- grgrub what yoyou love.. the 7pm news, weeknights on kpix 5. good morning and welcome to "mosaic." i am rabbi eric weiss and happy to be your host. music is used throughout the country in the world to bring to life, through some form of articulation, things that seem ultimately world lists when we contemplate ourselves and one another. we'd like to invite you to a wonderful conversation with cantor sharon bernstein and we

will jump into this wonderful, lovely conversation. thank you for being with us. >> thank you for having me. a joy to be here. >> what is a can tour and how do you train to be one and how did you become one? some basic things for folks to understand about being a cantor. >> is an english word, and comes from the word can't, as opposed to can, which is a bad joke i make some time and it means to chant. basically, there are several aspects to the origin of it. the prayers in judaism are always sung. the cantore is somebody who has an expertise in that, somebody trained in it and with different jewish music and prayers and the torah and

the text and the studies. there's a lot of aspects to it. the origins of it are the singing of the prayers and it has expanded into many areas. >> in english, can tour is related to the word tentacles, something that is song? >> yes. >> how did you become a cantor? >> i kind of fell into it and started doing it right out of college. i had met the rabbi from arizona state university and they needed a cantore for high holy days and i started doing it. i got year-round part-time jobs and eventually went to school. >> where did you go to the cantor school? where are they in the u.s.? >> there are several.

they have those affiliated with different movements and the one i went to is jewish theological seminary of new york. that is in new york and the program has a year in israel and then there is the hebrew college. there's also orthodox and renewal and i'm not sure if there is a specific program for reconstruction is cantor's or not. >> people don't realize that cantor's are the equivalent of a rabbi and you are ordained and function as clergy? >> i am ordained and function as clergy and i wouldn't presume to say on the equivalent of a rabbi. >> in jewish life, we can say so. [ laughter ] >> i wouldn't say that. >> from your experience, can you talk a little bit about the ways in which you understand the power of music to

articulate the deeper yearnings that in the best of all worlds, theology, spirituality, faith and traditions try to focus on for folks to feel like they have a place in the world and live in the world in ways that are nourishing and comforting? >> yeah. so, i guess i would say that i am extremely text oriented and i think that judaism is extremely text oriented. it's a deeper conduit and explanation of things. sometimes i call it storytelling based on traditional text. i see the music as giving an

additional dimension to it. even for certain texts where we have multiple melodies for it, different melodies can give a different meaning to the text, different experience to the text and it provides all kinds of different avenues and ways of getting in there and of touching people and helping people to find ways that are important for them to understand things. >> in that way, do you see music, even though you've got a lyric attached to it, whether in english or hebrew or yiddish or the jewish traditional languages? more or less, the music, itself, evokes things beyond what the words actually are saying? >> i would say it expands the meaning. it doesn't give it another

meaning. it's additional meaning within the words. >> believe it or not, we will take a quick break and is there something we can go out with in a quick way as we go to our first break? >> i was thinking, with the different melodies, they can sometimes give a different meaning for it. this is ethiopian. >> we should say it's part of the shabbat friday evening liturgy? >> yeah. [singing in foreign language]

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am rabbi weiss and we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation about the jewish musical community with cantor bernstein. some things i know you do and lots of other cantor's due in the jewish community is to pay attention to the music that comes of different jewish communities. can you talk about the ways in which you utilize yiddish and other examples of melodies?

the version of some of the shabbat liturgy? can we jump in with yiddish? >> we can. i have two lives i'm living. i'm a cantor and another that started was as a yiddish singer. i fell in love with in college with yiddish songs and the yiddish language. i started delving into it and finding yiddish songs wherever i could and singing them and performing them. eventually, when i went to jerusalem for cantor school, a friend of mine invited me to do workshops at a place that was a combination of a library of yiddish books, collected with

the national yiddish book center, and also, a cultural program. he asked me to do a workshop on yiddish songs. i would go to the library, to the archives, every month and search for yiddish songs on a different theme and then do some of those songs that i found, my favorite ones of those songs. i found them as part of a workshop in the club. eventually, it became a yiddish piano bar where i would hang out with my book and it kept growing and at this point, i have 400 yiddish songs in there and i play and sing and there is candlelight with people drinking vodka and eating herring and dark bread. >> that is wonderful. some people may know and some may not know that yiddish is a language that is generally a combination of german and hebrew, originally in hebrew

characters but also in german. it comes out of the jewish experience in eastern europe and was a language that people spoke day to day and people would have it as their first language, the language of conversation and of songwriting and of argument and love. it wasn't necessarily -- would you say it wasn't considered to be a sacred language the way that sometimes hebrews are considering it? >> not at all. it was the vernacular language. people didn't speak hebrew. it was the sacred language and yiddish was used for living for everything. >> no matter where you were in europe, we can communicate with one another. >> not necessarily, but where

yiddish was not widely spoken, for instance, italy. there are places in italy where yiddish was spoken and it really depends on where you were. >> what about yiddish song attracts you? music attached to words that reveals something about the soul and the spirit. what is it about yiddish songs and melodies that attracts you? >> so, it's -- for me, it's text-based. the stories, for me, are amazing and i feel like i'm looking into a window into another world. or, getting postcards from the past, postcards that reflect the different experiences. i tend to specialize in lesser known or unknown yiddish songs. i have had maybe five seconds

of fame for singing yiddish songs. i'm not going to do it here. but, you really get a wide range of experiences. it's different places and kinds of places. different countries and big cities and little towns and you just get such a wide variety of people, people that are not only religious, but completely not religious and you really get challenged. musically, when you say yiddish song, it's not almost completely, but it's like an english song and it really depends on the country and the place, almost any kind of melody. >> in a moment, we will go out with a little bit of a snippet of a yiddish song but are there

contemporary yiddish songwriters today? >> there are. i'm not remembering everybody that's doing it right now. my favorite and one of my muses was someone who passed away a few years ago. i met her at camp and she usually wrote her own music but had one of her poems that she had not found a tune she liked and she opened it up for people to write melodies. the melody i wrote was what she used for her song. >> beautiful. can you do a little bit of the yiddish music? >> i will do it. it talks about light and darkness. [singing in foreign language]

belvaa dadavis, repoporting a black nenewsroom on n the coa a a notable fifigure. throughohout her legegendary careerer, she remamained commim to the p place she c calls home >> belva davis in oakland. >> her history is our history.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i'm rabbi weiss and honored to be your host. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with cantor sharon bernstein about jewish music and the use of jewish music in life, in general. one area that you explored and have contributed to is the way music helps us heal. the word heal is a big word and as the ceo of the bay area jewish healing center, i have full appreciation for the different ways in which we understand that word.

you have focused on the way music can heal people in illness and in grief, at the end of life or in a more general way. you have a wonderful book called "under the wings of rafael" and i wonder if you can talk about what this book is. there is an accompanying cd. what brings you to it and what you hope it will do for folks? >> so, it came out of my congregational work at sha'ar zahav and we had a congregant diagnosed with cancer and would be undergoing chemo treatments. i came up with this idea and i'm not sure how, but of making it a journey for her. for each of her chemo treatments, i picked a different prayer or jewish text that either specifically talked about healing or felt, to me,

some way connected with feelings or emotions or explorations that might be helpful to her in her process. i recorded it. sometimes i wrote music for it and i wrote some explorations, some exercises or things that they could do to help explore the text of it and sent it the day before each chemo treatment, a little gift package. >> what is the meaning of the wings of rafael? >> it's said that we have four angels that surround us as we go to bed at night. we evoke them. on our right is gabriella -- it's mccalla, which means the one who is like god or the holiness of god and in the left- hand is gabriella, the strength of god and then we have the lights of god and behind us is rafael, the healing of god.

so, i was coming up with a title for this for maybe a year, trying to go through the possible names. i was cooking monday and finally had it come to me, "under the wings of rafael" and it means that somehow being envelope and surrounded and cared for and embraced. the evening prayer we were site before going to bed is often translated spread over us, the shelter of peace but i didn't want to use the word spread because with cancer, the word spread could have difficult connotation so i came up with unfurl over us, a shelter of peace. for the wings, i imagine rafael as having these wings and not

just on top of us, but all around us to hold us and care for us and keep us safe and nurture us. >> if anybody would like to have the book and the cd, how do they purchase it? >> the best thing is to go to my website which is sharonbernstein.com and click on the tab that says under the wings of rafael and you can find different places to get it. they have it in berkeley and there are copies at my synagogue and also, copies that can be gotten online and the book and cd can be purchased separately and the tracks can be downloaded. >> wonderful. as we go to the next break, is a something from the cd or the book that you might sing to us as we leave the segment? >> i will sing a prayer that we were site at the end of the

standing prayer and it means to keep my lips from speaking badly. [singing in foreign language]

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation about the use of music in the jewish community with cantor sharon bernstein of congregation sha'ar zahav. welcome back, cantor bernstein. >> thank you, rabbi weiss. >> we've been talking about the ways in which music comes a lot of a gentle tradition and the ways in which a community influences a region. can you talk about music in a contemporary way and how the congregation of sha'ar zahav, a single community and congregation in san francisco, how they've influenced you and influence the development of music for the broader community? >> in terms of music,

contemporary music and judaism, we tend to think of this as a modern phenomenon of having more pop or rock music in the synagogue. the research -- not just the research, but what has happened in jewish communities throughout the world, is that the jews tend to be part of the local non-jewish music scene. there is music that sounds like the music of the surrounding culture and jewish music in morocco has less similarities to moroccan music. italian music in the synagogue can sound like this, like opera.

people have a musical vocabula. it's a universal language but we have a vocabulary, language recorder up with and when you listen to things, you have a sense of where it would go or a sense of this because there is a predictability and is based on music that we know and we are used too. that can be really powerful when used in the synagogue and it helps people connect in additional ways. sometimes, it's what we call the traditional older tunes, sometimes even decades-old, not hundreds of years old, usually. sometimes that helps people connect and sometimes its music that sounds like what people listen to on the radio or more like on their own device.

i believe in using a wide mixture of things. of using traditional music and modern music and finding all kinds of different points for connection and reaching meaning. >> believe it or not, in a moment, we have to say goodbye. i'm wondering if there is an example that might come out of the congregation of sha'ar zahav that we can say goodbye to folks with in any particular context? >> i would say that, for me, being at sha'ar zahav, one thing is that i've developed a specialty in rainbow songs. i've learned many of the ones that are out there, but maybe not all of them. maybe we quit close with over the rainbow. >> wonderful. let's go. ♪somewhere over the rainbow♪ ♪way alpine♪

♪theirs a land that i've heard of♪ ♪one cent ilana levine♪ ♪somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue. the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true♪ ♪ ♪ the 7pm news, weeknights on kpix 5.

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