A Nation of Priests, Not Merely with Priests

In this week’s Parsha, Haazinu, the whole congregation of Israelites gather together to hear Moses read a poem. God has ordered that this poem be written down and read from time to time to the entire people. Who performs it later – and who listens? The Torah repeatedly tells us that the initial audience is all Israel – not only his successor, Joshua, not only the Levites, not only the tribal leaders, but all of Israel. The covenant between the people and the Creator must be embraced and followed by all of Israel, from generation to generation. Every individual is included. Every individual is connected, but the poem resonates differently in each listener. Every individual is different, as the Sifrei says (Haazinu, 306, quoted in Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation, p 318): Dvarim says, “let my teaching drop as rain” (Deut 32.2); we remember that rain nourishes every plant in its own way (Sifrei Devarim 306).

The JPS (1985) translation calls the poem a poem. Some translations, like the King James Bible, call it a song. The word “shir” in Hebrew can mean poem or song, but there are lots of clues that we are talking about words, not words and music. But through time, the Jewish people have set the entire Bible and many other texts to music. The Jewish civilization is essentially musical. We have shown you can sing almost anything; bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls sing sections of the Tanakh that might be about civil law or the formulas for simple sacrifice of pigeons. You name, we sing it. The modern Broadway musical is largely the product of Jewish talents, but words and music – that we have been doing since almost forever. We use different melodies, including distinct renditions of the tropes, to make the significance and mood of different holy days and occasions.

But who is singing? Is it more like Moses speaking to the assembly? Moses started off as a hesitant speaker, so God conveyed messages to him, and Moses in turn directed Aaron what to say. Aaron was the first High Priest, a role that requires exact performance. We have no reason to believe Moses impressed the Israelites through his power as a performer; we do not hear that he had a mellifluous voice or that he had any of the technical gifts of a skilled vocal performer, such as knowing how to alter the pace, accent, and pitch of the performance. In Temple times, the Levites were highly trained vocal performers. It was a time of centralized worship, many Israelites had to travel far to reach Jerusalem, and it might have encouraged them to come if they would not only see the architectural splendor of the temple but listen to the choral magnificence of the choir. We have reason to believe that individual Israelites were not themselves well-trained in the material; many prayers have a “call and answer” format, whereby the talented performers could sing out a line, and the ordinary Israelite would respond with an “ki le’olam chasdo” or “amen” or “selah.”

After the destruction of the Temple, Judaism was dispersed geographically and had to reconstitute itself. The synagogue became the temple. Every home was by itself a place of prayer. The virtuoso performances that drew in crowds might have been more the teachings of the great scholar than the recitation of the prayer leaders. The democratization served the cause of Jewish survival well. Children spent years studying the prayers, Talmud, and the rituals, and could variously pray in solitude, the home, and synagogue, could ensure that the Jewish people were a nation of priests, not merely a nation with priests. Perhaps as the size of some Jewish communities grew, it became possible to support some exceptionally good performers as part of the synagogue services. Some cantorialists became famous among their parts of the Jewish world, and a prayer service could amount to a riveting concert performance. But at least back in their homes, ordinary congregants were putting on tefillin, keeping kosher, reciting the three daily prayer services, and even sometimes reading from or about the holy books.

A tilt towards the performative/audience model was likely a product of the increasingly refined material that had to be conveyed. If Moses merely read the poem, there is no question that in the synagogues, the readers of the Torah were duty-bound to sing. The stupendously committed and meticulous scholars who produced the Masoretic trope system built on earlier musical systems to produce a score of the words that requires precise performance. The pitches should be sung with precision, even the spacing between words must be done methodically, and all this must be accomplished in a live performance with the performer reading directly from a Torah scroll – without the benefit of vowel marks or the symbols for the musical figures, the tropes, that must be used. As Jews tended to focus in modern times on success in their secular subjects, and have less time to study Judaics, it was not only the musical rendition that was turned over to experts. So was the interpretation of the text; a cantor might give a brilliant rendition of a parsha and a rabbi might explain and illuminate for a congregation whose own understanding might be rudimentary.

We are at risk of moving even further towards a performer-audience model in modern times. With internet broadcasts of synagogue performances, cantors and rabbis of supreme talent may be the center of broadcasts that are watched by far-away virtual congregants, who may enjoy the show, but who may have abandoned some of the forms of engagement in a more traditional synagogue service—meeting your fellow congregants, wearing a kippah, a yarmulke or even tefillin, leafing through the prayer book rather than, at most, following along. We need to find ways to enhance the engagement of congregants in synagogue worship, rather than permitting the model of top-notch performers entertaining a passive audience. We want as many Jews as possible to read or sing from the Torah, to be able to recite a prayer, not merely stand to the side while a virtuoso proxy carries out the performance on their behalf. We have been following strictures that unnecessarily limit active engagement.

A congregant—even an officiant—should be able to read from a machzor, a book with vowels and punctuation, rather than solely from an original scroll. If at all possible, a traditional scroll should be opened alongside, with another officiant silently following the reader using a yad (pointer) to catch and detect any errors. The use of both a scroll and a book also connects the reading to a long line of traditional practice. We must remember, however, that even while Torah scrolls have proven astonishingly precise in reproducing manuscripts at least two thousand years old, they are still not the original object written down at the time of Moses. The ultimate object should be to carry out a reading that is as verbally faithful as possible to that first manuscript. The oral pronunciation might not be exactly the same as in ancient times, but the use of vowels helps ensure that the recitation is not unreasonably far from it. The use of the trope marks aids in the articulation of the text; the chanting of the Torah makes reading and listening both more pleasurable and spiritual, and the use of trope singing serves other purposes. The scrolls do not have punctuation marks, and the trope system provides the rough equivalent of commas, semicolons, periods, and paragraph breaks. The selection of a particular trope can also serve symbolic and literary purposes—as when the rare and extended shalshelet trope is used to signal that the character is hesitating over a difficult decision. Similarly, the revia trope might emphasize resolution in triumphant moments.

While the use of machzorim in earlier days might have introduced errors, there are printed versions today that have been painstakingly reviewed by expert editors and tested millions of times in actual use. Using them can reduce verbal errors that result from reciting from a scroll and errors in the use of the trope system from not having the trope markings. More important, the use of machzorim—or modern-day software equivalents—can reduce the anxiety that results from trying to perform directly from the scroll. We want bar mitzvah boys and girls to enjoy their experience, and we wish them to return to listening and performing Torah ceremonies—rather than remembering the process as fraught with difficulty and anxiety. We want adult congregants to feel willing and able to read themselves, rather than stand aside on the bimah while a professional takes over.

If we can use modern technologies to assist in performance, why not? A singer should be able to have a “backing track” in his earpiece while performing; it might be the melody, it might be the actual performance, and the singer can sing along with it. Less terror for the performer, more accuracy of performance…why not? If there are software packages that permit a student to see each word highlighted as it comes up, along with the vowels and perhaps with a vocal performance on top of that, what would be wrong with having a reader sing along? Why do Torah readings have to be solo? Why could a group of friends together perform a parsha? It would reduce the fear of appearing alone on stage, and the overall quality of pronunciation and musical accuracy will tend to be higher in a group performance than a solo. Listen to the crowd sing the national anthem at a sporting event; most of them might do a clunky job on their own, but the errors tend to even out.

Moses was revealing a program for a nation of priests, a nation that in each generation would pass on to all the original teaching of its children – regardless of station in life, performative talent, understanding of intellectual nuance. Every single member of the Jewish people has duties to the Creator; it is not a supporters’ group for some star players. Our future depends on whether we all want to resonate and radiate, not only feel the impact of the words and music and instructions of others. Our nation of priests does not merely require most charismatic and artful high priests; it calls upon us, in our own way, to each find a way to recite, sing, interpret, instruct, and act.