Continuity and Change: The Past Half-Century of Jewish Liturgical Life

In my childhood, Rodef Shalom Congregation in Pittsburgh, our classical Reform “temple,” was a place of formal decorum. Children dressed up, even for religious school. Music in four-part harmonies emerged mysteriously from the organ loft above the stage-like pulpit below. There, facing the congregation, male rabbis presided in dark business suits and no ritual garb, their space rarely breached by congregants. The 1940s prayer book was compact, easily held in one hand, its mellifluous pseudo-Elizabethan English reinforcing the sense of awe. Torah was read, never chanted, with rabbis translating for the congregants. Children learned four key liturgical responses and one easy hymn in Hebrew, but all else was English. Fifty years ago, influenced by the vast social changes reshaping America and the Jewish world, this began to change. More children celebrated becoming bar or bat mitzvah and learned more Hebrew. Formality decreased. In the 1980s, women took a place on this pulpit, both as operatically trained cantorial soloists and myself as rabbinic intern. I dared to chant Torah. Gradually, revised (and ever larger) prayer books were accepted, each adding more contemporary and gender-neutral language, and alternative readings. Hebrew prayers became dominant, today mostly sung with congregational participation actively encouraged. The original reading desk now sits on a lowered welcoming pulpit extension, only slightly above the pews. Musical accompaniment comes from the grand piano now occupying the original higher pulpit as well as from the soloist’s guitar. In February 2022, the rabbi and soloist, both women, were wearing kippah and tallit, the ritual skullcap and prayer shawl. They turned to face the ark for many prayers, symbolically joining the congregation. Many congregants, seated in the original fixed pews, dressed casually. In other words, my ancestors who built and still led this synagogue fifty years ago would hardly recognize it. The degree of liturgical transformation in other parts of the Jewish world over the past half-century varies. Some more traditional settings are largely unchanged, while others fall on a multidimensional spectrum that ranges to various extremes. Outside of liberal Judaisms, the Hebrew prayers and lections were and are essentially unchanging verbally, but elements of their performance have shifted. Much of the Jewish world now uses prayer books and pew Bibles characterized increasingly by user-friendly production values like: layout that interprets the Hebrew text; instructions; commentaries, both historical and inspirational; and comprehensible translations according to today’s esthetics and theology. Fifty years ago, few Orthodox or Conservative prayer books met more than one of these considerations; today, they are common.