Diary of a Chief Rabbi

The connection between spirtuality and songs

The sociologist Peter Berger called them "signals of transcendence" - moments when you feel lifted beyond yourself and infinity seems almost within reach. That, for me, was the mood in the Edgware Synagogue for choral Selichot this year.

The shul was packed. I've rarely seen so many people gathered in a single building to pray. It was lovely to see so many people from different communities, spanning the religious spectrum, coming together in harmony. The music was magnificent. We've come to expect nothing less from Rev. Lionel Rosenfeld and the Shabbaton choir. This year, though, there were two newcomers - Rev. Shimon Craimer, a star of the future who, at the age of twenty-one already has a voice of rare sweetness and power, and thirteen year old Stuart Morell, whose poise on what must have been for him a nerve-racking occasion was impeccable. Together they created a moment of artistic and spiritual perfection.

There was a time, not so long ago, when chazanut and choral synagogue music were in decline. I remember having to close the chazanut department of Jews' College for sheer lack of interest by congregations. In the past few years, though, they've made an unexpected recovery, because of the pioneering work of many of our chazanim and choirs. Collectively they have brought a new idiom to the music of prayer, a delightful blend of the new and the traditional with special emphasis on the use melody to mirror the meaning of the words. The result has been that this year there were a record number of choral selichot services. We are in the midst of a Jewish musical renaissance.

I'm delighted. Judaism has long recognised the close connection between spirituality and song. Az Yashir - the Song at the Sea - was the first great collective tribute of the Israelites to God. Many of the Psalms were written to be sung, and the Levites used to provide choral accompaniment to the Temple service. To this day, music is the pulse of Jewish spirituality. We don't read the Torah; we sing it. We don't say our prayers; we chant them. We don't even read the Mishnah and Gemarrah; they too have their special tune. Each text, and each period of the year, has its own melody. Song charts the biorhythms of the Jewish soul.

There's a reason for this. When language is invested with deep emotion it aspires to the condition of music. As I put it once: Words are the language of the mind. But song is the language of the soul. That is why melody moves us in a way mere speech cannot. Judaism is a dialogue between earth and heaven, and when words become holy, they become song.

The supreme example of this is Kol Nidrei. The words of Kol Nidrei are dry and unemotional. Indeed they are not even a prayer. They are a legal formula for the annulment of vows between us and God. But the tune of Kol Nidrei is something else. Few compositions have ever caught so powerfully and poignantly the mood of the Jewish soul as it comes before God in search of forgiveness. It instantly establishes the solemnity of the day - the drama of human finitude in the presence of eternity. The music transcends the words. It communicates what words cannot say.

I used to regret the fact that, in the modern era, Jews had contributed so much to the music of other cultures and so little to their own. Mahler's Eighth Symphony is a Catholic mass. Irving Berlin wrote, "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." George Gershwin wrote some of the finest negro spirituals. Hopefully, though, the tide is turning. It should. Judaism is an intellectual faith. But it must also be emotionally compelling if it is to speak to both hemispheres of the brain. Besides which, music is the closest we come to expressing the inexpressible. As Joseph Addison wrote: "Music, the greatest good that mortals know / And all of heaven we have below."

At the end of his life, Moses gave the Jewish people the last of the 613 commands - that in every generation each of us must write (or at least have a share in writing) a Sefer Torah. Unusually, though, on this occasion he described it not as Torah but as shirah, 'song'. My explanation is that if we are to make the Torah new in every generation, it must speak to our hearts as well as to our minds. It must become our "song of songs". The Torah is the libretto of the Jewish people and we are its choir. The revival of Jewish music is essential to a renewal of the Jewish spirit. So I hope we have a musical as well as a sweet New Year.