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good morning and welcome to "mosaic". i am rabbi eric weiss and honored to be your host this morning. music is something faith communities used throughout the country and the world to bring to life to some form of articulation, things that seem wordless when we contemplate ourselves, the universe, the transcendent and one another. we would like to invite you into a conversation with kanter and sharon bernstein to jump into this lovely conversation. thank you for being with us. >> thank you for having me. >> let's ask you something basic like, what is a kanter and how do you train to be one and how did you become one ? basic things for folks to understand about this. canter is an he was word that comes from the word can't and not

can. it means to sing or chant . the hebrew word is [ speaking in a global language ] the person judaism are song. the canter is someone who has an expertise. someone trained and in the different kinds of jewish music and the prayers and torah and text and study. there are a lot of aspects to it. the origins of it or of the singing of the prayers, but it is expanded into many different areas. >> you remind me in english, cancer is related to [ speaking in a global language ] . >> i started doing this out of college and had been involved in met the rabbi from arizona state university and they were

needing a cancer for high holy days . i started doing that. and i got year-round part-time jobs and eventually went to school. >> where did you go to school? where are they in the united states? >> there are several different ones. they have ones that have different movements. the one i went to his jewish theological seminary of new york and that is in new york. but the program also has a year in israel. there is hebrew union college which is associated with the reform movement and also orthodox and renewal. i'm not sure if there is a specific program for reconstructionist cantors are not. >> i think what people do not realize is they are the equivalent of a rabbi. you are ordained. >> i function as clergy. i would not presume to say i am the equivalent of the rabbi. >> in jewish life we can say so.

>> i would not 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, spiritually, faith tradition, to focus on so folks feel they have a place in the world and move in the ways that are nourishing and comforting? >> i guess i would say i am extremely text oriented and i think that judaism is extremely text oriented. pretty much everything we do is some was based on text. what music does for me is that helps provide a connection. a conduit, a deeper exploration of things. sometimes i call it [ speaking in a global language ] and that is storytelling based on traditional texts. 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. can give a different experience to the text. it provides all lines of different avenues and ways of getting in and 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 beer attached . whether in english or in hebrew or yiddish or any other traditional jewish languages. that nonetheless the music evokes things beyond what the words are saying? >> i would say it expands the meeting. it does not give another meaning to it, it helps people to find additional meaning within the words . >> wonderful. we will take a quick break. is there something we can go out with an a quick way as we go to our

first break . >> we were thinking about this and that different melodies , and sometimes give different meanings. this is an ethiopian one or in the style of one, that one wrote. >> this is part of the friday evening liturgy. >> [ singing in a global language ]

good morning and welcome back to mosaic . i am rabbi eric weiss and we are having a conversation about music and the jewish community with cantor sharon bernstein. welcome back. >> thank you. >> some of the things you do and 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 could talk a little bit about the ways in which you utilize yiddish and other examples of melodies like the way you sung the ethiopian version of some shabbat liturgy. so we jump in with yiddish? >> we can. i have served at least two lives i am living and one is a cantor and one started at the same time as a yiddish singer. i fell in love while i was in college and i fell in love with yiddish songs and the yiddish language and i started delving into it and finding yiddish songs where i could and singing them and performing them. and eventually when i went to jerusalem for cantor oriole school, a friend of mine invited me to do workshops , he had a place called [ speaking in a global language ] , a library of yiddish books like the national judicial book

center, kind of like it . and cultural programming. he asked me to do a workshop on the yiddish songs and i would go to the library, the archives every month and do a search for yiddish songs on a different theme and do some of the songs that i found. my favorite ones of the songs i found, as part of a workshop in the club and eventually it became a yiddish piano bar what i would hang out at the piano with my book and it kept growing. at this point i think i have 400 yiddish songs and play and sing and there is candlelight and people drinking vodka and eating herring and dark bread. >> that is wonderful. i think some may know or not know, yiddish is generally a combination of german and hebrew, written originally in hebrew characters but also in german. and comes out of the jewish experience in eastern

europe. and was a language that people spoke day today and people would have yiddish as their first language and that was the language of conversation and of songwriting and of argument and agreement and love . it was not necessarily , would you say today, not necessarily considered to be a sacred language the way sometimes hebrews consider it? >> not at all a sacred language. it was the vernacular language . people did not speak hebrew because it was the sacred language. it is was used for living for everything. >> no matter where you are, in eastern europe if you spoke yiddish you could communicate with one another. >> to some degree but, not necessarily. i think there were places certainly where yiddish was not widely spoken. for instance, italy. although i think there are places in italy where yiddish was spoken. i think it depends on where you are. >> what about yiddish and a

yiddish song attracts you? if we think of music it is attached to words that reveal something about the spirit and the soul. what it is about yiddish song and melody that attracts you? >> for me it is textbased. the stories from it are amazing. i feel like i am looking into a window of another world and , or getting postcards from the past. it is reflective of so many different experiences . i tend to specialize in lesser known or unknown yiddish songs. i have had , may be five seconds of fame for singing dirty yiddish songs. which i will not do here. but you really get such a wide range of experiences because it was spoken in so many different places. and so many different kinds of places. different countries and big cities and

little towns. that you just get such a wide variety of people, that only people religious but those completely not religious . musically, when you say yiddish song, you are actually almost not completely but almost like you are saying english song. it really depends on the country and the place . it can be almost any kind of melody. >> in a moment we will go out with a little bit of yiddish song. either contemporary yiddish songwriters today? >> yes. that is a great question. there are but i am not remembering everybody who is doing it right now. my favorite and when a mime uses was [ speaking in a global language ] , who passed away a few years ago. i met her and she had one of her poems that she had not found a tune that

she liked and she was opening for people to write melodies and the melody i wrote, she used it for her song. >> shall we ask you to treat us to a little bit of yiddish music? >> it basically talks about lights and darkness . [ singing in a global language ]

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am rabbi eric weiss and honored to be your host. we are having a wonderful conversation with cantor bernstein about jewish music and jewish life in general. i know that one of the areas you explore and have contributed to was 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 and in illness and grief at the end of life , and in a more general way. you

have a wonderful book called, under the wings of rafael. i wonder if you can talk about with this book is. i know there is an accompanying cd and what brings you to it and what you hope it will do for folks. >> it came out of my congregational work . there was a congregant who was diagnosed with cancer and would be undergoing chemo treatments. and i came up with the idea, i'm not sure how 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 felt to me in some way connected with the feelings or emotions or explorations that might be helpful to her and her process . i recorded it , sometimes i wrote music for it and wrote some explorations, some exercises or things they could do to help explore the text of

it and sent it the day before each chemo treatment is a gift package. >> what is the meaning of, wings of rafael. >> it is said we have four angels that surround us as we go to bed at night . we invoke them. on the right is gabrielle, no, michael. which means the one who is like god or the holiness of god. on our left hand is gabrielle, the strength of god. before us is the lights of god and behind us is rafael, who is the healing of god. i was coming up with the title for this for maybe a year i was trying . i had a spreadsheet of 300 possible names . as it was cooking one day he came to me, under the wings of rafael. for me it means that somehow being enveloped and surrounded and cared for and embraced. one of our prayers, evening prayer we reset before going to bed at night says [ speaking in a global language ] . it is often

translated as spread over us the shelter of peace. i did not want to use the word spread, particularly with cancer the word spread can have difficult connotations. i came up with on federal over us the shelter of peace. for me the wings, i imagine rafael is having wings, not just on top of us but all around us and hold us and care for us and help keep us safe and nurtured. >> if anybody would like to have the book and the cd , how do they purchase it? >> the best thing to do is go to my website which is, sharon bernstein.com. click on the tab and you can find different places to get it. a store in berkeley often has it and there are copies that my synagogue and also copies that can be

found online. the book and cd can be purchased separately and the tracks can be downloaded. >> as we go to our next break, is there something from the cd , the book that you may sing to us as we leave this segment. >> i think i will sing [ speaking in a non-english language ] , which is the song we recite . and it means to keep my lips from speaking badly. [ singing in a global 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. welcome back. >> thank you. we have been talking a lot about the ways in which music comes out of a general tradition and also the ways in which a community influences music or a region. i wonder if you could talk about music in a contemporary way and how at your conversation, one congregation in san francisco , has influenced you and influenced the development of music for the broader community ? >> in terms of music and contemporary music and

judaism, i think sometimes 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, what is happening jewish communities throughout the world is jews tend to be part of the local non-jewish music scene. you end up having music that sounds a lot like the music of the surrounding culture. jewish music in morocco has a lot of similarities to moroccan music. italian music in the synagogue can be sounding a lot like [ speaking in a global language ] or opera. what we have happening today is people have a musical vocabulary. we talk about music being a universal language but actually we have a vocabulary, and language week

grew up with. when we listen to music sometimes you listen to things and we kind of have a sense of where it will go , because there is a predictability about it that is based on the music we listen to that we know we are used to. to be really powerful when used in the synagogue. it helps people connect in additional ways. sometimes it is the older traditional tunes, maybe just decades, not hundreds of years old usually, sometimes that is what helps people connect. sometimes it is music that sounds like what people listen to on the radio or maybe more like on their device. i believe in using a wide mixture of things. of using traditional music and using modern music and funny all kinds of different points for connection and reaching meaning. >> believe it or not in a moment we will have to say goodbye altogether. i am

wondering if there is an example that might come out of the congregation that we can say goodbye to folks , in any particular context? >> i would say for me , one of the things that i have developed is a subspecialty in rainbow songs. i learned many of the ones, i have learned all of them. maybe we close with, over the rainbow. >> wonderful. >> [ singing ]

from cbs news bay area, this is the morning edition. developing this morning.