First Portrait: “Sha’ar P’tach: Open the Gate"
The Shai Agnon House, the Hebrew month of Adar, 2006. Shai Agnon’s living room, which had been converted into a space for performances and lectures, is packed from wall-to-wall. “Sha’ar P’tach: Rabbi Judah Halevi meets David Zehavi” (the title, referencing a well-known piyut, literally means “Open the Gate”). Sitting on the stage is R’ Chaim Louk, one of the most important contemporary paytanim who has performed hundreds of times across the globe, including in the royal court of the King of Morocco, amongst other more conventional venues across France, the United States and Israel. For the first time in his life, he is slated to compliment his familiar repertoire of piyutim with Israeli songs. Juxtaposing the works of the renowned 12th-century Judeo-Spanish physician, philosopher, and poet R’ Judah Halevi with songs by the classic 20th-century Israeli composer David Zehavi, the chosen pairings have been thematically selected to highlight surprising points of human convergence. For example, the Israeli classic “Mi Yitneni ‘Of,” composed by David Shimoni to a Bucharian Folk tune, contemplating the rootlessness of a perpetually migrating bird, is intentionally aligned with Halevi’s “Yonah ad anah telchi,” a piyut lamenting the Jewish Exile and promising Return, revealing unexpected resonances between seemingly disparate contexts.
The audience of some 120 crowd together in their seats. The usual Agnon House audience, with its highly defined place on the local socio-cultural scale, is interspliced with a wonderfully diverse crowd. Men and women from the full spectrum of Israeli life (and a small non-Jerusalemite contingency) that found themselves moved by piyut. And, yes, there are some Moroccan Israelis, adults, some elderly, who suddenly find themselves feeling at home with Shai Agnon[2].
Back to the stage. Four musicians flank R’ Chaim Louk. Up until a few years ago, three of them did not know what Moroccan piyut was.
The first, the ney player (a middle eastern flute), is an Iraqi chazzan (cantor) and paytan who recently received rabbinical ordination from a prominent religious Zionist yeshiva.
The Second, the violinist, is of Ashkenazic-Dutch descent. He has been playing of late with some leading Israeli popular artists, Shlomo Bar and Ehud Banai. In his own way, he meets the local description of a Jewish ‘born-again,’ a ba’al teshuva.
The Third, the percussionist, is of half Iraqi origin, and half Ashkenazic origin, an escapee from local National Religious educational institutions. For some decade and a half now, he’s wandered in and out of different worlds – musical and other.
The fourth, the oud player (a middle eastern stringed instrument) is a native of Morroco, who studied classical guitar at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He compliments his mastery of Andalusian and Eastern music with intimate knowledge of classical Israeli music. (= Hashir HaEretz Yisraeli, music authored in the early decades of Zionism and following the state’s establishment, celebrating and lauding Eretz Israel, primarily its natural beauty). His head bears no covering of any sort.
The performance offers each of these musicians a renewed encounter with the world in which they grew up, as well as a first encounter with worlds that had until recently been distant. The power of music, the power of the Hebrew language, and the power of prayer join to offer them a sense of connection. Boundaries expand. Is this an act of avant-garde, or is this perhaps an act of tradition par excellence? After all, the vitality of tradition at large and of the sung piyut tradition specifically, has been preserved over the generations thanks to the vital movement between the permanent and the changing, between a core transmitted from generation to generation and renewal, thanks to the delicate balance between boldness and humility, conservatism and curiosity.
Conciliation between the ancient and the contemporary is embedded into the Hebrew language itself. The same lingual roots contain two seemingly contradictory meanings, the most ancient and the most new: the Hebrew word makor, which means ‘origin’ suggests the ancient, but mekori, original suggests the nascent. Likewise, Rishon which means ‘first’, suggests the ancient, while rishoni which means primary, suggests nascence. The lingual root k-d-m in Hebrew serves both in words referring to the past – as in kedem, kadum, meaning ancient, as well as words pointing to the future, as in kadima, meaning forward.
But in Israel of recent generations, a dichotomic division between different ethnicities and social demographics, coupled with the desire on the part of traditional Jews to hold onto themselves against the pressures of the Israeli melting pot, has impaired the collective ability to be in motion. I am convinced that fostering connection between the native Israeli generation, bereft of its natural traditions and left with a sense of absence and longing, and the generation that still organically remembers its native cultural traditions, could help restore vitality to a cultural collective that has yet to find its own internal axis.
After the concert, a sizable group of people linger, feeling the need to process the unusual experience they’ve had here tonight, wanting to reach out to each other to discuss this Jewish-Hebrew-Israeli culture that has suddenly been discovered in its full glory, to talk about the simple beauty that came across from behind the complex art of the lyrics and melodies, and the human warmth that emanated from it.
Later, R’ Chaim Louk says that this evening at the Shai Agnon House has been one of the most moving concerts that he has ever participated in over his forty years as a performer. I don’t know whether he meant it, but it certainly feels accurate to me.
[1] Shmuel Yosef Agnon was a Nobel Prize Laureate writer and a central figure of modern Hebrew fiction, who arguably represents an Ashkenazic, Jerusalem elite.
