Singing God's Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism by Jeffrey A. Summit (review)

Also available as an e-book (ISBN and price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, companion Web site.

וָאֶתְחַנַּ֖ן אֶלֹּ־יְהָו֑ה בָּ רֵ ע֥ת הַרִ ה֖וא רֵ לֹּאמֽקֹרֹ׃

Va'etkhanan el Adonay ba'et ha'hee le'emor : And I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying,—Deuteronomy 3:23

The opening verse of Parashat Va'etkhanan (the second Torah portion in Deuteronomy that is read after the Tish'a Be'Av fast) captures the concentric circles around which Summit conducts his cross-denominational ethnography of the performance of biblical chant in U.S. Ashkenazi synagogues. While my choice of this particular verse is quite random, it is this three-line structure, consisting of the original biblical Hebrew verse, its transliteration, and its translation, that determines many of the practices of cross-denominational U.S. Torah readers in the Ashkenazi nusach surveyed in this book. Consider, for example, that Summit's informants do not have equal or full understanding of the biblical text cited above, namely, the ability to read biblical Hebrew, to correctly pronounce and phrase it, and to understand its meaning. This factor alone is enough to demonstrate the different levels of proficiency in comprehending and performing biblical tropes, and yet Summit expands these findings even further through additional variables (and they are in abundance) that extend from the performance outward, to communal and familial histories, and to the particular communal-specific practices attendant to Torah chanting: who is reading (a man, a woman, an experienced reader, a lay congregant, a bar/bat mitzvah, an adult bar/bat mitzvah); the readers' denominational backgrounds and affiliations; the designation of these particular individuals to read from the Torah. Other questions posed include: what were the circumstances that led them to being called to the bimah; who taught them how to chant tropes; how did they study this role; what is their listeners' experience; and, finally, how do emerging new practices affect contemporary congregants, congregations, educators, rabbis, and cantors, especially in light of increased accessibility to Torah chant through what might be termed "digital traditions" (software, websites, apps) capable of teaching cantillation to individuals who had never engaged with the live subtleties of biblical chant.

Now another look at the Deuteronomic verse above shows that neither the transliteration nor the translation has the biblical tropes of the original Hebrew verse, whose main function is syntactic, determining the division of the above-listed verse into two versets: two constituent disjunctives, etnakh and the sof-pasuq (end-of-the-verse) tropes under the words Adonay (Lord) and le'emor (saying), respectively, cemented by the conjunctives merkha (first and fourth word) and tippeha (fifth word). Such distribution of the versets affects the translation and rhythm of the verse, mainly since the two disjunctives substitute for a comma (etnakh) and a colon (sof-pasuq). And we have not yet said a word about these tropes' subsequent musical execution, but neither does Summit throughout most of his book (not before chapter 8 at least, and even there he talks about rather than directly relating to musical properties); nor have we yet to consider that text is sung on Shabbat from a scroll whose Hebrew letters are bereft of both vowelization and tropes, thereby demanding rigorous preparation of exact pronunciation and musical tropes in addition to memorization of what is literally a monophonic invisible score.

Summit regards his book as "an examination of participatory religion in American Jewish life" (p. 244). Having structured his book pedagogically—moving from the different Torah chant traditions, through individuals' experiences, to musical performances and new modes of (digital) transmission—he relies methodologically on the micro and oral histories of dozens of informants whose age, location, and denominational affiliation (all within the American Ashkenazi soundscape) create a rich picture in which simultaneous practices refuse systematization. Often these findings (evident in Summit's transcripts, interviews, and field notes) are too subjective to yield an extensive...