In honor of Atzilah Solot, Ner Shalom’s longtime chantleader, on her relocation to Tucson.
This has been a year of counting.
We counted the 49 days of the Omer together in this Zoom Room, week by week, from Pesach to Shavuot. We counted the days of the shelter-in-place, scheduled to be 27 days. We are now on day 115, and are trying to slow our breath and heartbeats and expectations, in order to manage more such days, may they be safe and healthy ones. A time of endurance and quiet sanctity.
And there's more counting ahead. Because yesterday we entered a season known in the Jewish world as Beyn Hametzarim – the narrows. This is a 22-day period that takes us to Tisha B'Av, the day that marks the destruction of the capital-T Temple in Jerusalem 2600 years ago. The catastrophe of back then wasn't sudden and instant. It was a war, and Babylonia had laid siege to Jerusalem. Yesterday, the 17th of Tammuz, was the day when the walls were breached.
So this is a period of time that has some quality of mourning to it; not big or ostentatious. Just a kind of cloud hanging in the sky. Kind of like what we've been feeling sheltering in place. A subtle, low-key grief. A sense that we have to strain a little harder to see the Divine. Twenty-two days in the narrows, starting yesterday.
These 22 days are the headwaters of the stream of time that flows not only through Tisha B'Av but on for another 49 days to Rosh Hashanah. That is a piece of the stream where we will count the Omer backwards. And then the river rushes through the gates of the 10 Days of Awe, welling up high at Yom Kippur, but not stopping even then, carrying us instead into Sukkot, where we at last climb to shore for a time, build our hut, and pray for rain.
The current of this calendar of ours is consant, irresistible. Stick a toe in now, and maybe you will keep your bearings. But the water and the experience get deeper and deeper. They take us through gates of heartbreak and then of hope, of shattering and reassembly. They bring us through pools of introspection and renewal. Step in now, in the narrows, and perhaps you won't be swept away. But then again you might, and either way there's no telling where you'll end up.
We keep count of our days in Judaism. It is what we do. Six and then one. Six and then one. I think Shabbat has provided more rhythm for all of us here since sheltering in place than it has maybe ever. Six days and then one. There is no 7-day cycle in the natural world; nothing that makes Friday night ontologically different from Thursday night. But we know the difference. The shaking off of the hard week; the letting go of some of the burdens of commodity time; the bracketing of the unfinished business and the promise to meet up with it again around the bend next week. And Shabbat is not just a letting go. It is a vessel in its own right to hold our yearning and our gratitude; a day for prayer, learning, food, family. A taste of a world that could be. A day of rest, yes, but not empty rest. Full rest. Rest that is enriching, deepening, and a source of delight.
We are also counting days in sad anticipation of Atzilah's move to Tucson. We will still see her, but it won't be the same on Zoom – it's already not the same on Zoom, with our inability together, to sing in harmony, to feel other voices in an actual room. And saying farewell – for now – to Messengers of Peace Chant Circle that has been happening on the second Friday of the month for over 8 years now. And so tonight is a good night to honor what this offering has meant to us.
The Jewish musical tradition is ancient and varied. I spent this last week taking an intensive class on medieval piyyutim – prayer-poems. This is, as many of you know, my happy place. Complicated medieval Hebrew, with clever rhymes, references and wordplay, embodying intense mystical impulses and pouring forth a deep love of God. These poems are often many many lines long – 22 lines, 44 lines, who knows? Some written in Sefarad (Spain), some in Ashkenaz (Germany), and some in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). Married to melodies from Iraq – sung in quarter tones that I am working very hard to be able to hear – and from Turkey, Yemen, Ukraine, Israel and New York. Some piyyutim are used so frequently in synagogue life that you know them and might not think about their mystical or even erotic content. For instance Lecha Dodi, Yedid Nefesh, which you migh even know by many different melodies. And in the class we explored some lesser known piyyutim – including ones that Ner Shalomers actually know, for instance Y'idun Yagidun and Ha'aderet V'haemunah. And some that I'm reasonably sure that neither you nor I had ever heard of, but some might still surface here, for instance on Yom Kippur: Yah Shema Evyonecha.
These long, complicated songs are masterworks. They function as ladders climbing heavenward. Each verse takes you a step higher and then higher again. Climbing a lattice of letters and notes, printed in the siddur from the top of the page to the bottom, but sung as a step by step vertical ascent. These are often challenging though. For non-Hebrew speakers they can be a nightmare of consonants, and nothing about the deep content would be obvious.
Chant, however, functions very differently in our tradition – in our souls and in our bodies. In our wordless niggunim, whose genre is the legacy of the Chasidic movement, and in the many chants written by Rabbi Shefa Gold and others following her example, including Atzilah, we let go of showy wordplay entirely in favor of just a few words of Torah. We breathe deep and we settle in. A chant by Rabbi Shefa has probably no more than 8 Hebrew words, and likely only four. And, of course, a niggun has none at all. That alone gets us past the initial Hebrew hurdle.
But then there is the special medicine that each chant offers. These are not pop songs meant to entertain. They are a practice, meant to bring us into deeper connection with our own souls, greater alignment with our hearts. They allow us to take journeys of gratitude or tears or love. The short sacred phrase is repeated like a mantra, and the journey the chant takes you on is different for everyone. You're never certain exactly where it will bring you. To a place of brokenness or of healing. Of delight or playfulness. Definitely to a place of breath, of the body and soul recalibrating through sound. These chants are not songs with lyrics. They are a spiritual technology. This is why it's important to sing a chant or a niggun for a considerable period of time, longer than a top-10 song would play on the radio. Because you need the time. You need to hear it, learn it, let go of worrying about words, get past the awkwardness of "when will this end," and then let yourself journey. You might end up in a deep internal place. Or in the sturdy embrace of the Divine. Or you might in fact end up up there floating, Chagall-like, in the sky with the folks who just sang 22 lines of Haaderet V'Haemunahx. Anything could happen.
This is the practice that Atzilah, with her training and her healing instincts, brought to Ner Shalom, and which so many of us have been blessed by. These chants have, over and over, for 8 years or 100 months, carried our prayers to the ears of the Divine, which are actually located right here.
And so tonight, to honor this gift, and to celebrate the many years of Messengers of Peace at Ner Shalom, we will lean into chant. We won't be doing so many, but we will hold each of them for a while as is their due, and as is needed. And we'll remember that at the end of each chant, we will hold the silence. Because, as I've learned from Atzilah and have felt in real life, the work of the chant continues after the last note. That is when we integrate the experience, and absorb the medicine.
So tonight will be a night of chant and silence and a few words. A night of inviting Shabbat in not from some distant horizon, not through a door at the back of the room, but from deep inside, drawn forth by our voices and the resonating chambers of our hearts, riding a carrier wave, a chariot of song.
Gratitude to Atzilah Solot for her friendship and creative partnership. And to Rabbi Shefa Gold, Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg, and Hazan Diana Brewer.