On Friday night, November 16, we had a musical Shabbat service to celebrate the release of my new congregational CD, Shirei Tikvah.  The room was filled with people and ruach and beautiful Shabbat spirit.  At the end of the service, the CD was made available to everyone and people got to ride home with the sounds of Shabbat in their cars.  It was such a wonderful evening.

I was inspired to make this CD when we started having our musical Shabbat services a few years ago.  We precede most services with a catered dinner, and from the very first musical Shabbat we knew we were doing something valuable for the community because so many people came to both the dinner and the service.  Since then the services have been spirited, meaningful and most definitely successful.

But, I have found that despite the number of people coming to the musical Shabbat services, and despite the enthusiastic responses I get from people each month, very few people participate and sing along with me!  Ours is a community of music-lovers who don’t feel very brave about singing at services, and I decided that it was time to change that pattern.

So I embarked upon the project of recording a CD for the congregation.  I spent many months recording and mixing a CD filled with Shabbat melodies from our musical Shabbat services.  What started out as a small project, as almost just a learning CD, turned into a labor of love for Congregation B’nai Tikvah.  My initial intention was to make something that would teach you the melodies we sing at services, something that was hopefully engaging enough for you to listen to as you cook or as you drive.  But what I ended up making was a CD of complex, beautifully arranged music, a CD that you will hopefully love listening to, and that you will listen to so much that you end up learning our great melodies.

In my mind, a true congregation is not one that sits back at services and listens as if it is a concert, but rather a community of people joined in joyful song.  B’nai Tikvah is a lovely community and I believe that our services should reflect our sweetness and uniqueness.  My dream is to one day come to services and be blown away by the voices in the room with me.  So please, enjoy this CD I’ve made for you.  Sing out while you listen to it, experiment with the harmonies, make mistakes and laugh at yourself, and then come to services and do all of that again.  No one expects you to be perfect when you come to services.  In fact, no one is even paying attention to you.  We are each so consumed with ourselves and by our own self-consciousness that we are inhibited from participating in the best healing there is: prayer through song.  My hope and prayer is that this CD will help to strip away some of that inhibition and transform this community one song at a time.