The bottom right corner of Arabia

 

I visited the Sultanate of Oman in 1997. I've been fascinated by Oman ever since as a little girl I came across an old National Geographic magazine with an article on the Sultanate dated not long after the the recently departed Sultan Qaboos came to the throne. The story of his attempts to develop this small nation and bring it out of a global isolation which had earned it the title 'Hermit Kingdom' intrigued me.

In the mid-1990s there was another National Geographic article on Oman, about it's transformation from a backwater on the Arabian penisular struggling to put down a revolt by tribes near the Yemeni border, to a peaceful fairly prosperous country which had nevertheless succeeded in preserving it's rich heritage despite the dramatic change that had transormed the country in only two decades. The photos showed beautiful landscapes and interesting buildings.I was intrigued all over again, I remember comparing the 70s article with the one from the 90s and marvelling at the change.

In the summer of 1997 I made my dream come true. Well, summer isn't the ideal time to travel to Arabia, in fact it's a pretty lousy time to visit the Gulf, the heat is unbearable and the humidity in the coastal areas is suffocating. I don't think that I understood what heat and humidity really were until my Oman trip! Still, there are advantages to going off season - namely that my mother and I could afford it. The beauty of Oman and the fascinating cultural experience certainly made it worth our while to suffer the trials of an Omani summer. Oman remains one of my favourite places I've ever visited.



One of the lessons I came away with from my sojourn in Oman was a genuine appreciation for the work of Sultan Qaboos and his dedication to bettering the lot of all his subjects. He never married, considering himself married to his duty as sovereign. I didn't get the feeling that the people we met were paying lip service to him out of fear or any kind of enforced reverence for the man. My mother and I were struck by the genuine gratitude and affection local people had for him and the hands on way in which he was reforming and developing his country, whether it was a shiny new project in the capital or more remote rural village infrastructure projects. He seemed to make a point of being very much a man of the people, travelling extensively within the country, hearing the grievances of common people, building, improving and helping as he went.

This is very much in the tradition of the old fashioned local sheikh in the Middle East, a tradition that while not exactly democratic in the Western sense, relies intensely on the support and acceptance of the local people. He is their judge, their arbiter and their benefactor because they consent to his rule and he goes to great pains to care for their welfare.



I only spent a few weeks in Oman, and did not reach all regions of the country, but I did try to speak to as many local people as possible (my Arabic was very basic, but far better than it is today, and we found that many young people in particular spoke decent English)

I realise this sounds very starry eyed, and of course the Sultan also lived a luxurious royal life in beautiful palaces, as one would expect from a Gulf monarch. I am not saying that he was an altruistic saint, but he did strike me as a ruler who took his responsibility to his people extremely seriously.

This responsibility extended to his take on regional Middle Eastern politics too. Oman is in a location that is at once precarious and strategic, on the bottom right corner of Arabia, sandwiched between the instability of Yemen, the power of Saudi Arabia, the glitz of the UAE and with the revolutionary zeal of Iran just across the water. Not an easy place to be.

Sultan Qaboos worked to protect his realm by trying to balance all these players, doing his best to maintain neutrality between these competing powers, but also trying to act as peace maker and mediator between them. It was in this role that he also opened a channel to Israel and hosted visits by both Prime Minister Rabin and more recently Netanyahu. He saw that building bridges, even if for now mostly economic, was in the interest of Oman, but more widely the entire Middle East. In a an explosive region he tried to create calm and lower tensions and make new connections for the common good. His mix of realism and common sense will be missed. One can hope that his appointed successor, his nephew, will be blessed with similar aspirations for regional cooperation and peace.

Singing our tradition

Shuls used to be places where there was singing, where there was a regular professional or semi-professional hazzan, maybe a choir (formal or informal). Reading an article today calling for the introduction of singing in to the weekly Shabbat prayer services I was taken aback to see the writer suggesting writing special new tunes for these prayers, so that they may be sung, as though the problem is that we need to invent tunes.

There is so much beautiful nusah for the Shabbat davening that in the last few decades has been thrown away and abandoned, so much liturgical tradition that Ashkenazim in particular (but much less so Edot Mizrah) have dumped as "old fashioned", as though hazzanut and the niggunim of one's grandparents or great-grandparents is just a fad to throw out if one gets bored of it.

So much of the musical tradition of the Ashkenazi communities was already lost in the Shoah, and yet in recent decades many Ashkenazi communities have abandoned what was left. Even in the UK, a world centre for Ashkenazi hazzanut, most shuls have fired their hazzanim and scrapped their choirs. The music of the synagogue has gone quiet, replaced either with faster mumbled davening or catchy pop-Hassidic tunes to which the text must often be shoehorned, frequently without a connection to the liturgy or context. At the fringes there has been renewed interest in the melodies of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach or Modzitz hassidic nigunim, but this is far from the mainstream of most modern Orthodox Ashkenazi shuls which have increasingly opted for a fast, mostly mumbled Shabbat morning and even Friday night service.

I understand that people became fed up with long, drawn-out old time Shabbat services. But today the pendulum has swung too much the other way. I see so many children (and many of their parents) feeling a disconnect with the mumbled Shabbat davening. Singing needs to be restored to the Shabbat service, but don't go looking for new music or writing new tunes, revive the many beautiful melodies from the traditional nusah that are in danger of being lost, research historic hazzanut and Hassidish melodies in danger of dying out. Go visit Merkaz Renanim at Heichal Shlomo for inspiration.

Does it occur to the writer that one of the reason people are inspired by the singing on the Yamim Noraim is that these old traditional niggunim and the traditional nusah take people back to memories of their childhoods? Of singing in shul with their parents and grandparents? Of reliving, however briefly, the sweetness of a world that is no longer and loved ones who have passed?

Perhaps Proust's madeleines have become a cliche, but this doesn't diminish from the truth of his observation. Childhood melodies, like childhood foods, have the ability to transport us, to rekindle a connection lost in the haze of time, to be a Tardis of memory.

As religious Jews we have a keen feel for the importance of this connection, a reverence for maintaining a link with our ancestors thousands of years ago who were slaves in Egypt, who stood at Mount Sinai and who witnessed the siege of ancient Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Our religion and culture incorporates ritual and special days to help inculcate these experiences so that generation after generation will have shared memories that tie us to our roots and the events that formed our nation.

Of course things change with the times. It may be an oxymoron but traditions can also change with time. That doesn't lessen the importance of trying to preserve them though, not just for the sake of conserving a key part of our culture, but because of the way they link us to our ancestors and keep alive that fleeting memory of our departed grandparents or give us an imagined shared experience with great-grandparents we never actually knew.

Judaism is ultimately a balancing act, a culture which reveres tradition, but which is also continuously evolving and creating new traditions. The grandeur of mid-twentieth century synagogue hazzanut is unlikely to make a return, the days of the hazzan and choir on a regular Shabbat seem to have passed from this world in all but a handful of synagogues around the world. It saddens me to see this beautiful art form mostly relegated to the concert hall like a relic, rather than kept alive as a working, breathing practice, but it seems that in today's world people lack the patience for it on a regular Friday night or Shabbat.

That doesn't mean though that all the traditional melodies should be thrown out of the regular Shabbat service. There will always be those that don't enjoy singing, but for many people singing the davening is what helped them learn the prayers as children and helped kids sit through the long service. Communal singing is what made women feel that they had a place in the Orthodox synagogue even if they were in the balcony or behind the mehitza. The music of shul has uplifted so many people, by highlighting the words of the davening, by creating a shared experience that a mumbled quick service cannot. It is high time that more shuls around the world, especially in Israel, included more singing in the Shabbat service for all of these reasons.

We don't need to invent new music though. Ashkenazi nusah contains a rich collection of melodies for all kinds of prayers. We have a duty to preserve that heritage, to return the liturgical songs of our grandparents and great-grandparents to its rightful place in the synagogue. To pass on that immense body of knowledge to our children and grandchildren instead of letting it die out.

The eternal flame of Talmud

It has not been a good news week for Jews in the diaspora, in particular for Orthodox Jews in New York, but also elsewhere.

Today however Jews around the world celebrate a once in 7.5 years event - the Siyum Hashas, the conclusion of a 7.5 year cycle of study during which Jews study one page of Talmud a day, Daf Yomi, in order to complete the entire series of the Talmud from the first chapter to the last, covering a complex array of Jewish legal texts, legends and history in a mix of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew.

It is no mean feat to study the whole of the Talmud, to wrap one's head around everything from the complexities of the cycle of the rain and agriculture in the Land of Israel to legal discussions on the finer points of tort law, kosher observance and divorce to mystical legends and folklore.

The thousands of Jews around the world who have completed this cycle of Daf Yomi are not just engaging in a challenging and rewarding intellectual exercise, not just fulfilling the religious requirement to study Torah, but also celebrating millennia of Jewish culture, language, faith and tradition, a rich heritage which has endured the scattering of the Jewish people to the four corners of the earth, the most horrific persecutions, forced conversions and expulsions, but which has survived intact.

Centuries after the Talmud, originally an oral tradition, was written down, it's text remains at the core of an ancient Jewish literary inheritance passed down through the generations.

Over sixty years ago my grandfather, born in a tiny village in what is today Ukraine, visited Israel for the first time. He boarded a bus in Tel Aviv. Across the aisle sat a Yemenite Jew poring over a Talmudic text. My grandfather leaned over to see what he was learning and the man motioned for my grandfather to take the empty seat next to him. He spoke heavily Yemeni accented Hebrew, a dialect hard to understand by other Hebrew speakers. My grandfather spoke Hebrew with a distinct Galician Ashkenazi accent, equally hard for many other Hebrew speakers to understand. They bonded over the text of the Talmud though, able to share enough of the key terminology to study together all the way to Jerusalem.

It was the highlight of my grandfather's first visit to to Israel, more than visiting the holy places, more than seeing the miracle of Jewish sovereignty restored to Zion after 2000 years. Sitting with a Jew born in Yemen, he a Jew born in Galicia, united together on a bus ride in Eretz Yisrael over a page of Talmud, to him that was living the prophecy of the ingathering of exiles, of the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture and faith across the gulf of centuries of exile, just as the Biblical prophets had promised.

I remember as a child listening to him retell this tale of wonder, who could have imagined, he, a simple Hassidishe boy from a little shteitl, an aspiring rabbinical student who saw his village burned down by the Cossacks during the First World War, the Jews running to flee in the woods thanks to a Russian Jewish officer galloping in to the village to warn them in advance of the main force of Cossacks. And then not long after, my grandfather was forcibly conscripted in to the Austrian army, a young provincial devout Jew, thrust in to the middle of a war he had no hope of understanding and every chance that he might not survive.

By a miracle he found himself alive but alone in Vienna at the end of the war and happened to meet his Rebbe who with his hassidim had had to flee their shteitl, and his Rebbe, seeing how shattered the young man was by his experiences, no longer considering himself worthy of rabbinical training, appointed him his shammes, his assistant, a position that granted my grandfather a valuable visa to emigrate with his Rebbe's entourage to England, saving him and several siblings from the Holocaust that was to destroy the rest of the family and most of Galician Jewry only a couple of decades later.

Building a new life in London was not so easy either, learning a new language, encountering a different, but still painful, type of anti-Semitism, the general hostility to a foreigner with a somewhat Germanic (to English ears) sounding accent in the years after the First World War.

Diving in to a page of Talmud was all that time a refuge, taking him back to his youth before that life was forever banished by the horrific upheaval of the First World War. It would be many years until he could afford to own his very own set of Talmud volumes, but he could always go to his Rebbe or the local synagogue after work or on Shabbat to immerse himself in Talmud. All his life it was one of his greatest pleasures.

Seeing all the articles, posts and advertisements about celebrations of the Siyum Hashas this week I am reminded of that pure joy he found in the Talmudic text. Of the wonder his voice always held telling the story of being able to share that love of Talmudic study with the Jewish immigrant from Yemen on the bus in Israel, the connection it instantly created between Jews from such distant diasporas symbolising for my grandfather the eternal promise that God would one day reunite the Jews from the disparate lands of their exile.

These may be grim days for many Jewish communities around the world as anti-Semitism once again rears its ugly head, but the Siyum Hashas, a celebration of Jewish survival, reminds us that our ancient culture has survived far greater challenges and will survive this too.