What Is Hebrew Chant?
Chanting is the melodic and rhythmic repetition of a Hebrew phrase drawn from our sacred text. It is a practice that allows for the exploration of the deeper levels of meaning and experience that lie beneath the surface of our religious lives. For many, chanting has become an important method of opening the heart, connecting with the community, quieting the mind and viscerally embodying our liturgy and scripture.
Why We Value this Practice as a Core of Contemporary Jewish Spirituality
It’s important to bring our sustained and loving attention into building and refining our inner lives. Chant is a practice that connects the outer dimensions of sound and group dynamics with the inner dimensions of awareness. As we grow and nurture our inner lives, it is important to have ways to express and share with our community the gifts we have received in the solitude of our personal practice. Chant is the bridge between the inner life and the outer expression; between the solitary practice and the shared beauty of fellowship. When we chant we are using the whole body as the instrument with which to feel the meaning of the sacred phrase. We study the meaning of the words and the context from which they are drawn. We explore the range of our feelings so that they can be dedicated to the purpose of the chant. And we use the power of the practice to enter into the silence and stillness at our core. Thus the Practice of Chant integrates our spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical energies.
The Relation between Chanting and Other Spiritual Practices
Mindfulness Meditation
For many, the practice of silence can be daunting. Our minds are so filled with clutter and our thoughts move in habitual circles. The Practice of Chant can provide an entranceway to the silence, by focusing our intention and gathering up our attention into a form that is both compelling and beautiful. In the silence after a chant, many people experience an inner spaciousness for the first time. Because the chant is often energizing, they are able to sustain that spacious silence for much longer than ever before. The silence after the chant invites them then to rest and be renewed in the sanctuary that the chant has built.
Prayer
The Practice of Chant takes the words of prayer and uses them as doorways into deeper meanings and into the spaces of our own hearts. It does this through the clarifying and refining of our intention. Sometimes the sheer volume of prayers collected over the centuries, itself becomes an obstacle to delving more deeply into their meaning or using their power for transformation. The Practice of Chant allows us the luxury of exploring one phrase at a time, igniting the fire of our enthusiasm and pouring our passion into those particular words. Our prayer-life will start to reflect the personal and passionate experience we have had with those words. Chanting wakes up our liturgy and brings it to life within us.
Text Study
The Practice of Chant allows us to begin to approach the text from an expanded understanding — from our hearts, bodies and experience as well as from what we know intellectually. In addition to preparing us for text study by expanding our perception of the words in front of us, chant may also be used in the comprehension of a text. We take a phrase from the text that holds some power or mystery for us, and experience it with melody and rhythm and repetition until it unlocks its secrets for us.
Spiritual Direction
Often during the ongoing Practice of Chant, the complexities of our inner life are brought to the surface. For this reason it is recommended that one who engages in Chant also has access to a Spiritual Director who can acknowledge the mysteries and challenges that are called up by the chant and help us to appreciate the complexities of the inner life as they are revealed by the practice. Both Spiritual Direction and Chant rely on the ever-deepening of our capacity to listen and then express the truth of our inner knowing.
Yoga
Like Yoga, Chanting is an embodied practice. As Chanters, we are encouraged to feel the sounds we produce resonating in every part of the body and to use that sound to work on places of tension or resistance. Chanting supports the practice of Yoga by energizing the body, opening the heart, and clearing the mind. Chanting has often been used in conjunction with Yoga to put our efforts into the context of a Devotional Practice.
Middot (Character Traits)
We are dedicated to supporting the work of cultivating middot (qualities) such as: the conscious awareness of God’s presence, compassion, wisdom, love, open-heartedness, justice, spiritual community, and humility. Chanting can be an effective and powerful tool in this work. In the Practice of Chant, we choose a phrase that expresses or embodies a quality that we wish to cultivate. As we chant, we can step inside that quality, feel its beauty and also explore the obstacles that arise in response to its presence. For instance, in exploring the midah of patience, we might chant from the psalms, “Dom l’Yah v’hitchollelo.” (Be still and wait for God.) (Psalm 37:7) As we repeat and embody that phrase, we experience both the feeling of patient waiting AND our rising impatience. In the Practice of Chant, we can strengthen and appreciate the stillness of waiting as well as explore the roots of our impatience. This exploration can be done with compassion and understanding as we direct the beauty of the chant to soften hard places in the heart and melt our defenses.
Spiritual Community
When we chant together with a community we create something so much more beautiful than what any one of us could accomplish alone. We begin to appreciate the shared project of a chant and see that it is a microcosm of our lives. We can shape our differences to create fascinating harmonies. We can time our varying rhythms to create counterpoint. Each of us learns to bring the fullness of our presence to the group in ways that will enhance the overall feeling and tone of the chant. Even people who feel that they cannot sing can learn to chant and contribute their unique tone and feeling to the whole of the shared creation.
As we enter the silence after the chant, each of us lays down our differences and experiences a collective silence that is framed by the highest intentions of everyone in the group.
© Shefa Gold. All rights reserved.