July 2024 - Music Can Heal

Many of you know I attend the North American Jewish Choral Festival each July and spend 5 days singing with colleagues, teaching, learning, and re-kindling old friendships. This year I led a workshop on choral music for women’s choirs, entitled “It’s All About That Treble,” (taking off on Meghan Trainor’s title “It’s All about That Bass”). While the festival was fun and stimulating, we had several opportunities to hear from Israeli and American speakers about the situation in Israel since October 7. This mirrored the experience I had this past May at the Cantors’ Assembly convention in Minnesota. There Noa Tishby (look her up if you are not familiar with her work) flew in from California to be interviewed, and she enlightened us on her views/knowledge of the situation, as did a Vice President of the World Zionist Organization, who flew in from Jerusalem. 

What all of this brought up for many of us was the question, “What can we do?” For those of us who like to sing, it reinforced more than ever the need to express our joys, despair, and ultimate hope (Hatikvah) through music. As Leonard Bernstein once said, “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, and more devotedly than ever before.”

These inspiring conferences fostered thought, dialogue, support, and healing. I have always known this to be true. When I led my weekly choir rehearsals for many years in my previous position, we used to say rehearsal night was our most mentally healthy evening of the week. There was a study that found that people who sing in choirs are happier and that it is a healthy thing to do.

I return each summer with new enthusiasm and the certainty that I need to sing, and that in some small way doing so may foster some positive effect somewhere in my little world, our little world, and possibly beyond. Creating a space to pray together, as we do each Shabbat at Beth Samuel, allows each of us to open up to exploring our own ways  to begin to heal the world, one kind and meaningful gesture at a time.

B’shalom,
Cantor Rena