In 2005, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer of New York City was leading a Shavuot retreat in upstate New York. He and his group were completing an all-night learning session, as is the custom for Shavuot, and it was 4 a.m.
Among the participants was Milwaukee-born musician and music teacher Joey Weisenberg. Kaunfer asked Weisenberg to teach a music class at 4 a.m., hoping to keep people going until the morning service at 5 a.m.
What happened was “the most incredible experience I’d ever been to,” Kaunfer told The Chronicle in a telephone interview Oct. 16. Weisenberg “took one nigun [a melody chanted without words] and had us sing it for an hour.
“The way he was able to engage people around that melody, to have us stamp our feet, clap our hands, get us out of our chairs… Everybody was so energized and excited. And I thought, ‘This guy has an incredible amount of talent.’”
Weisenberg, 32, has more than the talent that has led him to be an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, composer, recording studio musician, band-leader and music educator.
He also has a vision of how music can not only keep people awake, but can awaken a Jewish community that he believes has fallen into a slumber.
“I think that there’s a sort of a cultural hibernation that set in perhaps 40 years ago,” Weisenberg said in a telephone interview on Oct. 15. “We as Jews are sort of like a sleeping bear that’s getting ready to wake up after a long, long winter.”
For the past 10 years, he has been trying to bring this vision to synagogues and communities around the country with “Spontaneous Jewish Choir” workshops. He will be doing this in the Beth Israel Center, Madison’s Conservative synagogue, beginning Nov. 8-9 and returning in January and May.
Elissa Pollack, the synagogue’s executive director, said bringing Weisenberg was the idea of the center’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Joshua Ben-Gideon.
“This is definitely an extension of something we told this rabbi we wanted” when the synagogue hired him about five years ago, “to bring more points of connection to davening and the ritual experience overall,” said Pollack. (Rabbi Ben-Gideon was out of the country and not available by deadline.)
Moreover, the Shavuot experience was only the beginning of collaborations between Weisenberg and Kaunfer. Not only did Weisenberg become the music teacher at Kaunfer’s retreats for eight years in a row, but when Kaunfer helped create the Mechon Hadar, which operates an egalitarian yeshiva for adults, Weisenberg joined the faculty.
In addition, this year, Weisenberg and the organization have launched the Hadar Center for Communal Jewish Music, in which Weisenberg has the title creative director.
“Our mission is to reinvigorate the Jewish world through song,” Weisenberg said. Through the Hadar Center he hopes to “enlarge the scope and impact of this work. Ultimately, part of the goal will be to train other people to do this work as well.”
And he is having an effect. Leonard Felson wrote an article about him featured in the Tablet online Jewish magazine headlined “A Brooklyn-Based Prayer Leader Heralds a Revolution in Jewish Music,” and expressed the view that “in terms of potential impact, he may be the next Shlomo Carlebach or Debbie Friedman,” two Jewish-music-world-changing singer-songwriters.
On YouTube, there is a video that shows Weisenberg entering a synagogue’s sanctuary where he will lead one of his workshops. He doesn’t just look around, but starts beating rhythms on the seats, the walls, the lectern and elsewhere.
He does this to test the room’s acoustics and to see what things will sound like when people will beat rhythms on them.
Weisenberg said that synagogue architecture is part of the problem that he struggles with.
“I think that many shuls are struggling with their architecture that they have inherited, which is generally way too big and often way too comfortable,” he said. “And it has allowed people to spread out very far away from each other to such an extent that the warmth has gone out of places.
“When you get too far apart, you can’t feel the warmth of other people, you can’t hear each other very well, you can’t communicate very clearly or instantly or with nuance.”
Moreover, “if we sit very far away from the leader [of the prayers], it’s very hard to follow,” he continued. “At the same time, if the leader is very far away from the community, it is very hard to lead.
“It is sort of like inviting a bunch of guests over to dinner, and then sitting 40 feet away from them and then trying to have a nuanced conversation. It doesn’t work. And hence we have a whole culture of shouting at each other.”
Weisenberg believes “if we can come closer together then we might learn how to hear each other better – and I’m speaking physically, musically and spiritually – and we might be able to create nuanced moments of beauty.”
“What I’m trying to do,” he explained further, “is to help us all take stock of what is actually valuable about being Jewish. It is not survival and continuity just for continuity’s sake… At this point, there has to be an affirmative, positive contribution to our communities and the world. That manifests culturally as well as in acts of kindness and communal outreach.”
These ideas are not only the themes of his workshops and of his book “Building Singing Communities: A Practical Guide to Unlocking the Power of Music in Jewish Prayer” (2011, Segula Press). They have also shaped his approach to being a performing musician.
“Ultimately, I feel that I might have gotten a little bit bored with frontal performance, where the performer is on the stage and everybody else is in chairs kind of far away watching things happen in front of them,” he said.
“My vision for my own performing and for the community on the whole is to work toward blurring the lines between performer and audience, such that the audience ceases to be an audience and begins to be active participants in their own musical culture,” he said.
Weisenberg’s newest recording is born of this vision. He is the prayer leader at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, and that building has an old choir loft.
Every Tuesday night, his band, named Joey Weisenberg and the Hadar Ensemble, goes into that choir loft and brings a small audience in there with them. “So we have a small, intimate performance, where we’re sitting in the middle of a group of people and often people join us in the singing,” he said.
A group of such live performances involving Weisenberg’s own melodies took place May 5-8 and was recorded, resulting in the new CD “Nigunim Vol. III: Live in the Choir Loft.”
Weisenberg said that the resulting music both fulfills his interest in “recording real music in real time with awesome musicians” and embodies the musical influences that have shaped him and his partners – not only synagogue melodies and nigunim, but jazz, blues, soul music, “Balkan brass band music, Flamenco rhythms, elements of Bach and Mozart – you’ll hear all of these types of sounds in this recording.”
A lot of these types of sounds came to Weisenberg from his Milwaukee background. He is the son of two accomplished avocational musicians: Nancy (Bruce Harvey) Ettenheim, a classical pianist with a particular fondness for the music of J. S. Bach, and Robert (Jane Elizabeth Marko) Weisenberg, a Flamenco guitarist who has made recordings. (Full disclosure: This writer is a clarinetist, and he and Ettenheim have been chamber music partners and friends for many years.)
Weisenberg also credits Milwaukeeans Rabbi Michel Twerski — himself a gifted composer — and Cantor Carey Cohen with having “laid the groundwork for a lot of the Jewish music I’ve been pursuing since then.”
Weisenberg primarily plays guitar and mandolin, but “often I play bass or drums; I’ve also shown up playing gigs on clarinet, fiddle, harmonica and various other things.”
He majored in music at Columbia University and started the Columbia Klezmer Band. He has done ethnomusicology field work in Eastern Europe, has been an active studio musician and has performed in concerts all over the U.S. and in other countries.
He is married to Molly Weingrod and they have three children, Lev Boaz, 5, Moshe Zeev, 3, and Bina, 9 months. It was the need to put the oldest child to sleep that led to Weisenberg starting to compose, he said.
“I’d be in this room with him, trying to put him to sleep for two hours at a time, and at the end of that I’d come out having written three or four new nigunim that I’d been singing to him,” he said.
But Weisenberg said that he has been devoting increasingly less time to performing and recording and more to realizing his vision.
“I’m finding that what I really want to do is to help open up the overall cultural landscape of musical life, especially in the Jewish world where I think it is direly needed,” he said.
“Jews are sitting on top of a treasure trove of musical heritage and creativity,” he said. “We just have to allow ourselves to reclaim it. That goes for all of our other treasured heritages as well, such as Torah and spiritual thinking and learning in general.”
More information about Weisenberg, his book, his recordings and Mechon Hadar is available at www.joeyweisenberg.com and www.mechonhadar.org. For more information about his appearances in Madison, contact Beth Israel Center, 608-256-7763 or office@bethisraelcenter.org.
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