Musical Changes

By Rachel Channon
New York University

We were all standing scattered around the studio. The lights were off and I could hear the dreary, New York City rain hitting hard against the pavement outside. As my teacher played the piano, I prepped for a "solo-round," in which each student would express himself or herself by singing whatever they felt at that moment. With my eyes closed I could concentrate on my breathing and any thoughts that came to me. My teacher often uses metaphors to explain how breath and sound flow out of us with ease, but I was shocked when my teacher said to imagine we were collecting heaps and heaps of manna in the desert. I knew exactly what she meant as I thought back to my many trips to Israel. I remembered lying in the desert and imagining my ancestors fleeing Egypt. I imagined them collecting manna from God as they dreamed about reaching Israel. Suddenly, my voice erupted from deep within my diaphragm. I sang with such strength and conviction, my classmates barely recognized me. "What changed?" they asked. I said I didn’t know, but the truth was that I didn’t know if they would understand.

My mother always told me that my best singing was done in shul. I hypothesized that this was because, unlike my singing for choir or shows, I truly connected to what I was saying. During voice class on that rainy afternoon, I realized that that was true. There is something about singing prayers, or a niggun (wordless melody), that elevates my soul—and ultimately my voice—in a completely unusual way. Music, in general, has an incredible ability to alter our moods and produce visible changes in us. But, as I have come to find in my own life, music that is significant to Judaism affects us in a spiritual way, because it is deeply rooted in tradition and belief. We find comfort in the fact that our great-grandparents most likely sang the same prayers and that when we do so we are part of something that is much greater than ourselves. It takes music from being purely entertainment to something which connects us with our ancestors and to God. When my teacher used the metaphor of manna falling from the sky, something unlocked inside of me, allowing me to sing from an honest, spiritually connected place –a place that I only discover when I am praying or singing Jewish music.

Rachel Channon is a sophomore at New York University studying both drama and political science and is the former vice president of KOACH at NYU.

[Posted 3/15/10]