Fear and Joy in Sepharad and Ashkenaz

On a day of indelible memories, it was one that stood out. In 2013, I was privileged to be inducted as the rabbi and minister of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in America. Shearith Israel has long been known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York, reflecting the unique liturgical traditions that its diverse membership has long preserved. About the storied history of the congregation—America’s oldest, featuring Jewish patriots who had encountered Washington, Hamilton, and other founders—I knew a great deal. I also knew that I faced a steep learning curve when it came to assuming the responsibilities of leading Shearith Israel in prayer. For this congregation’s minhag, its customs of prayer and worship, its magnificent liturgy, are above all rooted in the traditions of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, on the civilization and culture known as Sepharad.

As one who had grown up within the Ashkenazi tradition, many of the liturgical traditions of the synagogue were new to me, and to many of the guests attending the installation that day. One prominent Jewish intellectual was in the audience, and, as I approached him to express my gratitude for his attendance, he quipped that he did not understand how I could embrace a tradition that “didn’t say Un’taneh Tokef.”

Since then, it has been twelve years that I have merited to minister at my congregation, and when I am asked to describe what it was like for one steeped in the Ashkenazi tradition to take on my particular pulpit, as I regularly am, it is to this moment that I turn. While the tunes at Shearith Israel used for the prayers during the week and Shabbat are different from those with which I was raised, the words are to a great extent the same, as those prayers were established in earlier periods of rabbinic Judaism. Instead, it is the High Holy Days where the liturgical differences make themselves most known—and in a profound, indelible, unforgettable way. It is not only the words and melodies of the piyyutim—the compositions created for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that are recited by Sephardi Jewry—that are different from those of the Ashkenazi world. It is that the very mood they conjure and create is fundamentally different.