♪[ music ] ♪ good morning and welcome to moasic. i'm eric weiss and honored to be your host this morning. music is something that faith communities use throughout the entire country and really the world to bring to life to some form ofar tick lags things that seem ultimately wordless when we could not plate ourselves, the universe the relationship

of the transcendent and one another. we welcome to jump into this wonderful lovely conversation. thank you so much for being with us. >> thank you for having me. it's a joy to be here. >> let's just jump in and ask you something really basic like what is a cantor and how did you become a cantor? # u # just some basic things. >> cantor comes from can't and it means to sing or chant and the hebrew word is mass yan and there are also other words but basically there are several aspects to the origin of it is that the prayers are always sung and so somebody who has expertise in that somebody who has been trained in it in the different kinds of jewish music

and prayers and text and study so there's a lot of aspects to it so the origins of it are of the singing of the prayers but it's expanded into many areas at this time. >> cantor is related in english to the christian tradition. >> uh huh. >> so it's something that is sung. >> yes. >> and so how did you become a cantor? >> well i kind of fell into it. and i started doing it right out of college. i had been inedand i met the rabbi from arizona state university and they were needing a cantor for high holly days and so i started doing that and then i got some year round part-time jobs and then eventually went to cantorial school and here i am. >> where did you go to school? where are the cantorial schools in the united states?

>> so there are several. i mean there's several different ones. so they have ones that are affiliated with the different movements so the one i went to is jewish thee logical of new york but the program also has a year in israel. then there's also hebrew college and also orthodox and renewal. i'm not sure or not. >> i think what people don't realize or not is the cantors. >> well in jewish life we can say so. >> i wouldn't say that. >> so from your experience can you talk a little bit about the ways in which you understand

the power of music to articulate the deeper learnings for folks to sort of feel that they have a place in the world and move 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 judeism is extremely text oriented. pretty much everything we do is in some ways based on text so music provides a deeper exploration of things. it is sometimes i call it musical story telling based on traditional texts and so i see the music is giving additional

dimension to it. and even for certain texts where we have multiple melodies for it different melodies can give a different meaning to the text a different experience so 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 nines. >> and so in that way do you see music even though you've got a lyric attached to whether it's a lyric in english or hebrew or yidish or any of the jewish traditional languages that none the less the music itself evokes things that are beyond what the words actually are saying. >> i would say it expands the meeting meaning. i think it just helps people to

find addition grail meaning within the words. >> wonderful. believe it or not we're going to take a quick break. is there something we can go out with in a quick way as we go to our first break? >> we are talking about the different melodies can sometimes give different meanings for it so this is an ethiopian one that a friend wrote. >> and we should say part of the friday evening lit jay. >> yeah. it's [ singing ] my name is ryan. born and raised mostly in the

east bay. this is where it started. this is where i grew up. when you talk about where my career started you can directly point to valley high school. >> ryan from high school to college in san francisco around the bay area up to seattle. >> i remember him saying his ultimate goal is to come back to the bay area. >> it's a life time dream to work in your hometown so once that door opened for me i ran through it. >> good evening. i'm ryan. >> and i'm elizabeth cook. we start with breaking news tonight. >> it's all about reconnecting to where you grew up, reconnecting with your family, the people you love. so i had that opportunity to come back and you know represent my hometown. it's a proud moment for my mom

and dad. it's a proud moment from the friends i grew up with. it means a lot to be able to represent them and show them that, you know, i did okay. >> ryan joins our evening team week nights on kpix5 news. good morning and welcome back to moasic. i'm rabbi eric weiss and we're in the middle of a wonderful conversation about music and the jewish community with cantor sharon bernstein. welcome back cantor bernstein. >> thank you. >> some of the things that i know that you do and lots of other cantors do in the jewish community is pay attention to the music that comes out of different jewish communities and i wonder if you can talk a little bit about the ways in which you utilize yidish and

latino and other examples of melodies like the way you sung the ethiopian version of some of the lit jay as we were leaving the last segment so shall we jump in? >> we can. so i have sort of two at least two lisks that i'm living and so as a cantor i started at about the same time as a yidish singer. so i fell in love with theitish songs and language and so i started developing into it and finding yidish songs wherever i could and singing them and performing them and 1re7b8 when i went to gurs lum for sanitioral school a friend of mine invited me to do work shops at a place called the yidish which is kind of like a combination of library of yidish books that he's collected like the national yidish book center kind of like

that and also does cultural programming and so he asked me to do a monthly work shop on yidish songs so i would go to the library, to thear kieivesz every month and do a search for yidish songs on a different theme and then do some of those songs that i found, my favorite ones of those songs that i found as part of a work shop in the club and then eventually became a yidish piano bar where i would just hang out at the piano with my book and just kept growing so at this point i have 400 yidish songs. so people drinking vodka and eating dark bread and herring. >> that's wonderful. i think some people may know and some people may not know that yidish is a language that is generally a combination of german and hebrew. >> uh huh. >> written originally in hebrew characters but also in german and comes out of the jewish

experience and eastern europe. and was really a language that people spoke day-to-day and so people would have yidish as their first language and that was the language of conversation and of song writing and of argument and agreement and love and so it wasn't necessarily -- and would you say today even now it's not necessarily considered to be a sacred language the way sometimes hebrews considered. >> not at all a sacred language. it's -- yeah. it was the -- it was the language people didn't speak hebrew because it was the sacred language so yidish was used for living for everything. >> and was it kind of a jewish language that no matter where you were at least in europe that if you spoke yidish that you can communicate with one another. >> i think to some de not necessarily. i think there were places

certainly where yidish was not widely spoken. italy there were places where it was spoken so i think it really depends where you were. >> and so what about yidish songs attracts you? what is it if we think of music that's attached to words that kind of reveals something about the spirit and the soul, what is it about the song and melody that attracts you? >> so it's for me again it's text based so the stories for me are amazing. i feel like i'm looking into a window into another world and -- or like getting post cards from the past, like post cards i think of it sometimes and so it's just reflective of so many different experiences so i tend to specialize in lesser known

or unknown yidish songs. i have had like a very not even 15 minutes like five seconds of fame for singing dirty yidish songs which i'm not going to do here but you just really get such a wide range of experiences because it was spoken in so many different places in so many different kinds of places so different countries and big cities and little towns that you just get such a wide range of variety of people by people are religious and people who are completely not religious that you really get the range. >> so interesting. >> and musically when you say yidish song you're actually almost not completely but almost it's like saying english song that it really depends on the country and the place that it can be almost any kind of melody. >> you know in a moment we're going to go out with a little

bit of a snip of yidish song but are there contemporary yidish song writers today? >> yes, there are. that's a great question. there are and i'm not remembering everybody who is doing it right now my favorite and one of my muses was bailiff chef who passed away a few years ago and i met her at camp and she had what she usually wrote her own music but she had one of her poems that she had not found that she liked and she's not opening it up to people to write melodies and the one i wrote was the one she ended up using for her song. >> oh beautiful. should we ask you to treat us to yidish music? >> i'll do it and it basically just talks about light and

darkness. [ singing ]

i know that one of the areas that you actually explore and have contributed to is the way music helps us heal. i know the word heal is a big word and as the ceo of the jewish healing center i have full appreciation for the different ways in which we understand that word but you have focused really

particularly on the way music can heal people and illness and grief at the end of life or just in a more general way and so i knew you have a wonderful book that's called under the wings of raphael and i'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what this book is. i know there's an accompanying cd and what brings you to it and what you hope it will do for folks. >> so it came out of my congregationational work that there was a con greg yant who was diagnosed with cancer and was embog to be under going chemo treatments and i came up with the idea i'm not sure how but of making it a journey for her and so for each of her chemo treatments i picked a different prayer or jewish at about healing or felt to me in

some way connected to the feeling that our emotions or explorations that might be helpful to her and her process so i recorded it sometimes i wrote music for it and wrote some exploration, some things or exercises that they can do to help explore the text of it and sent it the day before each chemo treatment as a little gift package. >> what is the meaning of on the wings of raphael? >> well, so there's -- it's said that we have four angels that sunshine yond us as we go to bed at night and on our right is michael which is the one who is the wholeness of god. on the left hand is gabrielle the strength of god. the likes of god and behind us is raphael who is the healing

of god. and i was trying to 300 and i finally came to me under the wings of raphael. so it just means that somehow being enveloped and surrounded and cared for and embraced so it's spread over us the shelter of peace so i didn't want to use the word spread because particularly with cancer the word spread can have difficult connotations so i finally came up with unferrell. so unferrell over us a shelter a peace and so for me those wings i imagined raphael as having these wings that on top

of us all around that helps keep us safe and nur pictured. >> and if anybody would like to have the book and the cd how did it actually produce it. >> the best thing to do is to go to my website which is sharon bernstein.com and click on a tabitha says under the wings of raphael and they're confined different places to get it. sometimes carried it. and in berkeley and there are copies at my synagogue and also copies that can be gotten onbe >> oh wonderful. as we go to our next break is there something from the cd from the book that you might sing to us as we leave this segment? >> maybe i'll sing the prayer that we recite at the end of

the silent standing prayer and it means keeps my lips from speaking badly. [ singing ]

♪[ music ] ♪ good morning and welcome back to mosaic. we're in the middle of a wonderful conversation about the use of music in the jewish community. welcome back bern steen talking about a general tradition and also the ways in which i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about even music in a contemporary way and one single community one congregation in san francisco has influenced you and influenced the development of music for really then the broader community. >> in terms of contemporary music and judeism i think sometimes we tend to think of this as a modern phenomenon of

having sort of more pop or the synagogue but the research is i mean not just the research what has happened in jewish communities throughout the world is that the jewish -- the jews tend to be part of the local jewish -- of the local non jewish music scene. so you'll end up having music that sounds a lot like the music of the surrounding culture. so jewish music in morocco has a lot of similarities to moroccan music. italian music in the synagogue can be sounding a lot like tarren tellas. [ singing ] or opera. so what we have happening today is people have a musical vocab. we talk about music being a

universal language but actually we have a vocab. we have a language that we grow up with so when we listen to music sometimes we listen to things and we have a sense of where it's going to go or if we're learning a new tune we have a sense because there's a predictability about it that's based on the music that we've listened to that we know that we're used to. and so that could be really powerful when used in the synagogue that it helps people connect in additional ways. so sometimes it's the older what we call traditional tunes that sometimes are just even decades old. we're not talking hundreds of years old usually. so sometimes that is what helps people connect and sometimes it's music that sounds like what people listen to on the radio or maybe more like on their device and so i believe in using a wide mixture of

things. so of using traditional music and using modern music and just finding all kinds of different points for connection and reaching meaning. >> well believe it or not in just a moment we're going to have to say goodbye all together. >> uh huh. >> so i'm wondering if there's just an example that might come out of the congregation that we can say goodbye to folks with in any particular context? >> i would just say that for me being one of the things is that i've developed a sub specialty in rainbow songs and i've learned many of the ones that are out there i don't know if i've learned all of them. so maybe we close with. >> let's go. [ singing ]

♪ [ music ] ♪ [ singing ] if you smell gas, you're too close. leave the structure, call 911, keep people away, and call pg&e right after so we can both respond out and keep the public safe.

right now on kpix 5, and streaming on cbs news bay area, we're getting reports of gas line explosion s and firefights in ukraine as we enter the fourth day of russia's invasion. >> meantime, here in the bay area, we're getting reaction from bay area ukrainians and russians whose families are fighting to survive. and the late of the three injured oakland firefighters who were hospitalized after the truck slammed into a building. good morning, it's sunday, february bench theth. and thank you for joining us. i'm fill follow. first, we start with breaking news. russian president appears to be ratcheting up the tension with the west