Facebook brought across my bow this posting from 4 years ago.
Also this weekend, I came across a YouTube video that I hadn't been aware of where I was interviewed by BREAD about its history and my history with the organization.
That one was about 5 years old. In both these cases, I find myself making the same points with passion and joy, which means either that I am a tiresome and unchanging person, or that I am deeply connected to values that inspire me.
As I approach my retirement at the end of October, it makes me feel good and settled and satisfied, but still inspired to move forward with the things I hold dear.
Here's what I said 4 years ago today:
So today provided one of those great validations in the work I do:
Like most cantors, an important part of my work is training young people for bar/bat mitzvah. This afternoon, I had 3 delightful lessons. I want to talk about one in particular. . .
This girl's bat mitzvah is next spring. We're just getting rolling. . . First, she told me that I made a mistake in my recording of her haftarah. (This was a confirmation of something she THOUGHT might be the case at the preceding lesson. Once upon a time, I recorded those on cassette tapes. Over the years, I converted those to CDs and now some form of MP3 files that I can edit pretty freely. So I made the correction in the file, and then copied it into a couple of other places where I make the haftarah available to myself or the world. She was impressed by this small feat of legerdemain—and how often can grown-ups like me impress teenagers or adolescents in the tech realm?!) She learned 4+ sentences of her haftarah -- PERFECTLY -- so well (and this is a funny thing I experience from time to time) that it seemed incongruous when she got past what she knew and just looked up at me. That's all there was. What makes that fun or funny is that she SOUNDED like she could have sung ANY haftarah perfectly from start to finish perfectly – but so far she has just learned what she’s learned.
We did some work on the tropes – the building blocks that make it possible for her to learn independently of my recording of her portion.
What was so satisfying in this meeting? Delightful that she chose to carefully correct me at the outset. Very pleasing to hear her chant the haftarah so on target – and to know that she will add to it and add to it. Particularly nice that she did this before she has connected with the teenager who will be tutoring her in addition to the work that I’ll be doing with her. In other words, she did it herself.
But more than that – just what IS it we’re doing when we teach a child a haftarah – and what are they doing when they learn it? We are transmitting MUSICAL information that might be 400 years old – more or less. By Jewish standards, that’s pretty new. By any other standards, pretty preciously old. I say 400 years because I’m considering the western musical style in which we interpret Torah and Haftarah cantillation. It might be younger than that – but very likely not OLDER than that.
But the written notation – the tropes themselves – upon which we base the music we later derived? That’s about 1000 or 1100 years old. Which is pretty fabulous. Yet in order for some cheeky Masorete to write those tropes onto scrolls, it had to be an oral/visual custom dating back considerably farther. My guess is an additional thousand years. And the texts themselves are older than that – with great variation in just how long.
No matter how “recent” all that turns out to be, though, it’s pretty thrilling to be able to transmit what has come down to me piece by piece – a few hundred years and/or a couple of thousand years – and to be able to do it exactly. In a way that I know that this student and others like her can continue to transmit it in the future.
I don’t explain how cool this is to my students often enough. Or do I explain it TOO often?! Well, TOO often when a kid just stares blankly at me. But today, I felt that Audrey really understood that she had done something significant. Which made her happy, too.
So, Thank You, Audrey, for “making my day.” And thanks to all my students – including the two Ethans I really enjoyed earlier today – for listening to me and trying to connect to the ways that I explain the value and importance of these traditions you’re learning.
Thank you to the congregation and community that give me the privilege of doing this for my profession. Obviously I could take the thanks higher – but I don’t really like to go there in Facebook. Maybe I’ll need to transfer this conversation to my blog. . . and take it to a higher level.
But for now. . . thanks for listening!
