When people think of popular Jewish music, two pieces invariably come to mind: “Hava Nagila,” or perhaps Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.” But as an upcoming program at Lakeside Congregation for Reform Judaism in Highland Park will show, there’s much more to Jewish music.
Jonathan Miller, founder and artistic director of Chicago a cappella and himself a High Holiday cantor, will explore the role of music in a synagogue and how it’s changed over the past half-century as the scholar-in-residence beginning Friday and continuing through the weekend.
The annual weekend is “one of the most important days on the Lakeside calendar,” notes its cantor, Michael Davis. “It’s an engaging way to bring the community together for focused study on a particular topic that represents something special in the life of a congregation.”
Presentations will be held at the synagogue, 1221 County Line Road, Highland Park, and are open to the public.
On Friday at 7:30 p.m., Miller will discuss “How Music on Shabbat Moves Us Spiritually.” Saturday’s keynote address will chart “The Progression of Jewish Music from the 1960s to the Present.” The lecture is scheduled for 8 p.m. On Sunday at 10:30 a.m., Miller will pay tribute to the late composer Max Janowski, whose compositions “Sim Shalom” and Avinu Malkeynu” are performed at Reform and Conservative synagogues around the world.
The Friday night service will feature a piece Miller composed that was inspired by a Leonard Cohen poem about the arrival of Shabbat on a Friday night in suburbia.
There has been a “generational shift” in Jewish worship music over the decades, Miller said.
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“Back in the 1950s and ’60s,” he said, “a cantor leading the service or choir would sing at the congregation, and that’s all fine as far as it goes. But worship has become more participatory. Members of the congregation want to sing along and they want to sing songs that they know. Congregational participation is always a good thing.”
One of the game changers in Jewish music was camp music, which introduced some of the popular songs. One of the leading figures of this movement was the late singer-songwriter Debbie Friedman.
“She turned traditional synagogue music on its ear,” Miller said. “Her songs introduced a whole new way of worship service singing. I went to some of those summer camps and got swept up in how wonderful it was to sing stuff that felt fresh and new. Since then, there is a whole other generation of Jewish singers and songwriters who took their inspiration from Friedman and created their own songs. She showed them the way that ’60s-’70s guitar folk-inspired musical styles could be workable in the worship context.”
Miller’s Sunday morning presentation about Janowski hits especially close to home. Janowski, who fled the Nazis in 1933, five years later arrived in Chicago, where he was the music director at K.A.M. Isaiah Israel in Kenwood until he died in 1991 at the age of 79. Miller was one of his students and now serves as the managing partner of Janowski’s publishing company.
The take away for the weekend, Miller said, is that music is integral to the worship experience.
“I have a friend who is not Jewish, and he told me once that the difference in denominations doesn’t have so much to do with theology or dogma, but in aesthetics, and I think he’s right about that. Being immersed musically is how I worship. It’s hard to imagine being really connected to a service if there was not a musical component.”
For more information about Lakeside Congregation’s scholar-in-residence weekend, call 847-432-7950.