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November 2010/Kislev 5771
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Jewish Sound
Ari Y. Kelman
Funny, You Don’t Sound
Jewish: Three Stories
about Sound. . . . . . . . . 1
Julian Levinson
Entering the Heart
of a Language. . . . . . . . 2
Aaron Bisman
Hearing Jewish . . . . . . . 3
Marion S. Jacobson
New Jewish Music &
Radical Jewish Culture . . 4
Greg Wall
Sound & Revelation:
A Heard Mentality . . . . . 5
Tully Harcsztark
Joining the Voices
of Men and Women. . . . 7
Ebn Leader
Verses of Song. . . . . . . . 8
Discussion Guide. . . . . . 9
Suzanne Offit
Sounds of Learning:
In a Beit Midrash and
and Senior Facility. . . . . 9
Avi Rockoff
Shul Sounds . . . . . . . . 10
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer
A Montage of Global
Jewish Sounds . . . . . . . 11
Sarah Bunin Benor
The Sounds of
Becoming Frum . . . . . . 11
Miryam Segal
Accent: The Politics of
Poetry and the Sound
of Hebrew ........... 12
Jeffrey Summit, Jewlia
Eisenberg, Clare Burson,
Bob Goldfarb
NiSh’ma . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Robert Rubin
Sh’maEthics . . . . . . . 16
ith ten sayings/utterances (ma’amarot) was the world created.” (Avot 5:1) Sound
has been a pervasive presence in Jewish life: the sound of the shofar, the blast
meant to represent both redemption and the singular voice of a numerically small
people; the accents and inflections of a global people; the varied and stirring sounds of prayer. But
what about other sounds — sounds all around us that are rarely thought of as central to the mix of
the Jewish soundscape? And what about silence? Is it a lack of sound, or a sound all its own?
This month, Sh’ma focuses on the sounds of musical innovation, on accent and the street,
on the pitched singsong of chevrutah learning, on the force of wordless melodies. One essay
explores how an Orthodox school community wrestles with the Jewish law regarding kol isha, a
woman’s voice. Another essay lends an ear to the sound sources on creation. Several writers put
a microphone to the otherwise unheard sounds of Jewish life all around us.
Our digital edition at shmadigital.com offers dozens of links to sounds associated with these
essays as well as to several Jewish sound archives. And, on shma.com, we offer a montage of
music, liturgy, and conversation mapped around the world (explained on page eleven). The word
“sh’ma” means to hear, to listen. This month, we give you much to hear and savor. —S.B.
“W
Funny, You Don’t Sound Jewish:
Three Stories about Sound
ARI Y. KELMAN
Sometime in the early 1990s, I heard
So, when I returned to
Israel a year or two later,
I brushed up on my
grammar but retained my American “r”s and
the broad vowels of my California upbringing.
I’m both happy and fortunate to speak
Hebrew, but I wasn’t convinced that I had to
learn to sound like an Israeli. In other words,
language is different from sound, and given the
myriad of ways in which we communicate
extra-verbally — accent, cadence, dynamics,
and what French critic Roland Barthes called
“the grain of the voice” — all of these things
matter; in fact, they matter profoundly.
Grossman inspired me to pursue fluency in
my second language but to retain my accent,
because my accent sometimes reveals more
than my words. My accent is a part of who I
am and how I identify. As a proud Diaspora
Jew, speaking Hebrew like an American was
not about laziness or ignorance. Rather, it was
about the hegemony of sound.
Lenny Bruce could have been reciting the phone book and
his Jewishness would have sounded as clear as a bell,
even without Yiddish, without Ladino, without Hebrew,
without klezmer or minor keys, without prayer books.
A few years ago, I was interviewing a
Christian songwriter who told me that
he had been commissioned to write a song for
a Messianic Jewish congregation. He expressed
curiosity as to why the congregation’s rabbi
seemed to prefer songs in a minor key. I
laughed and tried to explain how the terms
“lament” and “mourning” (which, for the
record, I don’t even believe to be inherent to
Jewish prayer) have been woven throughout
Jewish liturgy. A preference for the minor keys
