Photo: Jenya Pavlovski/Dreamstime
The Yamim Noraim are approaching, and everyone has an opinion about the chazzan. Some say he’s too slow. Others say he doesn’t sing enough. Still others claim there’s too much singing. Yet another group judges the chazzan by an entirely different metric: how long was the break on Yom Kippur?
Music and song have been integral to Jewish prayer since time immemorial, and the chazzan has been present nearly from the beginning. For decades, the chazzan was a fixture in American Orthodox congregations, and though his role has diminished in recent decades, many shuls still hire a chazzan for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A good chazzan’s soulful singing can deepen congregants’ kavanah, making them feel they are in the presence of Hashem. Certainly, a chazzan can make—or break—the Yamim Noraim experience. Given the importance of the chazzan to the upcoming holidays, it’s worth exploring the history of singing in shul.
Tracing the History of Singing in Shul
The earliest indication that music accompanied Jewish worship is found in Amos. When criticizing the people’s sacrifices, G-d says, “Spare Me the sound of your hymns, and let Me not hear the music of your lutes” (Amos 5:23), alluding to music accompanying korbanot. The Mishnah records that in the Beit Hamikdash, the Levites sang Tehillim, and the music and song could be heard as far away as Jericho (Tamid 3:8, 7:4).
When the Beit Hamikdash was destroyed, prayer replaced sacrifice—but song remained. In the Land of Israel during the second half of the first millennium, there was a remarkable efflorescence of piyyut—Hebrew poetry. Paytanim like Yannai and Rabbi Elazar HaKalir wrote ornate compositions drawing on Tanach and midrashic literature to beautify the standard tefillot. Seemingly, at least parts of these piyyutim were originally sung. During the same centuries, the Ba’alei Mesorah standardized the ta’amei hamikra (trop/cantillation), codifying how the Torah should be chanted in shul.
Centuries later, synagogue song was important in medieval Europe. Rabbi Yehuda Hachassid (thirteenth-century Germany) writes in Sefer Chassidim (Siman 158), “When you pray, use those tunes that are pleasant and sweet in your eyes.”
One might surmise that song and vocal artistry became even more central to tefillah after the invention of the printing press. Once the text of the siddur was standardized by printers, a cantor distinguished himself not by composing new piyyutim but with the quality of his voice and musical choices.
Some musical innovations met opposition: In 1605, Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Modena recounted how, in Ferrara, Italy, some congregants were surprised when a choir rose to enhance the prayers. But Rabbi Modena championed such changes. He writes (Teshuvot Ziknei Yehudah 6) that he did “not see how anyone who has a brain in his skull could cast doubt on the fact that praising the Lord in song in the synagogue on special Sabbaths and holidays is a mitzvah.” He also defended the compositions of Salamone Rossi, a court musician for the rulers of Mantua, who set many tefillot and chapters of Tehillim to six-part harmony in the Renaissance choral style of his time. Music, Rabbi Modena wrote, was an antique Jewish art “stolen from the land of the Hebrews,” and it was high time for his brethren to reclaim it.
Rossi’s music did not catch on in his own time, but European-style choral music sung by trained choirs and cantors entered the synagogue in the nineteenth century through composers like Salomon Sulzer of Austria and Louis Lewandowski of Germany. (Their melodies remain iconic; although Sulzer had Reform tendencies, many Orthodox shuls in America still sing his “Ain Kamocha,” “Vayehi Binsoa” and “Shema Yisrael” before opening the aron.) Sulzer made the cantorate a profession; he wore a special hat and robes, cantorial paraphernalia that survive in some places today. Most importantly, he adapted traditional nusach to Western musical modes and arranged pieces for chorus.
Rabbi Yosef Zechariah Stern . . . declared that there was no place for singing in shul at all, “only the uttering of the liturgy with gravity.”
Eastern European cantors also adopted Sulzer’s methods. Choir shuls sprang up from Hungary to Russia. Vilna’s Choral Synagogue, built in 1903, was a grand edifice in Neo-Moorish style with a distinctive blue cupola. But these shuls were controversial. Some Hungarian rabbis forbade entering them. Rabbi Yosef Zechariah Stern in Lithuania declared (She’eilot U’Teshuvot Zecher Yehosef 50) that there was no place for singing in shul at all, “only the uttering of the liturgy with gravity.” Even the more moderate Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer in Germany, who allowed prayer in a choir shul, thought synagogue choirs were too great a concession to modernity. Nevertheless, throughout Europe, cantors and their vocal virtuosity reigned. Congregational singing was virtually nonexistent outside Chassidic shteibels, many of which still had professional cantors and choirs.
The Golden Age of Cantorial Music
The first half of the twentieth century was a cantorial Golden Age. Star cantors sold hundreds of thousands of records and performed internationally. From 1881 to 1924—the peak period of Jewish immigration to the United States—there was something of a cantor craze. In 1930s New York, sometimes 100 cantors waited in line to try out for positions. Shuls competed fiercely for star cantors like Yossele Rosenblatt, who was brought to America in 1911 by New York’s Ohab Zedek in Harlem. When Rosenblatt led davening, the shul overflowed and the police managed crowd control. His fame spread beyond the Jewish world; he toured on vaudeville and appeared as a singer in the 1927 Hollywood movie The Jazz Singer.
Yossele Rosenblatt’s fame as a cantor spread beyond the Jewish world. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Originally, in Europe, cantors began as meshorerim (choir boys) apprenticed to established cantors. In 1954, Yeshiva University founded the Cantorial Training Institute—now the Belz School of Jewish Music. The school, along with other similar institutions outside the Orthodox world, standardized and shaped nusach hatefillah, preserving the ancient modes of chanting each prayer service and publishing its musical notation for posterity. Belz instructors emphasized that nusach hatefillah is not arbitrary, often citing fourteenth-century Germany’s Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (Maharil), a renowned chazzan who cautioned against changing the tunes used in davening (see Rema, Orach Chaim 619:1). In fact, the chants for certain Ashkenazi prayers are so deeply rooted that some call them miSinai tunes—considering them as if handed down to Moshe at Sinai.
The Golden Age ended in 1966 with the death of the generation’s last star cantor, Moshe Koussevitzky. Yet, decades before that, many shuls—such as those affiliated with the Young Israel movement, which sought to inspire young Jews—began emphasizing congregational singing. Sherwood Goffin, cantor at Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan, was one of many transitional figures. Deeply devoted to correct nusach hatefillah—he taught at the Belz school for many years—Goffin also aimed to inspire worshippers by encouraging greater participation. In the 1970s and beyond, the music of Jewish folk singer Shlomo Carlebach and other easy-to-sing tunes—like melodies from Abie Rotenberg’s Dveykus—began to replace operatic cantorial solos.
Chazzanut Today
Today, you’d be hard pressed to find an Orthodox congregation with a choir—Breuer’s, the German congregation in Washington Heights, New York, being a well-known exception. Professional chazzanim are also far fewer. While cantorial concerts remain popular worldwide, you won’t hear much chazzanut in shul. Lay-led services predominate, and ba’alei tefillah rarely employ the vocal acrobatics of yesteryear’s cantors. Melodies are often straightforward and easy to sing. Now, even on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, some shuls forgo a hired chazzan, relying instead on trained congregants to lead services. While the Belz school is not as popular as it once was, there are, however, two successful cantorial schools in Israel, and there is a modest resurgence of chazzanut among a handful of young Chassidic singers.
Some of the reasons for the shift away from chazzanut are self-evident. Cantorial music has simply fallen out of style. Carlebach’s folk music or the sweet tunes of Abie Rotenberg’s Dveykus are more palatable to modern shul goers. Today’s popular Jewish music draws on rock standards—drums, electronic keyboards, guitars. When Mordechai Ben David debuted in 1973 and Avraham Fried released his first album in 1981, they infused their music with the sounds of disco and pop. The non-Jewish influences were unmistakable, and not everyone was pleased. A memorable 1997 letter to the editor in The Jewish Observer, Agudath Israel of America’s magazine, criticized an “Orthodox telethon in LA” that “showed a rocking Chassid shoving a microphone down his throat,” alongside yeshivah men with “sweat rolling down their peyos, their hands and hips gyrating in all-too-perfect synchronization.” But cantorial music was not entirely pure either—it drew on Western European choral traditions, even church music. Nevertheless, Jewish pop was here to stay, and over time, it has only grown more diverse and more popular.
Not only has the cantorial style fallen out of favor for some, but there are also those who view cantors as performers more focused on showcasing their voices than on leading the congregation in prayer. This is hardly a new complaint. The Shulchan Aruch, written in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Yosef Karo, chastises a “leader who lengthens the prayer” if he “intends to . . . rejoice in his [own] voice” (Orach Chaim 53:11).
Fast-forward a few centuries, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe puts it even more bluntly. In one of his sichot, he remarked: “A ba’al tefillah for the most part brings out the best in worshippers, whereas a chazzan for the most part causes them to sin.”
Part of the problem may be that many of the star cantors of the Golden Age blurred the line between shul and stage. They brought their concert hall compositions back to shul. But what works in a concert, where one is trying to impress an audience, doesn’t always work in a synagogue, where one should be attempting to inspire a congregation to sincere prayer.
Moreover, worshippers no longer want to sit passively in shul and listen to the cantor; they want to participate. Herman Wouk, in the book This is My G-d, recounts that in mid-twentieth-century America, many congregants were unfamiliar with the prayers. A worshipper, he writes, “is handed a prayer book that strikes him as a jumble. . . . Now and then everybody stands, he cannot say why, and there is a mass chant, he cannot say what; or if he dimly recalls it from childhood, he cannot find it in the prayer book.” But at least in Orthodox synagogues today, Hebrew literacy is nearly universal. Do we really need a cantor if everyone knows how to read?
Too often today, tefillah feels rushed and routine, led by untrained ba’alei tefillah who fail to convey its depth and beauty.
Yet perhaps we’re being unfair to the chazzan. Chazzanim have always been performers, but a good one also brings people with him into the tefillah. By modulating his voice in sync with the meaning of the words, a chazzan can create an atmosphere of kavanah. A true cantor is a master interpreter of the nusach hatefillah. He uses vocal drama not for show, but to plead with Hashem—repeating words for emphasis, drawing out phrases to stir the heart, helping build a sense of kavanah among the crowd.
And though it might be hard for us moderns to imagine, there was a time when the cantor’s emotional range truly moved people. Many people were deeply affected by the cantor’s improvisations and dynamism, hanging onto every word. There was a genuine charisma to the cantor that stirred the congregation—they would shed tears or gesture with their hands or fists. Sometimes we forget that worshiping Hashem can be just as much about listening as it is about singing along. Chazzanut, at its best, was a gateway to the numinous: it created a space where one could listen and hear the still small voice of G-d.
It is also important to note that traditional chazzanim are preservers of nusach. Aryeh Samberg, who studied at what became the Tel Aviv Cantorial Institute and served as the chazzan at Anshei Sphard Beth El Emeth in Memphis, Tennessee, for thirty-seven years, says that although he never used flashy chazzanut and was an early adopter of congregational singing, he can’t abide some of the new popular tunes because they don’t match the flavor of the nusach. “The music is to interpret the words,” he explained. “It has to come out of the correct nusach.” The way the chazzan sings certain phrases is a form of commentary.
For example, the paragraph Ochilah LaKel, which the chazzan says before the open ark on the Yamim Noraim, includes the words “meHashem ma’aneh lashon—the tongue’s eloquence comes from G-d.” When the chazzan chants that phrase, it’s supposed to sound like speech itself is coming down from Heaven. “I go really high for that part,” Samberg says. If the chazzan gets people to think about the meaning of the words, “something’s been accomplished in terms of the congregation connecting to the tefillah.”
The nusach also serves as a compass, orienting congregants to the time of year. Each holiday and tefillah has its own unique sound. Samberg points out that a nusach that is universal creates connection; someone can walk into any shul anywhere and feel grounded. Since the days of the cantorial training schools, proper nusach has been tightly bound to chazzanut. Without chazzanut, nusach is in danger of being lost.
Finally, the precision and professionalism of cantorial singing remind us that davening should be beautiful—elevated, like a work of art. We are commanded to glorify and beautify G-d through the performance of mitzvot (see Rashi, Sukkah 29b). This ideal should apply to tefillah no less than to a gleaming Torah crown or a flawless etrog. A traditional cantor may no longer stir congregants as he once did. But there is something in his fidelity to proper nusach, the reverence he brings to the tefillah, and the way he shapes prayer into an expressive, almost sculptural experience that we can’t afford to lose. Too often today, tefillah feels rushed and routine, led by untrained ba’alei tefillah who fail to convey its depth and beauty.
Eliyahu Beer—a singer, ba’al tefillah and rising force in the Jewish music world—has given serious thought to how best to blend the old with the new. His influences include Breslov and Carlebach, but he also studied cantorial music at the Belz school. Beer “appreciates nusach as it is” and often wishes he could use pure nusach more frequently. But because “there’s more crowd involvement that’s needed,” Beer often begins the service with dancing, hoping it will lift participants to a more elevated and focused place for the tefillah itself. He still incorporates some chazzanut but only after singing with the congregation—so that, as he puts it, they feel, “I’m bringing you into that chazzanut by having sung with you.”
What are ways to make tefillah more awe-inspiring but with a modern aesthetic?
• Shuls must be intentional about creating a space for beautiful davening. Ba’alei tefillah who lead on Shabbat and yom tov should have pleasant voices, a strong command of nusach, and the ability to uplift the congregation through song.
• A few times a year, shuls should organize special Shabbatot. They can invite groups like the Maccabeats or other a cappella ensembles to elevate the davening with layered harmonies.
• Alternatively, they might bring in popular singers like Simcha Leiner or Shulem Lemmer, who not only sing beautifully but are also trained chazzanim—attuned to the nuances of nusach and able to inspire with virtuosic flourishes.
• Some shuls now hold musical Selichot or a pre-Selichot kumzitz, or they bring in musicians and singers to occasionally lead a musical Hallel on Rosh Chodesh. People want to be moved. Tefillah should be a religious experience. Shuls ought to find ways to create such experiences, not just on the Yamim Noraim, but all year round.
Earlier this year, I attended a Friday night davening led by Beer in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I live. The experience had little in common with listening to a traditional cantor: People were clapping their hands, stamping their feet, even twirling about the room.
Some participants gathered around Beer like a spontaneous choir, with him as their conductor—as he raised and lowered his arms in rhythm, he drew out melody and harmony through the movement of his body. We sang many Carlebach tunes and other melodies, but Beer also stepped into the role of chazzan, improvising cantorial flourishes at the end of paragraphs and playing creatively with the traditional nusach. By pulling everyone into the davening, Beer blurred the line between performer and participant. Each person was leading their own prayer—yet somehow, we were all doing it together.
This style of tefillah, admittedly, is not for everyone—but it resonated with me. I felt fully present, engaged with the congregation but also in dialogue with Hashem. Tefillah that night was anything but perfunctory. I found myself thinking: the spirit of chazzanut isn’t dead. The music has evolved, as musical styles always do. But at its core, chazzanut is simply a tool—a way to draw us closer to G-d.
Sources:
Rebecca Cypess, “Reclaiming the Musical Past: Leon Modena and Salamone Rossi in Context,” Lehrhaus (March 12, 2023), https://thelehrhaus.com/culture/reclaiming-the-musical-past-leon-modena-and-salamone-rossi-in-context/.
Ari Y. Kelman and Jeremiah Lockwood, “From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 30:1 (2020): 26–62.
Jeremiah Lockwood, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California Press, 2024).
David Olivestone, “Shul or Show? The Golden Age of Cantorial Music,” Segula: The Jewish History Magazine (September 2020): 30–39.
Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Yosef Lindell is a lawyer, writer and lecturer living in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is a former editor of the Lehrhaus and has published more than forty articles on Jewish history and thought in a variety of venues. He often leads davening throughout the year and on the Yamim Noraim.