Covenant Award honors a Milwaukee-native musician and teacher
Joey Weisenberg
Long before Joey Weisenberg was teaching Jewish communities around the world to sing together, he was a Milwaukee kid learning from some of the city’s teachers and musicians.
He learned Jewish melodies at Congregation Beth Jehudah, where his grandfather worshiped. As a teenager, he played electric guitar in blues bars, where blues musicians taught him on stage by playing a riff and telling him, “Now you do it.” And at Milwaukee Jewish Day School and Congregation Beth Israel, teachers like Ateret Cohn showed him what it means to make Jewish learning come to life.
Those experiences have stayed with Weisenberg throughout his career as a Jewish musician and educator. This year, he is being honored with the Covenant Award for excellence in Jewish education, celebrating those who have made an impact on Jewish life through teaching.
Weisenberg will be honored with $50,000, and his organization will receive $10,000 from the Covenant Foundation, according to promotional materials. The ceremony will be held in New York City on Oct. 28.
For about two decades, Weisenberg has worked with the Hadar Institute, the New York-based Jewish learning organization. Hadar, founded in 2006, helps Jews create engaging egalitarian Jewish communities centered around Torah, avodah and chesed.
In 2016, he founded Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, a Philadelphia-based branch of the Hadar Institute. As the founder and director, he has composed and produced music, mentored artists and trained people to bring communal song to Jewish communities worldwide.
Though, for Weisenberg, communal singing is about much more than music.
When people sing together, he said, they are able to cross boundaries that otherwise divide them.
“We all need reasons to connect with each other’s humanity,” Weisenberg said. “These days, and in a very polarized world, we need to be able to sing together.”
Hadar’s Rising Song Institute emphasizes the power of group singing. The institute offers courses in Jewish song and prayer, concerts, workshops and gatherings. A communal song gathering may include five people or 50, 100 or even 1,000.
“People just want to have some beauty in their lives,” Weisenberg said. “Singing is one of those things that humans can do that is almost immediately magically beautiful.”
Weisenberg compares communal singing to a flock of birds suddenly moving together across the sky or a school of fish changing direction in unison.
The magic moments of singing can turn into spiritual experiences.
“Almost all of the time there’s some moment in a communal singing gathering where suddenly we’re not aware of what we’re doing anymore,” he said. “And we’re suddenly just floating on a magic carpet of song.”
Those moments can offer people a sense of something beyond themselves, he said.
“We get to connect with the heavens. And sometimes we’re also able to dig deep into ourselves,” Weisenberg said.
Weisenberg said his approach to teaching was shaped by people who gave him opportunities to learn by experiencing and by doing, both when he was growing up in Milwaukee and in his adult life.
Weisenberg attended Columbia University from 2000 to 2004 with the plan of becoming a doctor. While he was there, he was invited to teach at KlezKanada, a Jewish music festival in Montreal.
Weisenberg was 21 at the time and didn’t know what he was doing, he said. He was given the opportunity anyway.
“He gave me the chance to teach. It was in that moment that I realized that I had something to offer,” Weisenberg said.
This experience changed the direction of Weisenberg’s life and continues to influence how he works with musicians and educators, as he tries to give opportunities to others through continuing the cycle of teaching and learning.
“As long as the knowledge and the wisdom and the beauty is moving from person to person, it stays alive,” he said.
That cycle is part of why Weisenberg is so grateful to receive the Covenant Award.
One of his first teachers, Cohn, received the award in 1991, as part of the first group of award recipients.
“I’d especially like to send my appreciation to all of our amazing teachers at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, who not only expertly taught all of us, but also showed us how to invest our hearts into all of our endeavors, as they did every day as teachers.” – Joey Weisenberg
