The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor

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Judah M. Cohen. The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor

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The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor

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Tradition in Change

As matriculants into a Reform Jewish institution, cantorial students at the School of Sacred Music obtain their credentials, and represent Jewish musical tradition, within a religious movement predicated on change. In May 1999, a few months before I started my fieldwork, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR)—Reform Judaism’s rabbinic organization—ratified the movement’s fourth document of collective self-definition since 1885. Entitled “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” the document asserted in its preamble: “The great contribution of Reform Judaism is that it has enabled the Jewish people to introduce innovation while preserving tradition, to embrace diversity while asserting commonality, to affirm beliefs without rejecting those who doubt, and to bring faith to sacred texts without sacrificing critical scholarship” (“A Statement of Principles” 2000: 3). When the movement’s rabbinic journal officially published the Principles the following year, moreover, it supplemented the five-page document with ten essays outlining various levels of support or opposition, illustrating the intensely dialogic nature inherent in Reform Jewish identity. As Mark Bloom, one of the contributors to this issue, noted, the Principles seemed both to address and inspire the next round of “Reform Judaism’s endless quest to define itself” (Bloom 2000: 52).14

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