The Lord's Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship (review)

The Lord's Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. By Jeffrey Summit. (American Musicspheres.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xiii, 203 p. + 1 CD. ISBN 0-19-511677-1. $29.95.]

Jeffrey Summit, a rabbi and director of the Hillel Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts, breaks new ground in this study of the contemporary American Jewish community. Assuming the role of ethnographer, Rabbi Summit is one of the first to objectively examine the musical worship practicies of diverse Massachusetts Jewish religious congregations or worship groups. This original work clearly explains the diverse Jewish backgrounds and musical inspirations of each. The author gathered information on attitudes and musical practices by extensive research using this rabbinical expertise, as well as field observations and interviews. He forthrightly relates grappling with his role as both an observer and participant in the worship services he attended for field work. In a succinct manner, built step by step, Summit provides both introduction and summary to the complex and changing world of American Jewish musical worship. He examines and explains in detail the various modes of Jewish worship and their meaning. The main feat of the book is in clearly demonstrating how musical choice reflects religious ideology and identity. Summit attempts to prove that musical choice is not only an outcome of religious identity, but affects it, and in many cases, defines it. An accompanying compact disc allows the reader to hear extensive examples of the music and further grasp the distinctions made in the context of the book. This work is useful to students in general religious as well as musical studies. While there are many other books that outline the Jewish Sabbath eve worship service more clearly, this work gives an insider's insights and understanding, and a scholar's attention to the world of Jewish diversity.

For all those good qualities, the scope of this work is quite limited both in representation of worship services (Sabbath eve only) and in the sampling of musical field work. For those familiar with the greater Boston Jewish area, questions constantly arise as to the objectivity of the cross- section chosen for the study. Rabbi Summit examines five worship communities across denominational lines: a large havura (fellowship community); a large, urban Reform temple; a Conservative student group at Tufts Hillel; a small, suburban Orthodox synagogue; and a New England Hasidic center. In many respects these particular choices do not reflect typical groups or congregations in greater Boston. In Summit's close examination of the role of congregational musical participation in Jewish worship, for example, one cannot but imagine that the choice of worship communities may have skewed the conclusions given by the author. How typical are the experiences of the Conservative students of Tufts University when the majority of Conservative Jews in greater Boston attend larger, established synagogues? How would the results have changed had a mid-sized suburban Reform congregation been chosen? Why were the groups of such diverse size chosen, and what controlling variable is present? The author's explanations do not satisfactorily address the need for a more complete picture of the environment for this work to draw specific, well-founded conclusions about the contemporary scene.

The weakest part of the book is the photographs. For example, at one point a photo of a Yemenite wedding appears. While exotic-looking, not one of the worshipers interviewed in the book is Yemenite. At another point, a picture of a hill in the city of Safed, Israel, appears in apparent connection to the history of the ancient text of the mystical hymn lechah dodi, but the picture is fairly irrelevant to a book essentially about contemporary American worship and musical context. Also, the compact disc is almost entirely in Hebrew (the contents are listed on pp. 191-93), but for complete texts and translations other than those...