The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Hey there, my name is Rabbi Jen Gubitz, and I'm pumped to be joined by Rabbi Jodi Gordon as we welcome you to the OMFG podcast, Jewish wisdom for unprecedented times. Hey, Jodi.

Hey, Gubitz. OMFG, what a fabulous 4-letter word. Those 4 letters really do the trick, from, "OMFG, why do I live someplace where it's 17 degrees outside?" to "OMFG, we made it through the last 4 years." As rabbis, we have come to know that when the stories of our lives meet the stories of Jewish tradition, transformation, growth, and something awesome occurs.

Jodi and I are experts in the letters J and G, screenshotting, eating Lucky Charms for dinner, saying "please rise in body or spirit," and Amazon Prime. And we want to bring to you our conversations that express our love for Judaism and make it relevant in the world as we mine Jewish wisdom for strength and resilience in these unprecedented times with a dose of humor. Because as Milton Berle once said, laughter is an instant vacation. OMFG, I want to go on vacation.

Ah, vacation. So this week we are talking about music for a lot of reasons, and to warm us up, we're going to do a spin on our musical word association. So Jen, quick, tell me the last 3 songs that you played in your Spotify or iTunes or whatever you use for music.

I'm listening to Summer Hits for the '90s, Sara Bareilles, and Lechi Lach by Debbie Friedman. Obviously.

You? Uh, The Sound of Music soundtrack. We're going through like a serious 16 Going on 17 phase here with my 6-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Old Town Road and, uh, Jump Around by House of Pain. I have to just— I'll edit to say I don't mind any of that music, but it is all fully a result of the music my children want to listen to.

I love it. This week we are thinking and talking about music and the power it has to soothe and excite, heal and give hope. The moment is right in so many ways. In our Jewish calendar, it's about to be Shabbat Shira, and also we're approaching Debbie Friedman's yahrzeit, and also because music is one of the things that's been getting us through.

So I would love to start with— and you can time me— but I want to start with like 2 minutes of fun facts about music or song in the Bible, in the Torah. So here's a fun fact: the word Shir in Hebrew means both poetry and song. And so there's something already automatically connected about song and poetry in Torah and throughout sort of the wide canon of Jewish tradition that we call Tanakh. So there's a lot of different songs or biblical poetry that appear in Torah, and one of them is the one that we're going to hone in on this coming weekend. As you just mentioned, Shabbat Shira, we read Shirat HaYam, or Song of the Sea. And there's a few others. There's one at the end of Deuteronomy called HaAzinu. There's Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, which Just as a side note, if you are really just looking for something very romantic to listen to, I highly recommend Song of Songs. So there's this amazing way in which, like, poetry and song appear all throughout our tradition, and the one that we are going to celebrate we call Song of the Sea. You know, Moses has just gotten the people of Israel out from Egypt. He and Aaron and Miriam are leading them forward. They hit the Red Sea. Pharaoh's army is coming up behind them, and lo and behold, the sea splits, and they sing this song, and they there's this way in which that song that we call Song of the Sea sort of becomes like their national anthem. It's like the first time that there's something that constitutes what we call like the people Israel. It's also this kind of amazing moment where it feels like a little bit of a love song, you know, maybe a metaphor between, you know, the people and God. And the thing about biblical songs, right? So that word shir again, poetry or song, is like they're special and they know it. When they appear in the Torah scroll, they're written differently. They're literally scribed differently so they look special. You can't miss them. There's a special trope or melody for chanting them. And for our listeners who think, I'm not sure I know what she's talking about, like, what is this Song of the Sea? It does have this sort of greatest hits vibe. It's out of that text that we get the song that we know as Mi Chamocha. It's also the moment when Torah describes Miriam coming forward A woman touched with spirit, she dances for the land. With timbrels in her hand and leading the women in dancing. So we see it as this really sort of musical and triumphal moment. Now, Shabbat Shira is celebrated not just because we read the Torah portion, which is a big piece of it, but it has become a celebration in— certainly in our American Jewish community and beyond— as a celebration of music. And it's this Shabbat once a year that we, that we really dive into the possibilities that music offers us.

And what you're not saying is that it's your favorite Shabbat of the year, right?

Oh, totally.

You love it.

You love it.

2021 is special because it's also the yahrzeit, the anniversary, the 10-year anniversary of the death of Debbie Friedman. Now, Debbie Friedman is a household name, and maybe you don't know her name, so we're going to tell you about her. and we're sharing some info from the website that is a tribute to her music and that shares and compiles all of her music. But Debbie was someone who, from Carnegie Hall to the Hadar Ochel dining hall at the URJ Ohlinsang Ruby, brought music to the Reform movement and beyond. Her formative years were in Minnesota, and she also was a musical genius. And as she sat in synagogue services, the story goes, she felt that something was missing for her and for those around her. And she identified with other young people whose Judaism she felt had no language that spoke to them or for them. And so she started writing. She started writing songs to express her Judaism. It's the '70s. She translated and transformed prayers, Torah, Talmud, other scholarly texts that were ancient or contemporary. She even found ways to bring forward lesser-known liturgical pieces, focusing on Torah portions, Lechi Lach, Torah portion all about journeys. She focused on Psalms, she focused on mourning, and she brought it into our everyday musical vernacular, both in services and at summer camps. In youth groups, and truly everywhere. She was so remarkable that her music really did transcend all different sorts of communities. The Orthodox feminist leader Blue Greenberg was quoted in an article around the time that Debbie died, noting how large of an impact she had in modern Orthodox shuls, in women's prayer circles, and Orthodox feminist circles. She truly was what Blue calls a religious bard and angel of the entire community. I remember living in Jerusalem and was doing a pluralist gathering with Israeli soldiers, and it was time to end Shabbat with Havdalah, and they were going to lead it. And all of a sudden, I hear this group of Israeli men singing Havdalah with Debbie's melody. I don't know if they knew who she was. I sort of chuckle at the notion that they didn't. Know that it was a woman from Minnesota, a Reform Jew, and I loved that. But I also remember being in Ukraine. We were bringing Passover observance to the community and discovered that Debbie's music had made it there already. And at one point we were dancing in a circle, sort of Israeli dancing, sort of maybe dancing a dance that was a local vibe. And the folks living there taught us a song of hers that I had never before heard. So her music really transcended time and space and religious practice. One of the ways that I think about her is really as being the soundtrack of my Jewish life. And I think, Jodi, you and I grew up in different geographic locations, but sort of similar settings. And I think that you share that sentiment as well, that in a lot of ways, Debbie really was the soundtrack of your Jewish life too.

She totally was. And so much of that for me was also wrapped up in camp. I grew up in an amazing Reform congregation, but it was certainly fairly classical Reform congregation, except for the amazing musical tradition that at your bar or bat mitzvah, no matter what, our cantor— Cantor Bill Wood, if you're listening, I still love you— would sing to you the song L'Chi L'Chi. And it actually really stood out because so much of the rest of our music was played on an organ, and it was, you know, some of the much more like big high church classical Reform. But at your bar and bat mitzvah, Cantor Wood sang "L'Chiluch" to you. And the first time that I heard that song, it was, it was like unbelievable to me. Like, I just, I didn't know what it was, but I knew that it felt really good to hear. And then I went off to the O.J. Eisner camp, and so much of her music is the soundtrack to those formative years. There's two other things, though, about Debbie that, that I have a real personal sort of attachment and love for this piece of her story. That actually I think sort of came into my life much later on when I was working at the JCC in Manhattan and working for an organization called Mayan, the Jewish Women's Project. And that is the way in which, you know, she was, she was larger than life and loomed incredibly large on the sort of on the, on the American Reform Jewish scene, so to speak. But she also was such a huge part of the second wave of Jewish feminism that sort of started in people's living rooms on the Upper West Side in the 1980s and 1990s. And, you know, I had the really good fortune of working with so many of those women, you know, 15 to 20 years later after the women's Seders had started. And Debbie Friedman and her music were an enormous part of that. You know, Miriam's Song became an anthem for these women who suddenly felt like not only was there something in this Jewish tradition for them, but there was a story that they could tell, that actually they could sing with Debbie that reflected them and their own aspirations for their own Jewish life. And the other piece of that, this may be somewhat apocryphal, but my understanding from my time working at the JCC Manhattan is that her Mishaberach, her prayer for healing, came out of some of the really early healing services and healing circles that she and people like Susie Kessler were running at what was then the Manhattan JCC. And so when I think about her music, like, there's all of this beauty, right? Her tunes to me are so beautiful and peaceful. They're nostalgic. When I think about Debbie Friedman's contributions to the broader Jewish community, you know, I sort of have to put those beautiful nostalgic memories I have aside for a moment because I'm in awe of the way that she taught American Jews how to pray for healing, how actually not to leave their illnesses and their challenges outside of the synagogue, but to bring them in and to name them. I love how when she would sing her Mishabeirah, her healing prayer, to a congregation, she would say something like, you know, this first verse I'll sing to you, I'll pray for your healing, and the second verse you sing to me. This is still for you. Right? That there was something mutual about bringing Jews together in community and talking about the things that were hard and giving Jewish language to them. And, you know, teaching us how to pray for healing, I think, is huge.

She really wrote people's full humanity back into the liturgy. Don't leave yourself, like you said, at the door. Bring your whole self and we'll learn how to hold it.

And so much of that, I think, is part and parcel of what, you know, sort of this cohort of Jewish feminists on the Upper West Side in the 1980s and '90s were doing, right? In the way of, you can't be what you can't see. You know, if there's no tune to sing for healing and it's not part of a more classical cantor's repertoire, then you don't know that you can talk about suffering in your sanctuary, right? But when somebody models for you that vulnerability and gives you literally words, gives you the words to sing about it, suddenly it shows you that something else is possible. And I think that has, to me, that is feminist. There is, you know, we get to claim that.

That's so beautiful. A Debbie Friedman concert was among the first two live music experiences I ever had. The first one may have been Sharon Lewis and Bram, which was also holy in our house. But this Debbie Friedman concert, I must have been in like 3rd or 4th grade, and she came to Indiana, which was magical because when you grow up in Indiana as a Jew, it's few and far between that people come and stop by and give a beautiful performance. But I also got to learn and work with her. When I was a song leader. So because of Debbie and people like Debbie, other Jewish musicians, I was inspired to pick up the guitar and become a song leader at camp, which led me to the rabbinat. And I got to encounter her in a few different song leading moments, and she was spicy. She was spicy, and she had a dog named Gribenes.

The thing I know about her that I love and I think about all the time is that she would correct people's pronunciation of her music and of the Hebrew prayers, right, saying, "That's not how it's written. That's not how it's written." And I appreciate that. I love that sort of precision, right, and the precision that comes with having, like, real intention behind doing things a certain way.

I remember, though, at a certain point she said, "That's not how it's written, but I know you're going to sing it how you're going to sing it," and sort of accepting that what she had created was really out in the world and had such a profound impact. So May her memory be a blessing, and may her music continue to accompany us and so many others on our journeys of life. So, Jody, I think you have a personal passion for playlists and soundtracks. Can you tell us more about that?

I love curating music for the moment, and I've been doing it since I had a boombox and Maxell cassette tapes, and I would wait for 9 o'clock to come and for Z100 to play the top 10, and I could press record so I could make a mixtape because it captured that moment. And then that eventually became, you know, burning CDs in college, and now it's, you know, sort of the ease of it all actually is astounding to me. I tried to count, and it was hard for me to do, I lost count, but I have I must have something over 70 playlists on my Spotify account. And they have titles like DC Road Trip, Thesis Jams, Library Times. You can tell I was still in rabbinical school during those times. Showtune Happiness. And then I, and this is like sort of how my mind works. Like there's certain music that lends itself to certain moods and certain moments. So I have a soundtrack called Quiet Labor and Delivery and one that's called Energetic Labor and Delivery for the music I wanted to listen to when I was having a baby. And I think, you know, when I think about moments that sort of call for music, I think music serves a couple of different purposes, right? That music can energize us, music can soothe us, music can help us focus, right? Like those Library Jams playlists are just some of my favorite classical music all lined up in one place so I could easily access it. And so I, you know, this is something I still do all the time. And I have all sorts of funny playlists that say like Lola and Goldie's Favorites May 2018, which just means that in 2018, I wanted to have the 5 songs that my children wanted to listen to on repeat handy. And now it is sort of like this like vault for my own memory to remember like the ages and stages of our family of like, what were we listening to? Like, what did our family dance party sound like? What did it sound like you know, in the car at various times in our lives.

Our family's version of that growing up was what books were on the piano. You could see that I was interested in Beauty and the Beast and Sound of Music as well. Edelweiss learned to play it with the left hand also. I cannot throw away my CDs from college and the sort of the mixes. I suppose I could go to Spotify and remake them, but there's something about, again, that sort of vault of memory that, that I can look back on and remember what I could listen to. And also there were things at different points in my life that I couldn't listen to. And it's good for me to remember those things because frankly, I don't remember much from college anymore. I also found that in this moment during the pandemic, playlists played a big role too for the people I was supporting or even friends that were not well. Since I couldn't go visit them in the hospital or in other care facilities, I made a Spotify healing playlist that I sent to people. And I found that whether you were really dealing with a difficult diagnosis or feeling lonely, that having that sort of frame to bring meaning to one's day was really powerful. And so that brings me back to Debbie, right? She taught us how to acknowledge pain and suffering. And search and pray for healing through song.

I have an amazing pastor friend here. He's the Reverend at Christ Trinity Church in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and he's great. And I invited him to give a sermon at our synagogue a few years ago. So sort of like smack in the middle of the Trump administration. And he talked about the soundtrack of a particular story in Torah for him, Old Testament. And as a part of it, he made a playlist for our congregation that was called Songs to Sing into Our Broken World. And so it's a 2-year-old playlist at this point that he made collaborative, and he added to it, his wife added to it, and I added to it, and all sorts of people. And even just a few weeks ago, a congregant of mine said, hey, remember that sermon a couple years ago when the pastor from Sheffield talked about music and the power? I forget what he said, but that playlist, and I can't find it, can you send it to me? Right? And there's something about the, like, I can't put my finger on it, I don't have all the words, but the music did it for me. So can I just have the music? That I think is so powerful. You know, you talked about playlists for healing, and now I want to do that. That's such a good idea. I also— my confirmation students, my high school students know that like anytime we're about to do something big, that they'll probably also get a playlist from Rabbi Gordon to go with it. So all of my Israel trips have their own Israel soundtrack. Music unifies, even as it's something that maybe we're sitting and listening to alone on our own AirPods, right? You know, music, it gives us literally a common soundtrack.

And music is transporting, right? It takes us somewhere and it holds space. The 18th century mystic rabbi, the Baal Shem Tov, taught about these wordless melodies that we have in Jewish tradition called nigunim. And he taught that the purpose of a nigun, which starts in one place and ends in another, is to take you from where you are to where you want to be. And you travel that journey note by note sometimes singing in community, and I cannot wait for the day when we can hear other people's singing voices again. But music is transporting.

Music is transporting. I think it's why so many people like to close their eyes when they sing, because then you can really let it take you away. I love that teaching that you just shared. There's a great book called The Torah of Music written by Joey Weizenberg, who's a fantastic composer and Jewish musician, and he writes beautifully about sort of all the different modes and moods for the way that we sing today. Right, that there's songs of like real prophecy and Torah, like real, you know, like teaching. And then there are songs of ascent, right, songs that are meant to lift us up, songs of quieting, songs that are meant to help us get still and get quieter, songs that are meant to be for listening, to help us listen. And he has this amazing sentence, right, like, you know, all it takes is one sentence to change it all. He has this amazing sentence in that book that I wanted to share. He writes, "Crying and singing are the twin processes by which we cultivate an open state of being. When tears and songs flow out of us, they encourage vulnerability, signaling that we're open for personal growth, that we may yet develop into new and more sensitive versions of ourselves." Amen. So as we wrap up this episode, Jen, I'm thinking about what you said at the beginning when you were doing our amazing intro where we like to warn people that sometimes we're funny, and you quoted Milton Berle who said, "Laughter is an instant vacation." And so in thinking about everything we've talked about tonight, I would like to apply for official quoting on quotes.com by saying, I think music is an instant vacation.

Pack your bags. I'm ready to go.

We are excited to share with you some OMFG news. Coming next month, we are going to start introducing you to some of our friends, so stay tuned for OMFG. The F stands for Friend of the Week. We're not really quite sure what to call this segment yet, so if you have any great ideas, feel free to let us know. But really, we're excited for you to meet some of our friends and co-conspirators as we start introducing them to the OMFG podcast.

This week's episode of the OMFG podcast was brought to you by rabbis Jen Gubitz and Jodi Gordon, audio editing by Leslie Gubitz, and dedicated to the memory of Debbie Friedman. [MUSIC]