Soul Music

I’ve been to the mountain, and it’s called Nefesh L.A. It’s the synagogue-with-some-walls on the east side of the city where our son and daughter-in-law have settled their Jewish lives, and where they have initiated us in the mysteries of the next Jewish world.

It’s where our beloved granddaughters are likely to be bat-mitzvah-ed. It’s where we will all be celebrating the High Holidays together, even if I have to get on a plane to get there. This is no small deal for a travel-averse person, especially in an age of highly communicable viruses. Have you heard the one about the semi-elderly Jew and measles (and bird flu and that new thing from Wuhan)?

I like everything about Nefesh, even the parts that I don’t. It obeys the first rule of twenty-first century Judaism. If someone suggests that you build a sanctuary, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction or push that well-intentioned person off a cliff. In any respectable Jewish community, there are dozens of possible venues for ingathering, and you will never have to pay down a mortgage. This has never been a problem in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we never build a building that requires a mortgage, but other Jews are not nearly as fortunate.

Rabbi Susan Goldberg seems to understand this perfectly. She is the visionary soul at the heart of the enterprise. There’s a swagger and confidence that surround her like an aura. That, and an appealing hint of wildness. She understands that you can have a credible Jewish experience in the shadow of an enormous stone cross above the bimah. One of the very best Jewish experiences of my life was in such a place in the bosom of Manhattan. If the choice is between a cross and raising money for a building, I’ll take the cross every time. No distractions of overhead, no wasted energy.

And much of the energy of the Nefesh community is invested in the gorgeous music of its worship service. This will sound off-brand, but I am ambivalent about worship. I’ll have another post soon about this very issue. We’ve made worship a kind of high-barrier experience, surrounded by trip wires of language and knowledgeability.

Nefesh resolves these issues in a stroke by creating a soundscape of sweeping accessibility. It’s music, styled by Duvid Swirsky and Sally Dworsky, is an oceanic storm of throbbing intensity, where the words give way to a rush of sound. It’s simple, incantatory and full of surprises. I remember being roused from a stretch of rumination by the penetrative sound of a single trumpet, standing in for the blowing of the shofar. I’m not the biggest fan of dancing in the aisles, but I found myself dancing in the aisles. It’s a music program led not by pinch-throated cantors, performing the moves of the pre-war Synagogue, but by people who know who they are singing with. That’s the essential difference between Nefesh and others. Their musical ensemble sings with the congregation, and we the congregation sing with them.

The result is moments of ineffable beauty that are hard to come by in the American synagogue. I’ve experienced it at my own synagogue in Tulsa and now in the pews of Nefesh L.A. I actually know every word of the service. I’ve been generating those words since I was a first-year professional (and before), and it would be weird if I couldn’t choke them out. But I found myself at Nefesh discarding the words to sing the music of the liturgy as a pure line of sound. Everything else was an unnecessary distraction and carried me away from The Presence and The Power. Open your Spotify account and call up Nefesh Band El Na. I think that you will be moved by what you hear.

Thank you, Nefesh, for getting it right. I’ll be back under the cross for Rosh ha-Shanah.