Reclaiming the rhozhinke: music and the synagogue service

Judaism, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Joseph A. Levine

28. For this trenchant observation I am indebted to Rabbi Arnold S. Gluck, Temple Beth El, Somerville, New Jersey, phone conversation May 19, 1998.

29. Wyslawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), p. 20.

30. Ever since the eighth century, the Hebrew title, hazzan, has designated the congregation's assigned surrogate in prayer, or "cantor" (Hyman I. Sky, The Development of the Office of Hazzan through the Talmudic Period, Unpublished dissertation [Philadelphia: Dropsie University, 1977], pp. 172-182).

31. Virgil Funk, "Building a Relationship with God, while Enabling the Congregation to Pray through Music." The writer's notes from an academic conference commemorating the School of Sacred Music's Fiftieth Anniversary (New York: Hebrew Union College, Nov. 24, 1998).

32. Following, "We bend the knee and bow, acknowledging the Supreme Sovereign," in the Aleinu prayer that concludes every service (Siddur Sim Shalom, edited by Leonard S. Cahan [New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1998], p. 11).

33. "Eensie Weensie Spider," One Thousand Jumbo: The Magic Song Book (new York: Hansen, 1975), p. 23.

34. United Synagogue Youth.

35. Abraham Z. Idelsohn. Jewish Music in its Historical Development (New York: Tudor, 1948), pp. 168, 171.

36. Idelsohn, p. 239.

37. "That Old Time Religion," George Pullen Jackson. Spiritual Folksongs of Early America (New York: J.J. Augustin, 1937), p. 218.

38. Joseph Levine, Emunat Abba, vol. II, p. 282.

39. The Star-Spangled Banner, Words by Francis Scott Key (Baltimore: 1814); music by John Stafford Smith, after the popular drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven.

40. Literally: "Cantorial art," through which "the cantor breaks open the heart of the people in joy or yearning to the influx of the Divine" (Rabbi Herbert Bronstein, "The Elu V'Elu ((both/and)) of Synagogue Music," CCAR Journal [Summer 1998]: 79).

41. Based on Abraham Baer. Baal T'fillah (1877). Reprinted by Sacred Music Press (New York: Hebrew Union College and the American Conference of Certified Cantors, 1953), No. 694.

42. "From Sinai;" a stratum of melodic fragments thought to be so ancient that they were handed down to Moses along with the other 613 commandments; now identified with motifs used for cantillating scriptural material by Ashkenazic communities along the Rhineland between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries (discussed in Joseph Levine, Synagogue Song, pp. 44-54; numbered and cross-referenced with sources and parallels on pages 217-227).

43. "Mas'at Kappai," Siddur Beit Ya'akov, Part I, compiled and annotated by Rabbi Jacob Emdin, with commentary by Rabbi Shlomo Kluger (Lemberg: Joseph Schlesinger, 1923), p. 210.

44. Subtitled: Not for Clergy Only (Washingon, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1988), pp. 241-242.

REFERENCES CITED

PUBLISHED ARTICLES, BOOKS, FILMS, POEMS, RECORDINGS, SONGS

Appel, Willi. 1979. Editor, Harvard Dictionary of Music, Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Avenary, Hanoch. 1972. "Shtayger," Encyclopedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Keter, 14:1464.