I don’t understand why people assume that artistic presentation of davening done by a trained cantor and davening with kavanah are mutually exclusive. There were chazzanim like Ephraim Shlepak or Baruch Schorr, David Moshe Moshe Steinberg and others who were well known talmidei chachamim, who learned nine or ten hours a day; men of great piety. The chazzan in the Vilna Shtot Schul was required to learn a minimum of five hours every day, in order to insure that he was a pious Jew. Moshe Koussevitsky had a daily regimine of talmud Torah. Even among later day cantors who suffered lapses in their observances, there were hints of spiritual greatness. Pinchik, who upon escaping the Soviet regime, established himself as a chazzan even though he was well known as a Russian folk singer. He did so to honor his grandfather’s memory, who was a chassidic cantor, and out of a desire to reconnect with his heritage. Granted he lived a Bohemian life and was never able to shake off the bad habits he picked up in the Red Army. But his chazzanut, one filled with nostalgic yearning for his heritage and imbued with Jewish pathos, stirred his soul and those of his congregants. Ganchoff, who was raised with no Jewish education beyond an afternoon Talmud Torah, chose to be a cantor rather than a secular musician because as a Jew he felt called to it. How many of us choose our careers for no other reason than a desire to give expression to our Yiddishkeit? The Conservative movement today would be even worse then it is, would have destroyed far more Jewish souls, were it not for a core group of chazzanim who with a combination of charisma and piety and wisdom resisted the reformist tendancies of the rabbis. The stories are legion of Conservative rabbis bitterly complaning about the orthodoxy of their chazzanim and wondering why the congregations back those backward thinking Europeans over the American rabbis. I’ve heard countless tributes to those cantors from people who credit them with saving their yiddishkeit (generally they go along the story line of I sang in Cantor X’s choir as a child and watching him daven, the care he put into preparing services and the love he had for each of us who helped him make the davening more meaningful inspired me to be a better Jew.). I’ve never heard such tributes about Conservative rabbis. (and before you ask what those cantrs were doing in Conservative congregations, there were no jobs anywhere else for them. Orthodox refused to give them pulpits, by and large, having no interest in them) I don’t know why it is but when it comes to the cantorate, people are so quick to dismiss it and deride its practitioners and adherants and never consider that it was value, tremendous value. But you are the ones who lose out. You lose out like anyone who never experienced a truly beautiful thing. You can live your whole life and never appreciate the deprivation, but it is there.
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