Higher Education: Debbie Friedman in Chicago

In June 1972, singer, songwriter, and liturgist Debbie Friedman went to camp. The twenty-one-year-old had already distinguished herself as a regional force in liberal Jewish worship music, having led young people in song for nearly five years, including a turn in 1969 as a national song-leading instructor for the Reform Jewish Kutz Camp Institute in Warwick, New York. Friedman’s then most recent accomplishment, however, had been the creation, instruction, and presentation of a complete, original worship service at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Mount Zion Temple less than a month earlier, backed by electric bass, percussion, keyboard, and the chamber choir of her alma mater Highland Park High School. Taught entirely through oral transmission over several months of rehearsals, and worked to a high aesthetic polish, Sing Unto God became Friedman’s calling card, heralding, as the back cover of the LP announced, “a new experience in worship that emphasizes through song the importance of community involvement.”¹ The same ensemble professionally recorded the service’s twelve original musical selections a couple of weeks later, thus giving it a broadly accessible commercial form. That summer, at the Reform movement’s Midwest region camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (then called the Union Institute), the finished record arrived hot off the press and quickly sold out at five dollars per copy.² Friedman, hired as a counselor for the camp’s high school-aged Hebrew-speaking unit (Pioneers, or Chalutzim), also brought the service to the campers, leading the different units through long and demanding rehearsals to achieve a polished and consistent sound.³ On Friday night, August 11, 1972, the camp presented Sing Unto God in its rotunda building, establishing through the rare general assembly the high water mark of worship for the summer, and a source of hard-won communal pride.⁴

What happened in camp quickly spread beyond it. Union Institute, as a laboratory for Reform Judaism’s youth and leadership development in the Chicagoland area—and like other Reform Jewish camps around the country—served as a nerve center for new Jewish education and worship initiatives. Rabbis from major area synagogues regularly served as in-residence faculty, leading discussions of Jewish rabbinic texts, reinforcing the contemporary relevance of “Jewish” values, helping young people to construct and conduct religious rituals, and participating in sports and other leisure activities. The extraordinary and intentional exposure facilitated by this arrangement benefited Friedman, giving her access to a powerful network of communal leaders whose congregations often devoted substantial resources to youth programming throughout the year. Some rabbis found that her music’s contemporary sound clashed with their view of liturgy others embraced the service, leading youth at several area synagogues to present Sing Unto God, either in whole or in part, in the following months.

Friedman built a significant following at Union Institute through her late-night song sessions with the Chalutzim participants (boisterous one night and meditative another night), determined and serious teaching style, bursts of humor, and deep probing personal conversations that sometimes seemed to compensate for social awkwardness. Subsequent scholarly and anecdotal accounts romantically use these experiences as a source of Friedman’s musical inspiration, and some implicitly critique her artistic integrity as a result.⁵ Yet evidence points more to the summer camp experience as an opportunity to model, and then forge, mutually beneficial relationships with institutional gatekeepers and influential contemporaries across the region. Chicago Sinai Congregation Rabbi Samuel Karff, for example, described Friedman to his congregation as “an alumna of the Reform Youth Movement … blessed with a remarkably large throng of enthusiastic disciples.” During his tenure at camp that summer, he was so “captivated” by her charisma, and impressed with her skills, that he invited Friedman to join his congregation as an artist in residence that fall.⁶

This essay comprises the second part of a biography project exploring Debbie Friedman’s career and music.⁷ Born in Utica, New York, in 1951 and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she received choral training with her high school chamber choir, and song-leading experience with her NoFTY youth group, Friedman’s work...