We had our first Conservative Yeshiva Shabbaton over the weekend, which took place near beautiful Ein Gedi on the shores of the Dead Sea. We spent all day Friday climbing through the rocky desert, swimming under waterfalls, and floating in the salty sea. We soaked in gorgeous desert scenery, prayed at the ancient synagogue of Ein Gedi, and observed an abundance of ibex (pictured below).
Saturday was filled with student-led services and faculty-led learning, during which many of my cantorial classmates made contributions. Shulie's Maariv was vocally alluring, while Marisa (a member of last year's cantorial class who loved Israel so much that she decided to stay for another year) and Russ shook things up a bit with Spanish-Portuguese and Moroccan Torah cantillation.
Admittedly, I was too nervous to lead services or read Torah this time around, so I chose instead to be an observer. I did, however, agree to lead Havdalah, the concluding portion of Shabbat, alongside my classmate Frani. But I didn't want to do just any old Debbie Friedman Havdalah. Like Russ and Marisa, I wanted to shake things up a little bit and expose to the community to a melody that they wouldn't ordinarily be familiar with. To me, that's the essence of a cantor's role of transmitting Jewish musical traditions.
Last week, Frani introduced our class to a book called Songs of the Jews of Calcutta, which was compiled by Rahel Musleah, a member of my hometown congregation of Temple Israel of Great Neck. You'll notice that I've been finding lots of connections to Temple Israel here in Israel, which is one of the things that's neat about going to a school that's affiliated with the Conservative movement. What is even more incredible is that Jewish geography also connects Shulie with Rahel, as Shulie went to high school with Rahel's nephew! They say that Jews are the people of the book, and I find it really special that this other seemingly random book connects half of our cantorial class. But I digress.
Frani and I decided to adapt some of the Havdalah music from the Jews of Calcutta in order to formulate our service for the Shabbaton, and stayed up late Thursday night putting all the pieces together. It was a little challenging, in the sense that the book didn't include an actual Havdalah service -- just songs associated with the conclusion of Shabbat. We pulled three of these melodies and used them to formulate the three different sections of the service -- the introductory "Eliyahu Hanavi" song, which we taught to the whole group, the "Hinei El Yishuati" paragraph, and the actual Havdalah blessings. If you have no idea what I'm talking about and are curious to learn more, I'm happy to explain -- I'm just too tired to go into detail now!
Our service turned out to be a great success, especially because the melodies lingered in many of our classmates' heads during the bus ride home. I hope that they'll remember the tunes they learned over the weekend well enough to teach them to other congregations, thus perpetuating the musical traditions of the small but vital Jewish community in India.
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