Our Choir Director, Linda Moot, occasionally adds news and announcements here of interest to our congregation. So check back here regularly!Here are a few notes on the background and context of the 2012 Temple Beth Shalom Choir's Annual Spring Concert.
The very words “Silk Road,” an ancient network of trade routes criss-crossing Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India and China, inspire visions of camel caravans carrying high end commodities – spices, perfumes, jewelry, textiles. They also traded in steel weapons, furs and slaves. This is the stuff of legends and novels, from Marco Polo's 1269 tale of his epic journey to see the Kublai Khan to Michael Chabon's recent novel, Gentlemen of the Road. In his well known Silk Road Project, Yo Yo Ma referred to this first global exchange of scientific and cultural traditions as the “Internet of Antiquity.”
Traveling the Silk Road in the Middle Ages, a guild of Jewish merchants, the Radhanites, may have been responsible for bringing paper-making to the west, for developing letters of credit that predated banks, for introducing Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe (our own decimal system). We believe the Radhanites originated in Persia and traveled to eastern China. By the 12th century a Jewish population of 3,000 was well established in Kaifeng, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. In 1163 a large synagogue accommodated 3,000 local worshipers and hosted caravans headed west. Interestingly, their prayer books were written in Judeo-Persian, which was also the spoken language of the Jews of Kaifeng by the 12th century.
We have no written music from the Kaifeng community, but we begin our concert with a bit of conjuring. Our opening gong represents the sound of an artifact, a 12-inch black jade chime used to call worshipers to prayer and inscribed, “The Jade Chime Which Calls to the Spirits of the Departed and the Living.” Not customary among Jews in other parts of the world, this practice seems adapted from local Chinese rituals.
Considering the clear Persian connection to Kaifeng, our cantor, Robin Joseph, sings in Judeo-Persian cantillation (ritual chanting of Biblical readings) the liturgical text, “And you shall love Adonai, your God, with all your heart... (V'ahavta Adonai Elohecha...) And thus begins our journey.
Our songs come from some of the cultural centers along the Silk trade route that also supported large communities of Jewish diaspora, mostly funneled from the 1492 exile of the Spanish Inquisition: Sarejevo, the Greek Isles, Sofia, Istanbul, Adrianopolis (Edirne), Morocco, Yemen, and the great port of Venice. Just as the roads and their stopovers provided exchange of goods, they also became the cultural thoroughfares that remain today. We hear in the music a multi-cultural mix of Arabic, Spanish, Balkan, North African, and European communities as we sing both sacred and secular words in Judeo- Spanish and Hebrew. For the most part, these are folk songs, passed on through generations. We take the arrangements of modern writers and lend our own hand, as we sing of love and family, serious reflection and plain good humor.
Our journey ends in the great city of pilgrimage for Jews, Christians, and Muslims – Jerusalem! The songs grow from mysterious to exuberant as we explore the meaning of arrival in Jerusalem in many idioms, from the classically choral to a ballad by Sting to singable Israeli folk dance songs.
Last year we explored the musical conversation among Jewish, Christian and Islamic cultures in a concert of Three Faiths. This year we sing the results of that interchange – music that reflects a Jewish heritage that has absorbed the nuances of its geographic surroundings.
