Kehilot Sharot, who will be appearing at this year's Limmud Festival, use the traditions of religious poetry to bring together Jews from different backgrounds
Every day in the prelude to the Shema, we speak of the different bands of angels joining together in heavenly praise. It is a picture of cosmic harmony, celebrated in “sacred melody”.
We might not quite be able to scale the heights of heaven when we listen to Kehilot Sharot but the Israeli organisation will try to take us as close as it can. Founded 20 years ago, it aims to bring together Jews from across society — religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardi — through the medium of song, drawing on the rich traditions of piyyutim, liturgical poetry, from across the Jewish world.
It runs groups in different towns and cities in Israel who meet over the course of the year to learn new tunes and then perform them together in a grand songfest. And this month some of the paytanim, “the bards” who mentor them, will be coming to teach and perform at the Limmud Festival in Birmingham.
We tend to associate piyyutim particularly with the medieval poems we sing on the High Holy Days, whose allusive language can sometimes be opaque. But Kehilot Sharot’s repertoire is much broader and embraces Jewish life far beyond the synagogue.
Jeanette Rotstain Yehudayan, one of the team coming to Limmud, left Tehran for Israel at the age of 15. “In Iran, piyyutim are liturgic — sung in the beit knesset, paraliturgic — sung on chagim and moadim [festivals], and secular — at every event where Jews are gathered together and encouraged to be happy and have gratitude towards their lives,” she says.
One of her happiest memories is of listening as a little girl to her father, a chazan, when he sat with his friends singing piyyutim “for hours and hours” ,fuelled by “a little bit of wine — and maybe not a little”.
Kehilot Sharot was started by Yossi Ohana, a social activist of Moroccan heritage. The early leaders of Israel, who were predominantly from Eastern Europe, “wanted to create a melting pot,” explains Netanel Zalevski, who will also be at Limmud. “They wanted to found a new Israeli, and the new Israeli had to forget anything from his past — Yiddish, Ladino, all the languages, traditions — to be a sabra. Especially the traditions, Moroccan, Iraqi, Egyptian, that came from Arab-speaking states.
“There was not an official ban but they felt it was not right to speak in Arabic and a lot of time children were ashamed of their parents and they tried to disconnect with their tradition.”
Instead, what Yossi Ohana wanted was to revive those traditions and give them their due place in the culture of modern Israel. “I am a black sheep — I am Ashkenazi,” jokes Mr Zalevski, whose speciality includes Chasidic nigunim.
“The goal of this organisation is to connect people to their tradition, whether they are religious or secular,” he says, “and let them be able to enjoy and know it in their way, without judgment.”
And not only to connect them to their own tradition, but to Jews from other cultural backgrounds.
Twenty or so years ago the divisions between religious and secular in the Ashkenazi communities were particularly acute, he thinks, but less sharp among Mizrachim. But he believes the borders between Ashkenazim are “softer” now.
JeanMs Rotstain Yehudayan, who has been involved with Kehilot Sharot for 11 years, says it would be “a huge loss” if the cultural resources of the past were not transmitted to future generations. “I’ve devoted all of my life to listening, collecting, recording, teaching, to spread them.”
One thing she has been doing is musical matchmaking, taking melodies from the secular Persian tradition and marrying them to “milim hakdashot [holy words]. Persian music is one of the most fascinating, richest forces of music of the East. It is called the mother of all Eastern music.
“One of the purposes of Persian classic music is not only for pleasure. It wants to transform your consciousness and state of mind, [taking you] to a place of steadiness, mindfulness, of mystery.”
She has sung at many music festivals internationally, where she has included piyyutim in her set, and sensed that even when people didn’t understand the lyrics, they have experienced “a precious intimacy with the song… there is a magic happening there”.
In the Iran she left as a teenager, life was hard and “saturated in violence” but for the Jews who sung them, the songs evoked a sense of hope.
“The text is optimistic,” she says, “Ashreichem Yisrael — be glad and be proud that you are Jewish, you are a son of Moses.”
Her pupils fall in love with the melodies, she says. And when she breaks off to sing a few bars from Shachar Avakeshcha, “At dawn I seek you”, a poem by the 11th-century Spanish philosopher, Solomon ibn Gabirol, which she has set to music, it is easy to understand why. Her passion for her art is there in her voice.
And she promises: “When you hear Netanel sing, you won’t want him to go back to Israel.”
Limmud Festival begins on 23 December. For more details, see limmud.org/festival
