Dear friends,

I once heard Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks compare a niggun to a bed on a cold night. “First you warm it up”, Rabbi Sacks observed, “and then it warms you up.”

Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur have so many associations, and mean so many different things. Music has always been chief among them.  My grandfather led a choir for High Holiday Day davening, and in my mind’s eye and ear, I can still see and hear tuning fork that he carried with him always. It was always about the music.

Our shul is blessed with a richly diverse population, and many of us come from different traditions of Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur music. For the past many years, we have experienced the joy of together creating and establishing the melodies of Bnai David, to which we return year after year, and which we also refresh year after year.  As you can undoubtedly recall from Days of Awe past, the sound of our sanctuary filled with melody and harmony is magical. It’s, well, awesome.  We do it without a choir, and without a professional cantorial staff. We do it ourselves, with our hearts and our souls and our throats.

We all take these next few days as days of preparation. Let’s each include in our preparation, the preparation to sing -to let go, and to let the song rise out of our deepest place, and meet the song that is emanating form the deepest place within our fellow daveners. The whole is so exponentially greater than the sum of the parts, that to hold back, to hesitate, would cause us all enormous loss.

Sing before God a new song. We will all be singing with you.

Rav Yosef