I
t’s a Wednesday morning in February, and
inside the Minnie Petrie Synagogue the
melody of the traditional blessing for wine
floats though the packed room as a young
woman holds the room captive with her song.
Except she has a backup band, the four-
piece Afro-Semitic Experience, and they are
performing Kurt Weill’s jazz setting of “
Kid-
dush
.”
And the singer went to Carnegie Mellon
as a math major/jazz minor and worked for
three years as a financial analyst for Lehman
Brothers before coming to HUC-JIR as a can-
torial student. So, to put it simply, a few
things here are bordering on the unusual.
Dressed in gold brocade,
Lisa Shapanka
Arbisser
,
SSM ’09 leads her senior recital –
The Fusion of Jazz and Synagogue Music.
This
being her last semester of a five-year stint at
HUC-JIR, Lisa is ready to start a career in,
what she calls, “singing for a purpose.”
As a teenager, Lisa was very involved with
her Reform synagogue, Temple Shalom in
Aberdeen, NJ, and went through
bat mitzvah
and confirmation, in addition to four years at
a Hebrew high school. At college she spent
her junior year studying physics and math in
Israel. During her senior year, she recalls, “fi-
nance and math were all I really knew, so I
decided to look for a job that would leave me
the free time to explore other areas.”
Lisa joined Lehman Brothers, which she
says was interesting, but not exactly what she
wanted to do. She went to synagogue more
often and met her future husband, who also
enjoyed going there. She began taking voice
lessons and participating in an opera work-
shop, and got involved in the choir at Central
Synagogue. After speaking to the cantor, she
decided that it was time to get back into music,
but performing just for the sake of performing
was not for her. “I wasn’t interested in classical
music or oratorios or German Lieder or mod-
ern music. Synagogue music was something
that really appealed to me.”
After Janis Cohen, Lisa’s cantor from her
home synagogue, suggested that Lisa consider
becoming a cantor, the “seed was planted. I
decided this is something that I wanted to do,
and I told my parents. Their reaction: ‘You’re
leaving a job on Wall Street that pays you
nicely not just to be a cantor, but to be a stu-
dent again for five years?’” Lisa laughs now, as
she retells her story, but “they were shocked.”
“
I wanted to do something more with
my life rather than sitting behind a computer,
and working in an office all day…there had
to be more to a profession, and to life, than
just this.” It became clear that it was working
as a professional in a synagogue, which she says
is all about “connecting with people and cre-
ated sacred relationships, leading people in
worship, and teaching.”
During her first year of study in Jerusalem,
she was an English teacher to a mother and
her two children who had lost their hus-
band/father to terrorism. “I was sent there
ostensibly as an English tutor. But it was re-
ally just to be there for them, to be their
friend, and to remind them that there’s a life
outside of the grieving and the pain.” Upon
her return to the States, she became Mrs. Lisa
Shapanka Arbisser and began the next four
years of study at HUC-JIR’s School of Sacred
Music in New York.
Her interest in jazz-liturgical music was
sparked by an album that “Frank London of
the Klezmatics had done for Cantor Jack
Mendelssohn’s film,
A Cantor’s Tale –
where
they took four traditional
hazzanut
(
cantorial)
pieces and broke them down and made them
into avant-garde works.” She not only created
her senior thesis and recital around the con-
cept, but also plans to include the fusion idea
in her cantorate.
Dr. Mark Kligman, Professor of Jewish
Musicology, noted during her recital that
“
the Jewish love affair with jazz goes back
nearly to the beginnings of jazz itself. In the
1929
film,
The Jazz Singer
,
the young son of
a cantor leaves home in pursuit of the jazz
world. Al Jolson’s character was forced to
choose between the world of jazz and the
world of the synagogue. Now, however,
the barriers between the two have
long dissolved. Today, com-
posers for the synagogue
explicitly borrow jazz id-
ioms and sometimes
create entire jazz serv-
ices. Working jazz
musicians borrow
from
hazzanut
,
nusach
,
and fa-
miliar synagogue
melodies to create
their art, and
cantors and con-
gregations strive to
integrate music and
composers native to
this land, and create
a unique, authentic
American-Jewish experi-
ence.”
Lisa concurs:
“
One of my conclu-
sions in my thesis is
that you can really
use the musicians
in your congregation. Ask them to be in-
volved in the creative process of worship,
because it’s a way for them to be engaged
more deeply in congregational life. In the
process, you’re also raising the level of music
in the worship experience.”
Lisa suggests that anyone interested in
either being a cantor or simply learning more
about Judaism ought to follow through.
“
Everyone,” Lisa states, “has their own Jew-
ish journey.” For Lisa Shapanka Arbisser, a
pioneer in the field of fusion Jewish liturgi-
cal music, the journey is just beginning.
MEET HUC-J IR’S STUDENTS
2009
ISSUE 72 | 21
HUC-JIR
AND ALL
THAT JAZZ
Samantha Massell
Lisa Shapanka
Arbisser, SSM ’09
Meet HUC-JIR’s Students
