Chant

In keeping with my promise, I am now moving on from the topic of music. I hope some of you enjoyed the carefully curated selections I suggested for your listening pleasure and inspiration. However, for this one time and not any prolonged series, I am moving only slightly away from music to chant, which is admittedly still a form of music with the human voice as the instrument.

Chant in various forms has been an integral part of most spiritual and religious traditions spanning all times and places. As I have often related regarding the Torah and Veda traditions, the teachings were first conveyed and continue to be conveyed through chant. Both the Vedas and Torah first emerged as chant passed on from generation to generation, as is still practiced today, and only later were reduced to written form. There have been many variations of chant that have appeared over the centuries since its primordial emergence, in forms ranging from word to wordless, soft and delicate to passionate and exuberant.

I had been enthralled and inspired by several forms of chant, particularly call and response that is found in parts of traditional Jewish liturgical services and wordless Hasidic nigguns, and similar call and response or repetitive phrase chanting as found in Vedic kirtan. However, on my one and only trip to Israel several years ago as part of a group led by the Jewish Renewal wife and husband pair of Rabbi Marcia Prager and Cantor Jack Kessler, there was a person who joined our group after we arrived in Israel who engaged in what I found to be an interesting and peculiar practice. He chanted in Hebrew quietly all the time, while still engaging in life activities. He had a cheerful and welcoming countenance, although some members of the group found it to be pretentious. Other than it being novel, I didn’t think much of it until some years later, I was introduced to this different approach to chant in the Jewish tradition when I attended a weekend workshop with Rabbi Shefa Gold (no relation). She presented chant practice as an integral way of life, which I realized was similar to some Vedic practices of constantly chanting Sanskrit mantras with the use of a mala (prayer beads) while engaging in all waking life activities. I had encountered such practitioners who had mastered the ability to keep the silent or barely audible chanting going while simultaneously engaging in all everyday life activities, including holding conversations. Shefa Gold promotes a similar practice using Hebrew chant, and I realized that was what our fellow traveler on the Israel trip was doing. If you are interested in this approach or other forms of Hebrew chanting, below is her website and websites for other forms of Hebrew chant. There are several chant audio files in the “Chant/Music” page of this website, but I commend you particularly to two files as particularly good samples of Hebrew chant, “Kol D’mama Daka” (“The still small voice, please listen”), and a “Shalom” (“Peace”).

rabbishefagold.com

Kirtan Rabbi is also great in a different mode:

kirtanrabbi.com

My dear friends in Atlanta, sunmoonpie.com are also wonderful. 

And last but not least, check out https://www.congregationbethaverim.org/downloads