Interview Transcript with Lex Rofes

A: Let’s talk about how the music and the service relates to the community and what some of the features of the music are where it comes from.

L: This is really good ‘cause for a lot of people there music is the service.  They don’t care about God, a lot of people just go to sing.  I can’t say it’s unique to Judaism, and really it’s not unique to Judaism, it’s unique to this specific type of Judaism.  Other Jewish services have chanting but there’s not that many people who go for that.

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So you caught an interesting one.  So music in Havurah is so core, so central.  When we describe what makes Havurah Havurah compared to the other services, it’s the fact that we sing, it’s the fact that there’s harmony, it’s the fact that there’s drumming.  Music is everything.  One thing that’s interesting is that the music, while it’s the central component for everybody, it can be divisive because the problem is you’ve got these different ideologies in the room—you’ve got the people who want to have familiar songs, so they’d rather have the same songs, the same melodies every week—I shouldn’t say songs, they’re prayers—so that it’s consistent, so they know what they’re coming into and I think that’s valid.  And that’s a few people.  You’ve got a few people who desperately want to switch it up and feel that if you stagnate with a melody, it loses its spirituality and you sort of autopilot.  I’m one of those.   You saw me, I threw in some English readings and some of the melodies I did were very much not the ones we usually do.

A: I noticed the computer science doctoral candidate put in a new melody and it seemed like nobody knew it, so he ended up singing it by himself.

L: Yeah, every once in a while that happens.  One thing that’s important to remember, because people are there for the music, sometimes people forget—Ben wasn’t one of them, Ben was the computer science guy—sometimes people forget that people want this to be a service.  If you know a melody really well and you’re a great singer, in a lot of communities or situations, you just singing that would be good.  But because Havurah is all about participation and communal singing, when that happens, the vibe in the room goes down.  You saw some highs and some lows and there are some weeks when it’s just perfect.  Ben was lucky in that Ben was leading the second part of the service which, for whatever reason, we don’t make as musical as the first half.  We could, but—

A: Is the second half after everyone goes around the circle and introduces themselves?

L:  Yeah, so the second half is Maariv, but—nobody ever decided this, but the community culture is that you do it more straight laced, more how a typical conservative synagogue would do it.  And a lot of people there leave before Maariv.  Which reflects why people are there in the first place.  I don’t really care whether people come, go, whatever, because it’s all about people connecting to Judaism in whatever way works for them.  But the fact that you have six, seven people leave after Kabbalat Shabbat which is the sing songy one—those were the people that were there to sing!  Maariv is traditionally “the service” and Kabbalat Shabbat is like the warm-up.

A:  So they’re skipping the core of the actual service because they see the core of it as being the musical part.

L:  Exactly!  Which to me is beautiful; it’s a reflection of Brown.