38
A
licia Stillman – a former actress,
doula, pre-school music teacher,
and mother of two – was known as the
“
Jewish pied piper” for kids in Palm
Beach, FL. “It was my community that
reached out and told me to go become
a cantor,” she recalls.
This is the third year she has flown
twice a month to serve as student
cantor of Temple Judea in Palm Beach
Gardens.
“
As a student you accumu-
late knowledge; it’s all learning and
studying,” she says, “but when you
teach it to someone who takes it in
and relates it to his or her own life,
that prayer becomes real. A 78-year-
old cancer survivor talking about what
the
Mi Shebeirach
prayer means to her
is different from my singing it on a Fri-
day night.”
Her most recent challenge was her
assigned practicum (mini-recital) to
create a ‘sermon in song’ about the
prayer for
geshem
(
rain), which is re-
cited on
Shemini Atzeret
at the end of
Sukkot
–
a holiday not widely cele-
brated by Reform Jews. “How do we
make our liturgy and an ancient tradi-
tion come alive and have meaning for
present-day congregants?” she asks.
Tracing the history of this prayer from
the temple cult thousands of years ago
and drawing upon kabbalistic interpre-
tations of rain as manifesting spiritual
blessings to the material world, Still-
man’s sermon evoked the meaning of
rain as the source of “purification,
abundance, food, and life.” She per-
formed a broad range of music, from
traditional
nusach
reminiscent of
Neilah
(
the closing service for Yom Kippur)
to Israeli pioneer folk songs, Yemenite
songs, Cantor Jonathan Comisar’s
new work inspired by Yehuda Amichai’s
poem, “A Quiet Joy,” where rain serves
as a source of memory, and Cantor
Benjie Schiller’s “Water to Water,”
composed for the Mayim Hayyim
mikveh
in Boston.
With the environment increasingly on
the Jewish community’s radar, Stillman
hopes that the prayer for rain “may
offer Jews the opportunity to return to
their roots, understand Judaism from
its inception, and have a renewed re-
spect for the natural world’s wonders.”
Alicia Stillman
Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music Student/New York
Cantorial student Alicia Stillman
coaches emerging songleader and
6
th-grader Nikki Lickstein at the
“
Got Shabbat” family service at
Temple Judea in Palm Beach
Gardens, FL.
