Jewish Ritual, Quality, and Performance
Two things happened to me this Yom Kippur:
I had the most profound, devastatingly humbling, unspeakably illuminating Yom Kippur of my life.
I spent a greater proportion of it than ever before on totally mundane practical matters because I was participating in it from “backstage.”
These things are not in conflict for me. I still fasted. I still prayed (while I drummed and occasionally adjusted mic levels). What was religious about the day for me was elevating other people’s experiences.
I’m not realizing this for the first time. I have always gravitated towards this role in the scenes that have drawn me in. I have my first few powerful personal experiences, then it becomes about learning what made them awesome and how to do that myself, and then it becomes about doing it myself — and doing it better and better.
What I think changed this year is that I realized some ways in which this is a Jewish value, and thus it was probably taught to me rather than being just a trait of mine.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Judaism is about doing the same things over and over again. When something that is usually done is not done, or is done so differently that it breaks too many precedents, it creates a kind of community emergency. This is not the basis on which Jewish ritual experiences compete for attention. They compete on quality of performance at an extremely high level, because — due to the essentially repetitive nature of the practice — people’s tastes are refined.
To be sure, some Jewish lineages are famous for their ability to do things exactly the same way with no deviation for hundreds of years. Something outsiders probably don’t understand is that even these communities experience enormous variety in terms of ritual quality on a thrice-daily basis, and this is felt with incredible subtlety and provides quite a vibrant and active cultural life for those whose cultures are into that sort of thing.
Now, not all Jewish cultures value walling themselves off from outside influence like this, so naturally the others tend to experience some drift in terms of what is meaningful to people and what they’re looking for. But this value of repetition and familiarity — and its resulting emphasis on quality — seems to be one of the fundamental things Jewishness transmits, and so in lineages that don’t end via assimilation, changes still happen carefully and gradually. Pushing too hard still upsets people.
A new community — that is, a new lineage — is founded when enough drift has caused enough people in one place to drift away from existing institutions, which have become too entrenched to account for drift while continuing to perform at high-enough quality. A pioneer rabbi like my wife recognizes this opportunity, sets up something new, and gets one shot to prove their new idea can provide for these people’s refined and subtle ritual senses.
Either way, everyone in town finds out.
This year was technically our third High Holiday season as a going concern, but it was the first time we did every service. On the way to Neilah yesterday, my wife said her target proportion of new versus traditional musical forms in services is 50/50, which I find incredibly audacious. We’ve both been to so many services with that ratio — or even a smaller proportion of new material — and hated them. And yet the people really turned out, and we played our asses off for them.
So how did she do it?
She did it like an artist — by speaking directly to the hearts of the people in the room — but the reason she can do that is because she is a rabbi trained in the traditional forms of a major lineage. She knows in exquisite detail exactly what each component of each service needs to do, and that’s why people trust her to deploy her artistic skills in that environment. They trust to do every single one of those things, and to do so as an expression of our local, lived culture.
On the performance side, this means she comes in with clear vision and requirements, which work great as creative constraints for the players (myself included). This enables us to just hire real musicians, rather than scrounging the local Jewish community for people who know how to dink around on an instrument, which is what most of those other 50/50 shuls we’ve checked out are limited to.
So the show is not only good but unique. The importance of this part is not to be underestimated.
For my part, I am so grateful to have the role of playing drums in services because I’m not sure sitting still and praying generates enough power to move through what I’m moving through in this phase of my life. My heart aches for all the Jews who are not allowed to do this. It really does.
And as for the people whose form of participation in Ma’alot’s ritual life does not involve playing the instruments, it’s pretty clear to me — looking into their faces the whole time, as I do (when my eyes are open, which okay is maybe like 2/3 of the time) — that they need this level of energy to move through what they’re moving through, too.
There’s a lot more to what she’s doing — what we’re doing, though I am hesitant to take credit except as backup — than this. But this is how services work. And it takes a ton of work, and I am exhausted, and our car is only half-unpacked. But it worked. On everyone. The bass player cried (not Jewish). And that’s why I had the holiest Yom Kippur of my life despite a lot of driving and texting and carrying shit around. I also got to play my ass off. And cry myself.
This is how we do things now.
