“Find for yourself a teacher and acquire a colleague for study” — Pirkei Avot 1:6
I have been privileged to call the recently deceased singer-songwriter Debbie Friedman my teacher and the Havanashira community that she created my partners in study.
“I am wracked with grief. Sustain me in accordance with Your word” —Psalm 119:28
Grief continues to surprise me even after all these years. Debbie died on Jan. 9, the Sunday of Torah portion B’Shalach (Exodus 13:17-17:16) as the Israelites are finally let into freedom.
What irony that she died in the week of Shabbat Shirah (Sabbath of Song), on which we read the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-21). What irony it is that the woman who wrote “Miriam’s Song” and championed women is not here to sing it with us this year.
It says in Psalm 130 “Out of the depths I cry out to You.” I’ve been a rabbi for the last 15 years. Death is a constant in my day.
There are those who go with ease and there are those who suffer. And then there are those who did not see death coming and so they are mourned with a different kind of rawness.
I thought I’d seen and felt every kind of grieving. And then came the news of Debbie’s death and I realized there are still shoals of feeling yet unexplored.
Breaking barriers
Her good friend, the composer and mensch Sam Glaser, wrote for all of us: “Every thing I do I think, wow… Debbie can’t do that now. I’m stoic and then crying again… I’m still not sure what losing her means. I don’t think any of us know. OK. I’m crying again.
“She’s dancing with Miriam. No question. The seas are parting. She opened up the sea for us Jewish musicians. She showed us our potential. She showed us how to open up the hearts of our audiences to hear God’s music. How the concert or song session was not about us singing, but about lifting the spirits of everyone in the room, getting them to sing.”
We forget. We forget what communal prayer was like before Debbie, before Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994), before the other halutzim (pioneers) who in the face of adversity (and it was often nasty and personal) showed every Jew that they could truly sing unto God a new song. She matched adversity with persistence and fought for us.
We forget that an entire generation walked away from a Judaism where they were sung at and preached at, shut out when they so desperately wanted to be part of it.
In her commentary on the morning prayers, Debbie wrote: “Every soul has its own song.” The Kotzker Rebbe said that God dwells wherever you let him in. It was Debbie who tirelessly, at the expense of her own fragile health, broke down the barriers of decorum and opened the doors of the synagogue wide to welcome those souls in.
Dayenu… if she had only done that it would have been enough. But Debbie, my teacher, was not only about music. At someone said at her funeral, streamed in real time all around the world, “her calling was to live Jewishly. Her music was the vehicle of her expression.”
The accolades center on how central her music was to our prayer experience. Some of it will likely reach the point, like the 150-year-old “Sh’ma Yisroel” composed by Cantor Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), that it becomes the norm and is considered from Mi’Sinai (from Mt Sinai).
Even now, people around the world sing her music as inseparable from their prayers, sometimes without knowing it. A decade ago, I was living in Israel and assisting a renegade Argentinean rabbi in moving a moribund Jerusalem synagogue into the 20th century through music.
One Thursday night, the members voted a ban on modern music, especially Anglo music. On Saturday night, I listened to them sing “Havdalah” completely unaware that their beloved melody came from the heart of Debbie Friedman.
‘In the moment’
But music is not all that I will take away from the privilege of experiencing Debbie. The woman who composed the morning prayers for the body and the prayer for the soul in harmonic and rhythmic counterpoint taught me that, in prayer, they are not equal. The neshama (soul) needs to lead.
At the end of her funeral, the service leaders asked those who knew her to tell a story about Debbie every day of sheloshim as well as singing her songs. I do not know how to convey Debbie in a coherent story because so much of her was humor.
This was a woman who named her dog Gribennes (Yiddish for fried chicken- or goose-skin), who could turn a broken guitar string into an impromptu 15-minute monologue that would put any Borscht Belt comic in the shade, who was the master of the slow take and the expressive glance. It is impossible to convey because nearly all of it was “in the moment.”
And perhaps that was her greatest gift. Debbie modeled for me being fully present. She not only said we have to live for today, but she lived it and prayed it and sang it and laughed it.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) said that there are three ways to mourn: to cry, to grow silent, and then to transform sorrow into song. Debbie set the line from Psalm 30, “You’ve turned my mourning into dancing” in a joyous song.
I am not there yet. Nachamu, nachamu … I am still in need of the comfort promised in chapter 40 of Isaiah.
But I believe from the gift I was given by my teacher that “those who sow in tears will reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5). I just need a little more time to cry.
Rabbi Tamar Crystal is spiritual leader of Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue.
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