The Book of Life

What we are worshiping we are becoming: Thoughts on memory, tradition and the Days of Awe.

“In prayer there is a danger of relying on the word, of depending upon the text, of forgetting that the word is a challenge to the soul rather than a  substitute for the outburst of the heart.” - From Hannah Rosenthal’s High Holiday Services

It has been said that we die three times. Once when the body ceases to function. Second when the body is consigned to the grave. And third when our name is spoken for the last time. It is unclear who said it originally (I have seen it attributed to everyone from Ernest Hemingway to the rapper Macklemore). 

But if it’s true, then immortality exists in telling stories and saying names. 

35 years ago next month I had my Bar Mitzvah. That same week the Berlin Wall came down. I remember a vague sense that both were significant, and maybe even related in some way. History was happening in small, intimate moments, and in large, sweeping gestures at the same time. The book of life was being written all around me.

My Bar Mitzvah ceremony took place at the Gates of Heaven synagogue in Madison, Wisconsin. It was built by a small Jewish community (17 families) in the 1860s, and subsequently used by a number of secular businesses ranging from a dentist’s office to a congressional campaign headquarters, before eventually being bought by the City of Madison.

The building is considered to be one of the oldest synagogues in the United States and there is something very spiritual, albeit austere, about the space. Today it can be rented from the city for events by anyone, which is how in the early 1980s a group of post sixties alternative type progressive Jews in Madison got together to put on their own High Holiday Jewish New year services. 

I am reminded of all of this today because it is, of course, Rosh Hashanah.

“To be able to pray is to know how to stand still and to dwell upon a word. This is how some worshippers of the past would act; they would  repeat the same word many times, because they loved and cherished it so much that they could not part from it.”

Gates of Heaven wasn’t a traditional synagogue. It was intentionally alternative. The services were free to anyone - a group of families with no formal affiliation got together and rented the building to hold them in. 

The rabbi, Hannah Rosenthal, was in fact an unordained former rabbinical student (nearly the last in a long line of rabbis) who had studied for the rabbinate before deciding to devote herself more to public policy than to private prayers. But she needed a place to honor her father, a Holocaust survivor and rabbi, when he passed away.

So she started gathering to chant the ancient prayers that she had vowed to her father she would always recite after he was gone, particularly the Kol Nidre which is said on Yom Kippur eve - considered to be the holiest of all the days of the year for Jews - and which is itself as much of a vow as it is a prayer.

Hannah’s little services attracted mostly Baby boomers who had distanced themselves from the stilted formality of their parents' generation and were searching for something more inclusive, more accommodating, and more comfortable around which they could build a new community for their budding families.

It didn’t hurt that the services themselves were hauntingly poetic. Hannah’s prose was simple but profound, she quoted loosely from Martin Buber and the Beatles in the same breath, and distilled the essential components of Jewish prayer into a format that felt meaningful and understandable. 

The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a person will worship something – have no doubt of that either. 
One may think that tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of his or  her heart, but it will not. 
That which dominates imagination and thoughts will determine life and  character. 
Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we are worshiping, for what we are worshiping we are becoming…

I don’t know when my dad, Ben, found his way to Hannah’s High Holiday services at the Gates of Heaven. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he was raised in a Conservative congregation in Racine, Wisconsin, and later distanced himself from formal organized Judaism, becoming a jazz musician and turning to the Shul of Swing instead. But as the father of a young son (me) he also hoped to be able to create some kind of Jewish life for his young family. 

I don’t have a memory that goes back further than the Gates of Heaven. I grew up sitting on the piano bench next to him as he played Avinu Malkeinu, Oseh Shalom, Hatikvah. I watched him, I studied him, I turned the pages for him. I tried to make sense of both the Hebrew prayers and the musical markings on the sheet music.

I learned to understand music and prayer at the same time. I learned that some things can be meaningful even when they don’t make sense. I learned that singing together in a room with other people is not the same as singing alone. I learned that I somehow fit into a very long story and that history is not something that only happens in the rear view.

Time hushes all. The gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush  and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the  same hush you came from. Winners, losers, weak and strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their  lives away… Time hushes all.

So much mythology developed around this community over the years that it’s hard for me to separate the idea of Jewishness from that experience. What began as a small group of families eventually grew until there was a line to get into the building for the High Holidays. What started out as a freeform set of stories and songs over time became codified. 

Mimeographed handouts became perfect bound books. The songs that had been somewhat haphazardly arranged for the services became ritualized and memorized. My mother began taking care of the gardens at Gates of Heaven, which she did for decades.

The giant Torah that we used was what is called a martyred Torah - it was actually carried to the gates of Auschwitz buried outside the camp by Jews who in all likelihood did not survive. Because it had been buried it was no longer fit to be used in a traditional synagogue, but a less religious community like ours could still use it. In fact we loved the story of our martyred Torah - how it connected us directly to the history of our ancestors. I think we loved the stories we told about Torah more than we loved the stories that were told inside it. 

Judaism begins with the commandment: Hear O Israel. 
But what does it mean to hear? 

Every year, we would greet one another with the phrase “may you be inscribed in the book of life.” It’s a greeting that has its roots deep within the Torah, but it’s also a very alive concept and it resonated with me: we are not simply reading out of a frozen text, we are still writing the story. 

The experience of playing music for the High Holidays ultimately led my father to make an album of Hebrew Liturgical music performed by Jewish Jazz musicians called Life’s A Lesson, which came out 30 years ago. 

There’s a wonderful CBS Sunday Morning piece from 1993 that captures what the community felt like and tells the story of the record.

Life’s A Lesson put my dad on a journey that he’s still on today, and I suppose I’m on it too. After the album’s release he began performing “Jewish jazz” concerts all over the world, and since I was coming of age as a musician at that time, I joined him for most of the shows. 

For example, in November of 1997 we performed in Vienna on the 89th Anniversary of Kristalnacht (one of the most infamous pogroms against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party) with a band that included Howard Levy (harmonica), Steve Khan (guitar), Bob Malach (saxophone) and our late friend Jeff Eckels on bass. 

And in 2003 we performed at the Union Theater in Madison with Mike Richmond, Mike Mainieri and Gil Goldstein.

Listen to Third Story Podcast episodes with Howard Levy, Steve Khan and Gil Goldstein. 

Eventually Ben even wrote a book about the Jewish contribution to popular music in America, called There Was A Fire. The name refers to a story about The Baal Shem Tov, a legendary rabbi, who struggles to save his community. Really, it’s a story about collective memory. Ben told it on an episode of the Third Story Podcast a few years ago.

As I began putting my adult life together I was determined both to tell my own stories through songs, and also to hear other people’s stories through the conversations on my podcast. And in both cases there was always a low level buzz of this question of Jewish history and identity vibrating at the core. 

That can be felt in so many episodes of my podcast, from Peter Himmelman and Jack Stratton to Jeremy Dauber and Noa. But really it’s sitting just under the surface in nearly all of them, insisting “how does where you come from help to determine where you are going?”

I told the story of The Gates of Heaven on an episode of The Third Story podcast last year.

In 2022 the high holiday services at the Gates of Heaven came to an end. After 40 years (40 years!) Ben and Hannah decided not to continue doing them. 

Circumstances had changed, children had grown up and moved away, the context around the tradition had shifted, Covid had disrupted the community, and a ritual that was once filled with meaning was becoming hollowed out somehow. 

I felt guilty and partly responsible. I was among the cohort that could have fought to keep it alive. I was the one who grew up on the bench, turning the pages, learning the prayers. But instead I had moved to New York and started my own life. I no longer flew back to Madison for the services. I was one of the people who had left it hollowed out. 

Watch the last Gates of Heaven Erev Rosh Hashanah service
Watch the last Gates of Heaven Rosh Hashanah morning service

But I was back home in the late summer of that year and asked that we gather one more time to film the services for posterity. I wrote the song “There Was A Fire” in order to mark the moment. The inspiration for the song came, of course, from the same Jewish legend about the Baal Shem Tov that inspired my father's book.

Now on the High Holidays I simply stay home and watch the video that we made, like the rabbi in the woods in the old legend, trying to light a fire, kept warm only by a memory. But of course the story is never really finished. 

Earlier this year my daughter had her Bat Mitzvah. It took place in the garden of a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn. That same day Russia launched drone strikes against Ukraine, and fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continued. History was happening in small, intimate moments, and in large, sweeping gestures at the same time. The book of life was being written all around.

Next Friday night is Kol Nidre - the one considered to be the holiest day of the year for Jews - and I will once again take my place next to my father as he sits at the piano. Only this time rather than being at a synagogue, we’ll be at a jazz club in Montreal in a Shul of Swing where we will honor our vow to keep telling the story and saying the names. 

When you pray, know before whom you stand. 

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