When Asher Shasho Levy, an expert performer of Sephardic and Mizrahi music, became The Kitchen’s cantor four years ago, the congregation’s rabbi said she “felt like somebody was handing me another Torah I didn’t know about.”
“And my first reaction was to be like, where’s this been? What? How? How come I’ve been singing the same three chords my whole life?” Kitchen founder Rabbi Noa Kushner said.
Now The Kitchen, an independent congregation in San Francisco, is bringing together innovative Sephardic and Mizrahi musicians, scholars and other leaders for a weekend of musical and intellectual cross-pollination. The “Song of Songs” gathering includes Israeli musical sensations, American scholars and the editor of an egalitarian British Sephardic prayerbook.
But why is Kushner, an Ashkenazi rabbi, so committed to Sephardic music and thought?
“I always try to bring the best from wherever I can find it within the Jewish world. So I bring Rashi, I bring Rambam, I bring Ibn Ezra. Those are all Sephardi scholars,” Kushner said.
Then there’s the music itself. “I’ve always just thought it was the best,” she said.
Since Levy arrived in 2022, music at The Kitchen has been primarily drawn from Sephardic and Mizrahi sources, and its new siddur unveiled last year combines Sephardic and Ashkenazi prayer in a novel way. Last year, Levy and Kushner also invited a group of leaders in the Sephardic musical, liturgical and scholarly spaces to an invite-only convening partially in celebration of the new siddur.
This year, they’re opening the event up to the community the weekend of May 8 to 10. Friday and Saturday services that week will feature some of the musical talent in town for the conference. A Saturday night concert will spotlight Israeli singer Neta Elkayam and oud player Yair Dalal, both major figures in Sephardic music in Israel. The conference itself will take place Sunday.
The differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic liturgical music are profound, Levy said.
“Everything is done out loud, and there are these different registers,” Levy said of Sephardic praying — whereas Ashkenazi praying traditionally involves long silent or mumbled sections before the community comes back together for the closing line of a prayer.
Both forms of traditional hazanut (cantorial music) are improvisatory, but Ashkenazi cantors are working within a set of melodies prescribed for each service, such as Shabbat evening or weekday morning. Sephardic cantors, by contrast, have a set of maqams, or musical modes, special to each week of the year and they sing the entire service out loud.
Among the scholars and musicians participating in the concert and conference is Samuel Torjman Thomas. Though he comes from a Moroccan Sephardic background, Torjman Thomas grew up at a typically Ashkenazi American synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Modesto. He now lives in New York, where his work encompasses both the academic and the artistic. He’s an ethnomusicologist, who also plays jazz saxophone, oud, and nay, a Middle Eastern and North African flute.
The way that The Kitchen combines Ashkenazi and Sephardic elements is unique and springs from both its nondenominational identity and the Sephardic world’s lack of denominational division, according to Torjman Thomas.
The Kitchen, Torjman Thomas added, has a worldview similar to the Sephardic outlook “that can go beyond denominationalism and also beyond a more stark divide between the religious and nonreligious aspects of your life.”
For him, it’s a more complete, all-encompassing approach. Some American synagogues have only occasional “Sephardic Shabbats” or one-off uses of Ladino songs.
“Most of Jewish world history is part of the Mediterranean world, and certainly half of Israel’s demographic background is of the Mediterranean world. And so if we’re going to be thinking about what it means to be a collective Jewish community, true Am Yisrael kind of vibes, there has to be more of an integration of elements, rather than tokenism,” he said.
Torjman Thomas will participate in the Saturday night concert as well as Sunday’s conference, at which he will moderate a panel called “Sepharadi Liturgy and Musical Culture: The Symbiosis of Religion and Culture.”
“The most important thing about this conference is getting all these people together,” Levy said. “I truly think that just by having these people from all these communities around the world who are bringing similar ideas together, something holy will emerge.”