The Jewish world is very connected — that’s why Jewish geography is gratifyingly fun to play — but sometimes it gets siloed. Synagogues use their own tunes, week after week after month after year after decade. When there are many impeccably correct ways to do something in a service, many shuls always do it the same way. That’s entirely human nature.
Naomi Less, who will be Temple Israel and JCC in Ridgewood’s scholar in residence this weekend — “I like thinking of it instead as spiritual artist in residence,” she said — is a musician, composer, service leader, and educator who functions in a way like a bee. She’s a co-founder, associate director, and ritual leader of Lab/Shul in Manhattan, so she has an office and a headquarters, but she also spends a fair amount of her time working, teaching, singing, leading, listening, and sharing in other shuls.
She’s cross-pollinating. She’s doing what bees do, if only bees, instead of stinging, could sing.
When she spends Shabbat at a shul, “The focus of my residency is on delving into a depth of meaning,” she said. “It’s about making meaning around prayer and matters of the spirit, through music, meditation, intentionality, and some conversation.”
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She comes to this work through a lifetime immersed in shul music and life. “I grew up in a Conservative shul-going family in Highland Park, Illinois,” she said; the shul was North Suburban Synagogue Beth El. “I got a deep love of engaging in communal prayer and singing that I think was my baseline,” she said.
She was a camper at Ramah Wisconsin, on staff at Ramah Darom — Ramah camps are music-filled — and then, after college at Northwestern, went to the Davidson School at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she studied education.
Her plan was to work with summer camps, most likely as a camp director, she said; she was one of the founders of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, which provides support to the whole field. She still loves Jewish camps. But she also started to meet people who were involved in the theater and with music. She met, among others, Amichai Lau-Lavie, before he was ordained; he’s the visionary rabbi behind Lab/Shul who was the central character of the film “Sabbath Queen.”
She also always was part of a band, she said. “It was secular music, and we played to secular audiences. We played blues and rock. It was awesome. I was writing songs based on Jewish prayer, but nobody knew.”
Ms. Less worked with Rabbi Lau-Lavie to create Storahtelling, which translates the Torah into modern language, during a service, drawing on theatrical training and Jewish knowledge and creative instincts to make the reading come alive while staying true to itself. From there, she moved on to Lab/Shul.
For the last 20 or so years, Ms. Less has been part of an informal, deeply Jewish group of musical innovators and spiritual leaders. “I was very lucky,” she said, meeting them when she did, at around the turn of the century.
“They opened my heart and eyes to what was possible if we slowed down, if we took prayer really seriously. If we weren’t just davening to get through with the davening, but actually really unpacking it.
“We could do more with less” — that is, spend more time and attention and energy on fewer words, on allowing the meaning of the words to hit the heart. “There are also ancient Jewish tools of noticing, of intentionality, of music, of meditation, of theater, of story, of personal exploration, and what that could actually do to cultivate the land of the soul in a person.
“So I began a path of true exploration, in community with other seekers like me.
“We’re Gen Xers,” she continued. “We were breaking boundaries. Every generation finds their way, right? So this was pretty radical.
This was at the time when Jewish expression from the young people began to explode. The incubators, like Bikkurim,” a New York City-based foundation that encouraged new ideas in the Jewish community — “it was all happening at the same moment. I was very lucky. It was the days of JDub,” the nonprofit that produced and recorded Jewish music, “and Heeb,” the Jewish magazine aimed at other Gen Xers, “and Storahtelling.
“I was so lucky to be coming up at that time.”
Now, Ms. Less, who lives in the city, spends some of her Shabbatot in synagogues across the country. She helps people “explore what it means to really bring in a Sabbath experience for themselves and in community.”
Every community is different. In each one, she both listens and leads. As a rule of thumb, she said, she and educators like her go by the 80/20 rule; if people recognize and are comfortable with 80 percent of what they’re hearing, or what they’re singing, they’re likely to allow themselves to learn some new melodies, say, as well.
“It’s the zone of proximal development,” she said; that’s the theory, in educational psychology, about how much learners can do on their own and how much they can do if they’re supported properly. She provides that support.
She’s a performer, Ms. Less said, but even more than that, she’s an educator. When she comes to a community, she sees her role as “looking for the openings for people to connect their own experience to the ancient wisdom of the liturgists, of the poets that have given us our prayers.”
People react differently, she said. Performers often judge how well they’ve done based on “how loud people are clapping. But the reality is that you can’t tell.
“A lot of the time, people sit there. It’s not in their comfort zone to jump up from their chairs and sing and dance. But I don’t know what their internal experience has been. Sometimes, nobody has moved, and my initial instinct is that it really bombed, and then I’ll have people come up to me afterward and say things like ‘That was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had in my life.’ And you would never know it by that person’s face. You don’t know the journey that’s happening inside.
“So I remind myself to trust the process. Really, trust the process. Because everyone is an iceberg. You can see a little of the top, but you have no idea what’s going on underneath the surface.”
Ms. Less takes her obligation to bring lessons she’s learned from one community to others. “I see it as a sacred responsibility,” she said. “It’s not only to put forward what we think everyone else should be doing, it’s also to listen to what other people are doing.”
She loves the way that she will find herself at Temple Israel this Shabbat. Her initial contact wasn’t the shul’s rabbi, David Fine, but a community member who’d heard her at a similar weekend at a shul in Florida, “and I happened to be friends with his son-in-law,” Ms. Less said. It’s those kinds of connections, when facilitated by leaders like Rabbi Fine, that allow cross-pollinators to do their work.
Ms. Less will lead services on Friday night. They start at 7. Later, she’ll lead a circle in singing songs of Shabbat. She’ll sing more during Shabbat morning services, and will lead joyous zemirot after the kiddush lunch that day. Learn more at the shul’s website, synagogue.org (Yes, that really is the website.)
Shabbat is about music, joy, and spirit – New Jersey Jewish News
