c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) After a recent Friday evening service at Reform Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden, Conn., a congregant approached Shoshana Lash, the temple’s cantor who leads the congregation in singing Hebrew prayers.

“Your singing did something to me tonight,” he told her, referring to her soothing lyric soprano voice that filled the sanctuary with a feeling of mystery. “It just lifted me up, it made something happen for me.”

As gifted as Cantor Lash is, her experience is actually far from unique.

While there are precious few laws and customs the different branches of Judaism agree upon, it seems all Jews adore their cantors. “Shelichei tzibbur,” they are called, the emissaries of prayers, which they send up to God on the wings of their mournful songs.

While the demand for cantors has always outstripped the supply, the shortage suddenly has become acute, according to cantor Scott Colbert, executive vice president of the Reform movement’s American Conference of Cantors.

Last year, for example, 30 synagogues vied for the 14 cantors who graduated from the Hebrew Union College, Reform Judaism’s central seminary. The cantor shortage exists in the Conservative and Orthodox movements as well.

Jewish leaders cite several reasons for the shortage. For one, the booming economy has enabled more synagogues to hire full-time cantors, said Reform cantor Judith Rowland of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. And more and more synagogues want them.

“It’s the emotional component,” Lash said. “I think spirituality is still an `in’ word. People are searching for something.”

Apparently many are fulfilling those mysterious longings by listening to the prayers sung by their cantors. But these sweet singers of Israel choose a life that by any standards makes impossible demands. Singing on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, as well as on holidays, is only part of a cantor’s job description.

Cantors today are ordained clergy who perform all the religious duties once confined to rabbis. That means that besides the usual congregational business of conducting weddings and funerals, leading services and visiting sick congregants, cantors typically also direct the synagogue choir and teach classes. And, perhaps most important, they prepare bar and bat mitzvah students. All the while, they must find the time to care for their voices with vocal exercises and lessons. Vocal problems are a common occupational hazard.

“The stress factor is amazing,” said Rowland. “Often congregations hire a cantor instead of an assistant rabbi. So cantors are doing two jobs.”

“Because I am a singer, I have to take care of my body in a way that rabbis don’t,” Lash said. “I can’t afford to get sick. A rabbi can still give a sermon with a sore throat. But I may not be able to sing. Or, if I do sing, I may damage my vocal chords.”

For the last 12 years, cantors and rabbis have studied together at Hebrew Union and the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. Hebrew Union established the first cantorial program in 1948. Prior to that, said cantor Richard Botton, the seminary’s director of cantor placement, “people became cantors by hanging out with an older cantor.”

“They learned by rote,” Botton said.

Cantors in those days were lay singers who rarely had full-time positions with synagogues. This was the era of the great Orthodox “hazzan,” Hebrew for cantor, some of whom became famous.

But it is not only in the assumption of pastoral duties that the cantor’s role in American Judaism has drastically changed in the last half-century. Both the Reform and Conservative movements began graduating women cantors in recent decades. Today, half or more of cantorial students are women. An exception is Orthodox Judaism, where women cannot serve either as rabbis or cantors.

Botton may unwittingly have helped create the current cantor shortage when, 10 years ago, he began calling congregations urging them to hire cantors. He pointed out the financial sense of hiring an ordained cantor rather than a lay singer.

Many did, which sometimes has led to tensions between the rabbi and cantor. In any congregation, the rabbi and cantor are partners, but not equals. It is the rabbi, not the cantor, who has the final word on religious matters. The rabbi also commands a higher salary.

“Cantors are clergy,” Botton said. “But some rabbis would rather not know it.”

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On the other hand, Reform Rabbi Jon Haddon of the Shearith Israel synagogue in Ridgefield, Conn., said congregants are often insensitive toward their rabbis. He described a Friday night scene in a synagogue where congregants virtually ignored the rabbi, who had toiled over his sermon, but embraced the cantor, telling him how much they loved his singing. Such gushing, Lash said, can be embarrassing.

But Haddon, who is a former cantor, came down hard on his rabbinic colleagues. Rabbis, he said, “are settling for the lowest common denominator.”

“Most rabbis are not of high cultural traditions,” Haddon said. “But cantors are steeped in the highest culture.” Cantors know not only music, Haddon said, but literature and poetry as well.

“Cantors want to elevate their congregation,” Haddon said. “But the rabbi wants to get through the service alive.” He described the conflict between rabbis and cantors as “basic and raw.”

So why did he become a rabbi?

The short answer, Haddon said, is “because I also love Hebrew text.” But four throat operations failed to heal chronic throat problems, so Haddon left his singing for teaching. Still, his heart is in the music.

“I could no longer function as a cantor,” Haddon said, “but I felt my real connection with God as a cantor, and not as a rabbi.”

KRE END ALEXIOU