Kabbalachia

Basya Schechter and Shaul Magid
“Sing a New Old Song”

The Talmud teaches “three things come unawares: messiah, a lost object, and a scorpion.” And there are other creative moments that happen “half-awares” being there, yet also being somewhere else. This project is one of those moments.

It was a warm early summer afternoon when I rode my bike over to where Basya was living on the far end of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. It was her first year as hazanit at the Fire Island Synagogue and we needed to prepare for Friday night davenning. I arrived with my banjo. While Basya was finishing something inside, I started picking some old-time tunes on the small outside patio just to pass the time and get in some practice. At some point Basya came out and listened for a few minutes. Then she sat down with some percussion and started riffing on a tune using the Friday night liturgy. In about an hour we had three or four new Kabbalat Shabbat tunes in raw form, adopting them from old-time Appalachian banjo music. The rest came later.

Introducing it to the synagogue was not easy. First, we needed to make the case that we could use instruments for Kabbalat Shabbat. And then teaching a whole new set of niggunim to a community is a challenge. But slowly everything congealed, and we had a new nusah (musical liturgy) for Kabbalat Shabbat (“being there, but also being somewhere else”). We added and subtracted a few things along the way, for example, a banjo version of the Calypso “Jamacia Farewell” for part of Lekh Dodi (in memory of the great day Harry Belafonte) and an austere haunting old-time ballad “Pretty Polly” carried “Raza d’Shabbat”.

As liturgy, Kabbalah Shabbat is wide open. The liturgy we have today was established in the 16th century, from an idea already mentioned in the Talmud about “welcoming the Shabbat bride.” The kabbalist Shlomo Alkaetz authored the central text Lekha Dodi in Safed in the middle of the 16th century. There is no strong indication that the moment of Shabbat’s arrival was accompanied by a specific liturgical formula before that, perhaps a song or the psalm “Song of Shabbat” may have been recited. In Safed there was a custom to go outside to the apple orchards (khakaltapukhin in Aramaic) on the edge of the city to welcome the Shabbat as the apple orchard held mystical significance. Kabbalat Shabbat is thus kind of a moment of “liturgical anarchy.”It is liturgy without authority. Once the liturgy comprised of a series of psalms and then Lekh Dodi was set in place, an entire new genre of creativity emerged in the adaptation of largely local music to the liturgy; Eastern European, North African, Central European, Yemenite, American folk music. One could write a study of Jewish music around the world just by examining the melodies adopted to Kabbalat Shabbat.

What we were doing that Friday afternoon with a banjo and percussion, later adding guitars spoons, and Oud, had likely been done many thousands of times before over the centuries. As may have been the case with myriad other experiments, it came “semi unawares.” We were there, but we were also somewhere else. There was no plan, no concept, no expectation. Not a messiah, not a lost object, and not a scorpion, but still, something not quite tangible.

Over the course of the next decade this new liturgy became our Kabbalat Shabbat at the Fire Island synagogue that included many fantastic musicians who came to visit and added their musical brilliance to the mix. At some point we talked about recording it, but as with many things, it never happened. A few years ago, we had this crazy idea to record Kabbalat Shabbat with other musicians in a studio we would set up on Fire Island. Bringing recording equipment on a water taxi and transforming the synagogue into an impromptu studio with six musicians, we spent two long days arranging, rehearsing, and then recording the songs on this album. From there we moved to the complex art of mixing, re-recording, and honing the sound.

Each one of these tunes has a story, as is the case with traditional music more generally, and often the story is only partially known. Where did a tune originate? Who wrote it? How did it travel, how did it change along the way. Alan Lomax and his father John travelled the rural south, prison farms (where he first recorded Leadbelly), the mountains, deserts, and plains of the US and later around the world, recording the music of the people. In some cases, some of the songswe adopted came from slave plantations, through the Smokey Mountains and then to the hardscrabble world of Appalachia. In some cases, they came from Ireland or Scottland through the Canadian provinces to the mountains of the mid-Atlantic. Ethnomusicologists like the great fiddler Al Jabbour (1942-2017) could show you how a song was played in one county in North Carolina and then how it was played in an adjacent county in Virginia. Musicologist and expert banjo player Ken Perlman (and my teacher) collected many tunes from Prince Edward Island where they germinated from the British Isles, sometimes germinating for a few centuries.

In any case, one way or another, some of them made it through me to Fire Island and the ear of Basya Schechter, who had her own musical trajectory from traditional Hasidic music, to Yeminite and Miztahi music, filtered through the folk and singer-songwriter scene in New York.

The musicians on this album come from a variety of musical genres; classical, jazz, bluegrass, folk music. They each added their expertise and their ear to an odd project, merging traditional old-time music to with the Jewish liturgical tradition. Working with them was like watching a painting take form, slowly taking shape, changing, moving in and out of musical genres.

So, this is our small contribution to Kabbalah Shabbat. As it took us, so it should take you; “half awares,” being there and being somewhere else. We hope it surprises you, makes you smile, and it should offer a new taste of moving from the week to Shabbat, to greet the Sabbath Queen, to embrace the creation anew, as Jews have done for millennia. Amen.

Shaul