Leilah Tov: Lather, Rinse, Repent

They say that you learn best when you're thrown right into the fire, which is exactly what happened when I "accidentally" agreed to a student pulpit for Yom Kippur. I say "accidentally" because when my fellow cantorial students and I received an invitation to spend the High Holidays with the Masorti (aka Conservative) congregation in the small community of Kochav Yair, we didn't realize that they were really looking for people to help lead their services. Oops.

After spending the past two weeks cramming for the service, perfecting my Kol Nidre, and learning the High Holiday melody for Torah cantillation, my classmate Russ and I were off to Kochav Yair (situated about an hour and a half northwest of Jerusalem) via a carefully arranged tag-team of rides. Chauffeur #1 was Bernie, a saxophone player who entertained us with a recording of an Israeli melody for "Unataneh tokef," one of the central prayers in the High Holiday service. The late Israeli composer Yair Rosenblum was commissioned to write the piece by Kibbutz Beit Hashitah, which lost many of its residents during the Yom Kippur War. Bernie is going to burn us a copy of the recording, but in the meantime I managed to find a video of the piece on YouTube (there's a brief spoken introduction before the music actually starts). It's incredibly moving and is definitely worth a listen. Russ even managed to incorporate part of the tune into the "Unataneh tokef" that he sang during services, and the congregants loved it!

Bernie dropped us off in the town of Kfar Saba, where we met up with his Aunt Roz, who drove us the rest of the way. Roz's son Danny is the rabbi/organizer of Kochav Yair's Masorti congregation, which meant that he made all of our arrangements for the holiday. Roz and I share a mutual love for Jewish geography, the JCC movement, and Scrabble. Before making Aliyah 15 years ago, she was the director of Jewish programming at the JCC out in Commack, Long Island. She also happens to be a tournament Scrabble player and knows Joe Edley, the Scrabble champion who did a workshop at the Y last year! Unfortunately, we realized the Scrabble connection a little too late to actually attempt a game. Hopefully we'll meet again -- I'd love to see how my skills hold up against someone who plays on the national circuit!

On the 20 minute drive from Kfar Saba to Kochav Yair, Roz made cracks about the community's proximity to several Arab and Palestinian towns. The town is located just 10 meters from the Green Line (the former 1967 border), which is currently delineated by the extremely controversial security fence. At the same time, it's only 14 kilometers from the Mediterranean. It's weird to think that the community is just a year older than I am (it was founded in 1981), yet it has grown to embody a population of about 5,000 -- including many prominent figures in Israeli government like Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Olmert's cousin (the homes of these luminaries were pointed out to us as we drove through the town).

The closely-knit planned community (think "Little Boxes" and Levittown mixed with traces of Boca Raton) is designed so that you can go between any two points without even crossing a street. There's a beautiful bike path that passes behind almost every house so that children can ride freely around the neighborhood. But since there were absolutely no cars on the streets on Yom Kippur, the kids took advantage of the fact that traffic stopped to the point where they could roam around the actual streets with no worries. Riding bikes in the streets during Yom Kippur is apparently such a novelty that many Israeli parents have a "tradition" of giving their children new bikes just before the High Holidays.

Even the secular Israelis don't drive on Yom Kippur; partly because it is the most important day on the Jewish calendar and partly out of fear of being looked down upon by the rest of the community. In fact, our hosts drove us from our pre-fast meal to synagogue, and because we were running a little late, we were one of the very last cars on the road -- and yet we were still met with disapproving looks! But don't worry, after services we left the car at the "shul" -- which is normally used as a senior center -- and walked home. We were grateful to be able to use it to make a quick getaway once the next day's services were over so that we could break the fast!

The services themselves were pretty basic and low-key. As I said to Russ, each of the five separate Yom Kippur services -- Kol Nidre, Shacharit, Musaf, Mincha, and Ne'ilah -- were all very much bottled up in a "lather, rinse, repeat" format -- or, in this case, I should say lather, rinse, repent. While each section is normally marked by special prayers and melodies, this congregation kept things pretty consistent. They were very much attached to certain melodies (we heard the same mind-numbing version of "Sim Shalom" five times in a 24 hour period) and even repeated some prayers multiple times using several different tunes. I actually knew more of the service than I initially thought, especially since I happily recognized some of the more upbeat congregational melodies from my Youth House days.

Indeed, growing up in the Conservative movement definitely worked to my advantage in this particular community -- not to mention that I was able to quickly prepare a Torah reading during the short break we had between Musaf and Mincha!

But there were still a few surprises, the most amusing being that the tune the congregation used for the prayer "Hayom" was "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves! Here are the words to the first verse so that you can sing along for yourself:

Hayom, hayom, hayom, hayom, hayom

Hayom, hayom, hayom hayom teyamtsaynu -- amen!

It was cute -- and definitely something I would borrow for a Junior Congregation service -- but I must admit that I kinda missed the traditional melody. The traditional melody is so catchy in itself that even my brother Scott couldn't get it out of his head after Rosh Hashanah services -- when I spoke to him after the holiday, he kept singing it into the phone!

Another interesting thing was that the congregation sat during the concluding service of Ne'ilah. Traditionally, the ark is open and we stand for the duration of that entire service. Supposedly, we do this to show our strength before G-d as we have one final chance for repentance before our fate for the year is sealed. When I asked Danny later why the congregation sat for Ne'ilah while the ark remained closed, he said that most people in his community don't know any better and would probably complain about having to stand for an hour at the very end of the fast. He was just happy that the Masorti community managed to get such a good turnout at services, with a crowd of about 150 people. He would rather them come and sit for Ne'ilah than not come at all, and, quite frankly, I couldn't agree with him more.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the fact that it was a lot easier than I had thought it would be to get through an entire day of singing without drinking water. Part of this was because I didn't always sing along when the congregation broke into their spirited melodies. I took advantage of those opportunities to rest my voice so that I could save it for the times when it really mattered.

The most poignant moment of the entire Yom Kippur holiday was the final long blast of the shofar -- and that's not just because it meant that we could eat again. The community's long-time shofar blower passed away on Erev Rosh Hashanah last year, and since then the congregation has made a tradition out of sounding his shofar to ensure that his presence will continue to endure. His legacy also lives on in the community's beautiful ark, which he designed and created using intricate mosaic collages of various Jewish symbols like the ones you see in this photo. Russ and I had the privilege of meeting his widow at our Yom Kippur breakfast, who took us back to her house and showed us all sorts of incredible mosaic work. In fact, their living room floor is modeled after an Italian mosaic that they admired while visiting the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York!