Music and Jewish Worship a Essay

It was on a Friday night, and the room was mainly made up of older individuals, although there were a few single men and some families with children. Many of them seemed to know one another well, and laughed and talked. When they approached me as a stranger, I explained what my purpose was -- to observe the use of music during services on a typical Shabbat. They told me that the synagogue was more crowded during the holidays. They said the cantor was well-liked, although they felt that the previous cantor had a better voice. Men and women sat together. The entire sung prayer aspect of the service was in Hebrew. The people seemed comfortable and familiar with the prayers, as they seemed to know when to stand and sit, occasionally rocking with devotion. Their responses to the words of the prayers seemed unforced and confident, again underlining their familiarity. The need for mutual participation in the musical prayers created a sense of unity and cohesion of worship.

As someone who does not speak or read Hebrew, a language which is not written in the Roman alphabet or even related to English I had difficulty following along with the services. The use of the foreign language, intoned, created a sense of awesomeness and timeless power that clearly set a distinct tone from the friendliness preceding the ceremony. It gave an otherworldly quality to the service that even the rabbi's address during the service lacked. The sound of the intoned, musical chanting, the ritualized bowing, standing, and seating created a sense of solemn and formal communal harmony.

The sounds of the cantor's use of Biblical Hebrew and the behaviors of the congregants clearly marked this as 'sacred time' and 'sacred sound,' and underlined the significance of vocal music in the Jewish congregation. Later, I found that one of the prayer sequences I heard is known as the Shema and is part of every religious service (Kolatch 1981, p.114).I attended on Friday evening. Friday evening and all of Saturday spans the Jewish Sabbath, the most important period of worship during the week.

The use of chanted prayers was not the only sign of the importance of music in the congregation's life. Although there was no organ, from talking to the congregants before the ceremony I gained an understanding of how music was an important part of the celebrations connected to personal events, like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. The importance of the cantor's musical ability was also vital, given that even people knowledgeable in the prayers did not use Biblical Hebrew in their daily lives, thus how something sounded was just as important as what was actually said in a literal sense. The emotional connection to the ritual and the past history of the religion was reinforced through the sung or chanted quality of the service, while more ethnic and personal associations were affirmed through coming-of-age rituals and the general culture of the community.

Attending this service highlighted the different functions music can perform, even within the same community. I had attended Jewish weddings and Bar Mitzvahs before, and my main memories of these events were the secular dancing in the celebrations that followed the receptions. Although some of them had klezmer music or various aspects of Jewish culture woven into these personal rituals, the effect of the music was decidedly different during the worship ceremony. Within its fold, Jewish music is able to embrace joy, humor, and personal expressiveness, as well as a kind of collective, sacred obligation that ties the individual to the collective past through music.

Works Cited

Kolatch, Arthur. The Jewish Book of Why. Jonathan David Publishers, 1981.

Nettl, Bruno. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine….....