Cantor Brings Joy to an Old Tradition

“How do we show the Torah we love it?” asks Yonah Kliger, the youthful cantor at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills.

The 20 or so tots in the preschool session consider the large scroll cradled in Kliger’s arms. They answer as if it were a new baby brother.

“You don’t slap it?” one suggests.

This is not quite the answer Kliger is looking for, yet it is technically accurate, so he says, “That’s absolutely right!”

Sure of themselves now, the other children jump in: “You don’t kick it?--You don’t push it?--We don’t bite it?”

Yep, they’re all correct, the cantor says. “I’m glad you all remember how to show the Torah we love it,” he says with a smile. The children, age 2 to 4, are terribly pleased with themselves for getting it right.

As Kliger looks out on the small faces singing in Hebrew and clapping along with him as they wriggle in their parents’ arms, he sees himself. He grew up at this temple, attending the day school, Sabbath services, high holy days and celebrating his bar mitzvah. Then, six years ago, at age 24, he became a rarity: a cantor helping to lead a congregation that remembers him as a child.

Kliger, a compact man who wears his chestnut hair in a ponytail, attended Temple Emanuel’s religious school up to age 15 and then taught in the school throughout his four years at UCLA. He even hosted his own wedding there three years ago.

As a boy, he was torn between musical theater and a career as a cantor. He says he was swayed one night at 15. On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, he was singing a prayer before the congregation.

In his office, which has a piano and conga drums, he sings the first phrases of that prayer, the Kol Nidre. His tenor voice rises softly.

“Let all our vows today, all the promises we made and the obligations be null and void should we, after honest effort, find ourselves unable to fulfill them,” he reads from a translation after he is done.

Historically, because Jews considered themselves bound by any vow--even one made under duress--the Kol Nidre brought comfort to those forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity.

“I think before that night I didn’t really understand its significance, its beauty,” Kliger said. “I was singing, and I felt this connection with the congregation on a completely different level.”

Recognizing that not all Jews will be moved by solemn classical liturgy, Kliger spearheaded a service dubbed “Shabbat Unplugged,” named for MTV’s live acoustic performances. The laid-back format has modern music and encourages far more participation from the congregation than standard services. The service draws a standing-room-only crowd of about 300 younger Jews on the fourth Friday of each month.

One of them is Matt Roberts, 30, who is not a member of Temple Emanuel but does pro bono public relations work for it. His sense of Judaism is more cultural than religious, he said, and Kliger’s style appeals to him.

“I grew up in a more conservative Jewish congregation, and as I got older, I started coming here more and more,” Roberts said. “At the Friday night services, that’s as close as I get to a feeling of spirituality.”

Kliger says it is not his role to lead people like Roberts to God, but to simply accept people wherever they are on a spiritual path. “I think that’s a very personal journey everyone makes individually. I try to instill a real sense of joy and family in the Judaism I present.”

Kliger’s mother, Marian Kliger, says she is awestruck by her son. “I could tell you the stereotypical things about being proud, but it’s more profound than that,” she says. Watching him singing to the congregation, “when he’s just totally lost and he closes his eyes ... there are moments when I can hear the sob in his voice, and it’s so old and he’s so young.... Then I remember carrying him, and I start crying.”

Technically, a cantor’s job is the interpretation of liturgy utilizing sacred music. Cantors also teach, preparing children to enter adulthood at the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah ceremony. The job also calls for spiritual virtuosity; it is the cantor’s voice, manner and soulfulness that invite the congregation to merge with a prayer.

More than 500 generations have passed since cantors in Europe left their seats amid the congregation to sing a prayer or two--and then swept and cleaned the synagogue after worship, said Scott Colbert, executive vice president of the American Conference of Cantors.

The art of the cantor became more formalized 250 to 300 years ago, and professional cantors gained prominence during the 19th century.

“The cantor is not a minister of music; he or she is a full partner in bringing people to God,” Colbert said.

It was also the cantor’s job to bring secular folk music to the Jewish community.

“For centuries, Jews have been enclosed within walls and were separated from the mainstream,” Colbert said. “So the cantor was someone who, with his incredible music talent, could bring the world of secular music inside.”

In the United States, the period of great cantors endured through the 1930s. Stars were technically brilliant with impressive voices and a deep knowledge of the Torah. A promising student studied with the greats--the late Joseph Rosenblatt or Mordechai Hershman of New York, Pierre Pinchik or the Koussevitsky brothers, Colbert said.

The Holocaust, however, almost destroyed the Eastern European cantorial tradition. Many of the great cantors perished in concentration camps, and their loss jeopardized what had largely been an oral tradition. But in 1948, Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion founded the School of Sacred Music, helping to revive the tradition. Today, there are about 1,000 cantors nationwide, Colbert said.

For Marian Kliger, the Holocaust left her wrestling with how to raise an observant Jewish child who asked baffling questions about God. “Being a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Yonah would see the numbers on their arms and ask, ‘How could God let that happen to you?’” she said. “So it was difficult. I didn’t intellectualize God to him, I left it that God is a part of everything--it was just a given.”

Today, Kliger says his mission is to transmit a joy and passion for Jewishness. His style is warm and welcoming, a modern approach to an ancient tradition.

“Traditional cantors were trained in a style of music and in a vision of a liturgy where the cantor was the [sole] representative of the community before God,” said Laura Geller, Temple Emanuel’s rabbi. “He would sing and people would respond, ‘Omein!’”

But younger American Jews have a variety of musical experiences to draw upon, and a spiritual shift has taken place among more liberal congregations, Geller said. “I grew up in a synagogue where the choir was hidden, and as a little girl I only heard the voices; I thought they were angels. But that wouldn’t work now.”

As temple architecture has become less soaring and majestic and more intimate and serviceable, reflecting cultural changes, Geller said, so too has the style of prayer. “The dominant metaphor now is not that of God soaring above a congregation,” she said, “but of God living within.”

At the end of the preschool session, Kliger reminds the children that the Torah is delicate. In addition to never kicking or biting one, it is not to be touched with fingers.

“What we do is we give it a big kiss in our hands, hold the kiss tight, then let it out at the Torah,” he says, showing them.

So they do, giving their hands long, sometimes wet kisses and balling up little fists. Kliger sits down on a stool, and the children walk past, opening their hands wide to release the kiss, fingertips hovering very near, but never actually touching the Torah.