What It’s Like To Be A Queer Female Cantor
Image by iStock
By Risa Wallach June 9, 2017
When you hear the word ‘Cantor’ or the Hebrew word chazzan, the image in your mind might be a man in a miter or top hat, wearing a tallit (prayer shawl), with a beard, or perhaps the iconic Yossele Rosenblatt, the famous tenor from the Golden Age of Cantors, or a clean-shaven Israeli man in a kippah. Or maybe you’re even a millennial who grew up with a female cantor, and for you, seeing women on the bimah is simply how it is.
I myself am a female cantor and am 45 years old. I serve a Conservative synagogue in an affluent suburb in Northern California.
I’m also married to a woman. She identifies as genderqueer, a word that is gaining popularity — meaning that she uses feminine pronouns, but her identity and gender presentation leans toward the masculine, what’s called transmasculine. My appearance and gender presentation are cis-gender (consonant with gender of my birth) and feminine. My residence is in a multi-ethnic, multiracial neighborhood in the city of Oakland.
Image by Courtesy Risa Wallach
I listen to world music, folk music, classical, occasionally opera, hip-hip and glossy, highly produced dance music when I’m driving my car. I love bluegrass music, and especially singing along with Alison Krauss, maybe adding my own harmony here and there. I love Renaissance music, and live gospel choirs make me cry. I love Yiddish/Klezmer dance more than almost anything in the world. At my wedding last summer, the Yiddish dancing following the ceremony complete with being lifted in chairs and entertained by our guests doing ‘shtick’, was for me more delicious than the locally crafted cupcakes.
In cantorial school, I was trained by a well-respected inheritor of the European Ashkenazi lineage of cantorial musical chant, also know as chazzanut, or colloquially, hazzones. This lineage has centuries of inherited musical intricacy based on the use of unique musical modes and motifs which we call nusach. The art form of chazzanut really comes into play when the Hazzan moves easily between related musical modes, and can take the improvisation to a place of heightened musical expression, examples of which were made famous during the Golden Age of the cantorate. This was a time in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s when cantors in American Jewish communities could rise to the level of fame of a super-star, and places like Brooklyn New York developed a following for well-known luminaries like David Koussevitsky in Boro Park, and his brother Moshe.
The tradition of chazzanut includes the necessity for the cantor, or chazzan (or the lay-service leader), to improvise within those modes, and to use those musical motifs to evoke responses in the congregation, while leading them in worship.
One of my favorite aspects of these customs and musical traditions is the use of the musical patterns to evoke moments in time, whether they be the weekday morning, the Shabbat afternoon, High Holy days of Selichot, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, or one of the three regalim or pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot, Passover and Shavuot, when the ancient Israelites were commanded to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem and make sacrificial offerings.
These traditions of musical artistry, skill and intricacy, not unlike the music of other ancient religious traditions, are slowly being left behind. Fewer people have the training to interpret the liturgy using chazzanut, for a variety of reasons including the modern day need for Jewish communities to participate in collective worship singing experiences. Fewer audiences have the patience, the zitzfleish, to listen to elaborate cantorial recitatives which lengthen religious services. Much has been written to lament the loss of this ability to both appreciate and to render this venerable musical form.
Being a person who adores Jewish cultural traditions rooted in ancient custom, and a person who embodies 21st century social and political categories in my daily life, I travel between worlds which are sometimes at variance, and which sometimes overlap in unexpectedly delightful ways. I can imagine that I’m not the person that the chazzanim of old imagined in their future lineage. Nor could they imagine the contemporary face of American Judaism.
The wonderful LGBT Jewish advocacy organization, Keshet, based in Boston and in the Bay Area has been a great bridge for those of us in the Jewish world who need a place where the Venn diagram puts us between, or within two increasingly related worlds. LGBT synagogues like Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco and Beth Simchat Torah in New York City are wonderful examples of places where we can feel welcomed, and fully seen, and can find communities where we feel understood. More and more queer clergy are being ordained in Jewish seminaries, including transgender rabbis. Most of these changes have occurred in the Reform, Reconstructionist movements and in the Jewish Renewal milieu. Traditional Conservative, Masorti, and Orthodox communities have been slower to recognize us and make us a part of their self-image, yet we are part of these communities, in or out of the closet. Rabbi Steve Greenberg has been a prominent voice for LGBT people in the Orthodox movement.
I came out to my community when my then-fiancée from the East Coast had decided to move to the area where I lived. At that point, I began by individually calling each member of the synagogue’s executive board. Their responses were overwhelmingly positive, and my announcement from the bimah of my fiancée’s imminent arrival soon after I made those calls, was met with warmth.
Still, what could traditional Jewish and other religious communities be doing to open their doors wider? Some communities are exceptionally welcoming, and others are less so. Visibility and full inclusion happen by a matter of degrees, and the comfort level of a community with those who seem different, whether Jews of color, Jews by choice, disabled people, non-Jewish family members or LGBT people, can be readily sensed.
In the 2017 political and cultural period of chaos and increasing fear of the other, it takes creativity and chutzpah to keep our physical doors and the doors of our hearts and minds open to those on the fringes of the dominant culture. But the enriching benefits of that kind of radical inclusion are far greater than any fear or complacency that remains in traditional religious communities. It’s time to make our houses of worship as welcoming,(and yes, fundamentalism aside) as warm and as adapted to cultural shifts (in words and in actions) as we can. When membership and affiliation are decreasing for so many communities, what other choice do we really have?
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