad over leaving this place, even though I basically hate living here. And I’m looking forward to the next, and my last, Simcha Shabbat next month. But maybe I’ll find someplace to play in Philly. Stay tuned for more tunes, mayn Yidelech!