Steve Klaper

 

INTERVIEW Transcript

Interviewee: STEVE KLAPER

Interviewer: Lawrence Boocker

Interview Date: March 13, 2020

DOB: 1/13/1954Place of Birth: Detroit

Location: Oak Park, MI

Interview No.: 13.03.20-SK (audio digital file)

(Approximate total length 1 hour, 13 min)

Transcription: Yousaidit (DS),

Themes: Jewish Identity, Doctrine, Jewish Gentile Relations, Observance, Upbringing

Summary: Over his adult life, Steve Klaper combined the rituals and litany of his Orthodox and Hasidic religious upbringing into songs and teachings. Gradually he introduced Orthodox praying into Reform prayer and included his learning of Renewal practices into his own religious practice. More recently he and a Franciscan friar have explored parallel prayer services (Song and Spirit). Early motivation for his eclectic religious progression came from his interfaith marriage where one child was raised Catholic, and the other child was raised Jewish.

Example of proper citation/ attribution:

                              Boocker, L. (Interviewer) &Klaper,S. (Interviewee). (2020) Steve Klaper: Jewish Journeys [Interview transcript]. Retrieved from Jewish Journeys Oral History Collection of Congregation Shir Tikvah: https://shirtikvah.org/cstoralhistoryarchive

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

[00:00 silence]

Interviewer: The name of the interviewer is Larry Booker; the name of the interviewee is Steve Klaper. Today's date is March 13th, 2020. We're at the interviewee's house in Oak Park, Michigan.  And I’ve explained to you the purpose of the interview, and you've signed an agreement for the interview. Do I have your permission to start the interview?

Interviewee: You do.

Interviewer: Good, thank you. So I think I want to start by asking you about your earliest connections with Jewish music. Were there particular songs or prayer melodies that grabbed you as a child?

Interviewee: My first experience of the Jewish music was sitting next to my father in Shul. But I grew up Orthodox in Detroit, in the Orthodox Shuls there's this phenomenon that I don't know how to name. But later, when I was a kid, I come to think of it as a shadow hazzan. The hazzan is the cantor who leads services.

They don't necessarily sing but they chant a lot, and they lead any songs. My father was one of these shadow hazzan if you will when he davened, he davened loudly. And since he knew all of the melodies that a hazzan would know, he would sort of do what the hazzan was about to do and finish right when the hazzan began.

So you would hear it twice. In some of the old shuls, there were often a couple of these guys who knew the music and knew the Nusach so well that they would just be chanting out loud while they were davening. And so I sat next to my father, and I was just immersed in this music, in the sound of the Davening.

Interviewer: Did you think it was cool that your father did this?

Interviewee: It alternated between thinking he was cool and being embarrassed.

Interviewer: Was he well respected for this?

Interviewee: Oh, yes, he was good. People knew that he was a good davener; he was often asked to lead Davening, to lead services.

Interviewer: Do you think that this is something that he obviously you've, to some extent, followed in his path? Do you think he was like prepping you? Did he give you hints on how to do this as you were sitting next to him?

Interviewee: No, not at all. He, like any good orthodox father, was teaching me when to stand and when to sit and which prayers are this, which prayers are that. He included a lot of stories about what was going on there. Stories that he had gotten from his grandfather because he had grown up in shul also as I did. I mean he was a musician anyway, he played piano.

So he played piano, and he sang, and he did all this anyway, not professionally, this is just what he did. And he had a big personality and wasn't afraid to get up there and sing whatever. And he certainly, at anything at a shul he was completely comfortable because he had grown up in this.

Interviewer: Well, that's interesting because you are a cantor, but you're also a storyteller also.

Interviewee: Correct, that's a different story.

Interviewer: Well, actually, we're kind of here to hear that story. Again were you attracted to your father's ability to tell stories and the way people responded to them?

Interviewee: Yes, yes, I mean look, my father came from, I come from a long line of Hasidim. We did not grow up in a Hasidic community; we were not a Hasidic family. But his grandparents, and back before that, were all part of this Eastern European Hasidic, very superstitious culture. So there were all these rituals and little things that we did that I witnessed that made no sense, and he had all sorts of stories for them, mystical stories.  During the holidays, there's a thing called dukhanening where the priest, where the Kohanim come out and bless the people. Yevhārēkh-khā. They come out and bless the people. And when it's time for that, all of the men would pull their tallit’s over their heads, because you couldn't watch what was going on up there.[00:05:00]

Why? Because we had to get under the Tallit with [00:05:00.02] dad, right? Why couldn't you watch, because the angels are floating around up above the ark, and you can't see, or you'll go blind, right? It's stories like that. I came to realize that it was a lot of Eastern European superstition.

[00:05:00]

Interviewer: Okay. So what was your reaction to the mystery and the mystic and the secretive stuff in Judaism? As a child, how did you respond to that?

Interviewee:  It really appealed to me. As a child, I don't know how young we're talking, but sometimes six, seven, eight, nine years old, not a toddler. I came to feel that there was nothing to do with specifically with shul or Judaism.

That there was stuff that was going on under the surface. There were invisible things happening all the time that people weren't aware of. And I wasn't necessarily always aware of it, but I was always looking for it. When people were talking to each other, the way the conversation would go, there was stuff going on. I didn't think about psychology; I didn't know anything about; I didn't know anything about anything.

I was seven years old, eight years old. But I always felt that it could be because of how I was raised. But there was stuff going on below the surface, and I always felt that way. There was the Stolener Hasidim [Karlin-Stolin]

Hasidim, of which my great-grandmother was a member, had a contingent here in Detroit. And the contingent in New York with the Rebbe would come to visit the group in Detroit right before Passover every year.

And we would walk the couple miles to the Yeshiva, where they were all camped out in the hallway on cots. And that's where we would daven with them. And the Stolener [Karlin-Stolin] Hasidim happened to be one of the hallmarks of their style of whatever, is that they're very loud and exuberant. When they daven, it's not even dancing, they jump around the room, and they yell, and they shout, and they sing very loudly.

And it's a whole different kind of thing, and they're all dressed with the shtreimels, and the kapoteh [long black frock coat]

that are these long gowns, right? And when they dance, they twirl, and it looks like what I later thought of as Rumi and the Sufis. And I remember seeing these guys when I was young as a kid thinking they're tapped into something else, and it's a really interesting something else. It didn't make me want to go off and join them and be part of their weird community, because it was weird. But what was interesting and exciting was that they were tapped into something that was happening off the page, and I just really enjoyed that.

Interviewer: You know what; I want to come back to that in a minute. But first, did you know the circumstances of your ancestors coming to America?

Interviewee: Somewhat, yes. I know that great grandmother came over with the Rebbe, and the contingent from, where were they from Vinlansk Fedorivka?

which is now in the Ukraine, then it was whatever it was. When the Russian army came to town, it was Russia.

Interviewer: Right.

Interviewee: So I know they came over. Most of my family came over at the turn of the century or then later in the 20’s. I didn't get Holocaust stories; any evil from Europe was Stalin, not Hitler, right? They didn't know from Hitler; they knew from Stalin.

Interviewer: So they came over for safety because of programs?

Interviewee: Oh, yes, on both sides of the family.

Interviewer: Do you know how they responded to being in America? Did they try to keep their ways as much as possible, or did they jump in with both feet into American culture?

[00:10:00.00]

Interviewee: Different sides of the family did different things. My mother's side of the family tended to be more secular, and we were into business and then being merchants and all of that. My father's family tended to be more religious and keep their religion. I suspect that more of my father's family lived in the old neighborhoods down on Dexter, down by Dexter in that neighborhood.

In that old Jewish neighborhood from [00:10:00.00], it's interesting that the people who came here and the people who grew up Jewish before the second world war, before the holocaust have a whole different connection to Judaism than we do. Everybody born after World War II, the Holocaust is just a fact. It colors everything about being Jewish. The people from before that and my father was born in 1930. So he grew up really before anybody knew about any of that. It had to do with a chain of connection back to the old country, and back to the old people.

and so the neighborhoods in Detroit were far more European, with people sitting on the porches playing dominoes and drinking tea you know. And people being called to prayer, and if you needed a minyan, you just walk up and down the street and announce it. It was a different sort of world than the one that we as Jews who grew up after the war knew.

Interviewer: Okay. So let's talk about you, because you talked about this Hasidic heritage that you inherited, but you were born and raised in America with baseball and hot dogs, and you were American. Did you ever feel like there was any kind of conflict between being Jewish and being American?

Interviewee: Well, so I didn't go to a parochial school, I didn't go to Yeshiva, I went to public school and then I went to Hebrew school after school for ten years, all the way through graduating.

Interviewer: While some of your friends were off playing baseball?

Interviewee: That is correct. We also kept kosher, and we're Shomer Shabbos, so I didn't get to play in little league, games were on Saturday. I didn't get to join cub scouts or boy scouts like some people did, because again these things happened on the weekends, happened on Saturday.

Interviewer: Were you ever resentful of this?

Interviewee: Oh sure, I mean not to the point that… life in Detroit in the 60s as you're aware was very much what was going on on the block. So there was always something to do on the block anyway. As I got older, yes, as I got into junior high school, certainly, certainly.

Interviewer: You're resentful of the time constraints or the practices, the restrictions?

Interviewee: Yes. Of not being able to do things Friday night, Saturday yes, oh yes. The time constraints weren't that much. As I got older, it became more of my choice to join my dad at Shul or not. And then my parents got divorced when I was around 14 years old. So that changed the family dynamic, right, dramatically.

Interviewer: Did you live with your father or your mother?

Interviewee: My mother. And so, who did not come from a religious background was not as eager to keep on pressing it and enforcing it as my father was.

Interviewer: Okay.

 

Interviewee: I fell away from all of this in my mid-teens; I began falling away from all of this.

Interviewer: As a result of living with your mother?

Interviewee: Yes, as a result of being free.

Interviewer: As the maturing process, did you start questioning some of the things that?

Interviewee: Well, I was always questioning, but yes. And if I wasn't living with my father, I didn't have to question it out loud, I questioned it to myself, and I decided what I wanted to do. And tested what I could get away with, and got away with it. I was a troublemaker.

Interviewer: What were some of the things that bothered you about the Judaism that you grew up with?

Interviewee: A lot of it was rote.  A lot of it was rote.  That was how it was taught. They taught us in Hebrew school how to daven, how to read Hebrew and daven at speed, so that you could keep up, right? They didn't really teach us the Hebrew language, a little bit, a little bit, not a lot. I really learned the translation stuff much much later.

Interviewer: What about the theology? Jewish beliefs?

[00:15:00.01]

Interviewee: You know I’ve been in the liberal Jewish milieu for so long, that where we like to teach all that, and we like the kids to understand things about God and things about theology and all that. Growing up orthodox, they [00:15:00.01] don't teach any of that; you're just in it. You're in it, and you pick it all up, you know what I mean? No one ever talked to me about, for instance, Judaism being about how you behave, not about what you believe. That's a critical thing, which I use now in teaching all the time.

It's different from other belief systems that are all about what you believe and having faith, and this is about faith and belief too. But we're mostly about how do you behave and what do you do in the world. Well, nobody ever talked about that, I never heard about Tikun Olum as a kid, orthodox in the 60s, nobody talked about that stuff. You just did the stuff; you just did everything. It's the holidays and here's what you do, you know what I mean? Do you understand it?

So I don't know that I really thought that deeply about it, I was just in it. I thought more deeply about the extraneous things that were presented to me in high school and college from other traditions because those I was actually studying. I never studied Judaism as a kid. I never studied it; I studied much later.

Interviewer: So what other faith traditions did you study?

Interviewee: Oh, this is the late 60s, the early 70s we were fascinated by Ram Das and his whatever that Eastern thing that Ram Das was doing was and Castaneda. And Latin American Shamanism and all of that, I mean that was all fascinating stuff. And Yogananda, and I mean all this Eastern mystical stuff.

Interviewer: Were you attracted to it?

Interviewee: Oh, very much so, because it went hand in hand with other consciousness-expanding practices that a lot of us were into in the late 60s and 70s.

Interviewer: Were you looking for ways to integrate it with Judaism? Or were you just seeing it as a complete alternative?

Interviewee: Oh no, I knew that I was Jewish. I knew that I was Jewish, and anything I picked up would be incorporated into it. I wasn't looking to join an Ashram; I wasn't looking to join another faith tradition and convert to the thing.

I was interested in, really, what I was interested in figuring out was what all that hidden stuff was that I knew was going on. And the Judaism I grew up with wasn't addressing it, didn't address it. It was there as I discovered later by studying Kabbalah, and there's amazing stuff in there. But that's not the Judaism I grew up with.

Interviewer: So you found these other faith traditions were kind of filling in the gaps?

Interviewee: And some of them led me back to deeper aspects of Judaism.

Interviewer: Did you continue throughout this period though doing the ritual things? The holidays, the prayer?

Interviewee: Only through, sometime in the middle of high school, it was done.

Interviewer: Completely, okay.

Interviewee: Done.

Interviewer: Abandoned. Where did you go to college?

Interviewee: Grand Valley, Grand Valley, it was called. Grand Valley State College, Colleges in those days it was a cluster college outside of Grand Rapids. Now it's a state university.

Interviewer: Was there a significant Jewish life there? Did you find yourself isolated?

Interviewee: There was no significant Jewish life there; it was Grand Rapids. It was Grand Rapids in the 70s, and it was like.

Interviewer: For the first time, you were completely away from a Jewish community?

Interviewee: Yes, oh, sure. Come Passover; we were at school; I wanted to get Matzah. I went into the Meijers,  Meijers comes from Grand Rapids it was just a grocery store by the Meijer’s brothers. And I went in asking for Matzah, and they didn't know what I was talking about. I said Matzah, what Matzah crackers? Unleavened bread. And they looked at me like I was from Mars, why would you want unleavened? What are you talking about? It was a moment when I realized oh. No, there was nothing going on that I was aware of in Grand Rapids.

And somewhat in college, but certainly later in my 20s as I lived all over the country. I sort of got a kick out of being the expert Jew. Like I’m the one who knows about Judaism and rarely am I going to meet anybody else who does. So that's kind of … you know.

Interviewer: Are there other students in campus who had questions about Judaism?

Interviewee: Anytime anybody did, yes. At college, there wasn't a Jewish presence. I would meet other people of my faith, but there was no [00:20:00.06] Jewish presence in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1970s. There's barely one now.

Interviewer: Yes. And you were okay with being the representative of Judaism?

Interviewee: No problem, didn't bother me at all.

Interviewer: So you're a musician, a storyteller, and a teacher pretty early on?

Interviewee: Yes.

Interviewer: Okay.

[00:20:00.00]

Interviewee: I was also very quick early on. My mind works quickly; I’m full of nervous energy. I get that from my mother. Who if they'd have the diagnosis in 1934, they would have told her she was ADHD right from the beginning. So it got me in trouble in elementary school because I was constantly interrupting teachers with asides to get the kids to laugh.

Because if they laugh with me, I was a stutterer. And so I was looking for a way, I’m going back now, young; I was looking for ways for kids to not make fun of me. And the way to do that was to make jokes at the teacher's expense. So it got me into a lot of trouble, but I didn't mind being in trouble, because at least I was in. So telling stories and doing songs and all of that sort of was okay, it works. It works, o.k. I’m making jokes all the time anyway.

Interviewer: But you were doing less in the way of ritual that you feel at the time, and I’m talking about in college that you were drifting away from Judaism? Or was the identity so?

Interviewee: The identity was absolutely there, I was drifting away from all that practice, all that orthodox practice that didn't mean anything to me.

Interviewer: You think you were becoming a secular Jew at the time? Would you have described yourself that way?

Interviewee: Looking back, I could say yes, but at the time, no, I don't think so. I don't think I thought in those terms. I wasn't practicing anymore; I wasn't orthodox. But I was only vaguely aware of what the other denominations were. You know what I mean?

Interviewer: Okay. So what brought you back, and what brought you to Reform Judaism, for instance?

Interviewee: So to do a very fast thing, I spent my 20s living all over the country, driving around in my car. Living in various college towns and other places in San Francisco and ultimately in Paris for a while. And doing the post 60s hippie thing. I was going to be Jack Kerouac and write the great American novel and experiment with, I was experimenting with drugs and everything else, and that's what I did in my 20s.

It never occurred to me that you go to college; you get a degree. You get out of college; you find a job that never occurred to me. I figured oh, I’m going to write a novel and it's going to be a hit that I’m going to be famous, whatever. And if not, I’ll have fun, okay. It wasn't really something that suburban Jewish kids were doing in the 70s, but it's what I was doing. So when all that period was over, which is a fascinating period for me to even talk about, but I won't.

Interviewer: But not the subject.

Interviewee: Not the subject, correct. When all that was over and I got back from Paris the second time, I met Mary, my wife, who was a friend of my sisters at college. And we saw each other all the time for like two years, and then we were getting married. And I told my father, I married this woman her name is Mary.

Okay, he looks at me. She's not Jewish, no she's not Jewish. And she's got a son, what's his name? Ready for the kicker, his name is Christian. My father didn't bat an eye; he said, what's his middle name? And that didn't matter to me; it's like he was going to accept it.

Because my father was not one of those orthodox Jewish guys of his generation, who would excommunicate his kids or fly into a rage, he wouldn't. He would express his displeasure, and then he would butcher my family, but my son, what am I going to do?

Interviewer: What about you? Did you have any concerns about starting an interfaith marriage?

[00:25:00.04]

Interviewee: No, not really. We sort of didn't talk about children, would when we did, that's what. But Mary was raised with the same, [00:25:00.04] with an analogous depth of religious intention and religious practice as I was. Hers was catholic; mine was Jewish. But they had prayers every day; they went to mass all the time. They made prayers before they ate, right? Like Hamotzi we did all these things, right?

So there was a similar intensity, and we both knew enough about each other’s excuse me. We both knew enough about our own faith tradition that we could constantly be talking about it.

Interviewer: Are you saying her being Catholic actually made this easier than if she had been some protestant denomination?

Interviewee: I don't know. It might have been just as easy that way, but it certainly made it easier to figure out how we were going to make a life. We had more, and surprisingly we had more in common religiously, faithfully than if one of us had been raised in a religious house and one would have been raised in a secular house, then we wouldn't have gotten it, we wouldn't have understood each other. We understood each other's beliefs very well because we came from; it was a similar intensity; it's all I can say.

Interviewer: Now I know that that Mary comes to Jewish services, do you regularly attend Catholic mass?

Interviewee: So what happened was Caitlyn was born about a year, even less than a year after we were married. Christian was four, five; I guess when we got married. He was already going to the Catholic school; he was already going to school at her parish. So when Caitlyn was born, Mary said to me if you want her to be Jewish, I’ll help you do it, but I can't do it, you have to do it, okay. I'll support you, but it's got to be for real. If you don't do it for real, then I’m going to take her down to the church and have her baptized.

So just let me know, I’m willing to support you doing this. So okay, all right, I’ll figure out what I’m supposed to do now because I hadn't really thought about it. If she had been a boy, I probably would have gone to Young Israel Israel and joined Young Israel and done that and just coasted. Because I knew how to do modern orthodox Jewish by heart, I’d have to think about how to do modern orthodox Jewish in America, easy peasy.

But as a girl, nine or ten years into it, they wouldn't let me sit with her anymore, I know this. I know at what point you can't sit with your daughter anymore, and that wasn't acceptable, because there wouldn't be anywhere else for her to go, I’d be it. So I called the conservative synagogue right nearby, Beth Shalom, and whoever they shunted me to, the membership committee or whoever it was that they gave it to.

I explained our family situation, and he said something along the lines of you know there's a lot of family things on the bema; I don't know that you'd be comfortable here. Years later, now that I’m like a member in good standing of the Jewish community of Metro Detroit, I tell the Rabbi that at Beth Shalom, Who was it? I’ll kill him.

All right, okay, I don't know who it was. So okay, goodbye, call up the reform shul. Love to have you come on down. So we went into Temple Emmanuel, and it was beyond weird with the organ playing softly before services.

Interviewer: Oh, you had no exposure to non-orthodox services?

Interviewee: I had been to a couple of Bar/Bat Mitzvahs at a conservative shul; I don't think I’d ever been in a reform shul in my life.

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee: I don't think I’d ever been a reform shul in my life. So I walk into this, and I saw all these pews, not chairs, not shtenders, pews.

Interviewer: A shtender being a holder?

Interviewee: Like a podium.

Interviewer: Yes.

Interviewee: Often, it'll hold your prayer book. In the orthodox Shuls, there were actually stands that you would stand at and sit at it, a stand, a shtender. No, it was all pews, and soft organ music is playing.

Interviewer: Choirs?

[00:30:00.05]

Interviewee: No, the choir is quiet; people are filing in. [00:30:00.05]

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee: It was odd; I didn't get it at all. Okay, I don't have to get it, I don't even know where I am. The prayer book is weird, mostly in English, and the Hebrews there it's all out of order; it's like this is not the order of it. Mary felt much more at home than I did; she really did.

Interviewer: What about some musician in you though, how did the musician in you respond?

Interviewee: Well, I wasn't doing Jewish music yet at all.

Interviewer: You were unimpressed with it?

Interviewee: I wasn't impressed with the organ at all. I don't like the organ; it's a sloppy instrument. It's not precise enough for me. But Caitlin grew up there, Caitlin in pre-school and in kindergarten, and that's where she was. And she came with me every Friday night, which is right not Saturday, Friday night is the main event in reform Shuls.

And she came, and Mary would often come to be with Caitlyn and support and be the family. And Mary was also interested in all sorts of stuff.  The adult ED committee and the library committee and all the stuff that would interest her, so she was into doing all that.

Interviewer: She volunteered at Emmanuel?

Interviewee: Yes.        

Interviewer: And had no problem being accepted there?

Interviewee: No. Christian didn't come; he came on Purim.

Interviewer: Was Christian being raised as a Catholic?

Interviewee: Yes.

Interviewer: Did you have any responsibilities there?

Interviewee: I was supporting her in whatever it was, yes. Typically, I didn't go to Catholic mass, unless there was something going on with Christian. And then I would be there as part of the family.

Interviewer: Just to get him through catechism classes?

Interviewee: He went through everything.

Interviewer: And did you drive him there?

Interviewee:  Sometimes, yes. But I mean I would go on Christmas Eve with all the bells and the songs, and that was very nice. I would go a few times a year, at certain day I wouldn't go on Easter because that's their solemn holiday; it's not for me to be there on Easter.

Like Mary didn't come to shul and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, because it's not for her to be there. It's our solemn holiday and Caitlyn, and I would go. In third grade, Caitlyn’s was in the choir. Caitlyn, we realized that she could carry a tune when she was like two years old.

Now, we thought this was normal; we realized though this is not normal. She actually has a voice, she has an ear, and she's a singer. Oh so she's in the youth choir in third grade, Judy Lewis is her third-grade teacher and is the choir director, the youth choir director. And sometimes a third or fourth grade maybe, the accompanist, the piano guy says I'm done, I'm moving to Thailand or something.   He was leaving the country.

So Judy said does anybody here, she said goodbye, does anybody here in the choir these little kids know anybody that plays guitar? And Caitlyn said my daddy plays guitar, but I don't think he knows any of this music. In fact, they didn't know any of this music.  So I came and I met Judy. I said sure I'll be your accompanist. I said sure, why not, I'd like that spend time with my daughter playing music, great.

But I got to tell you, I know nothing but Yibble bible beeble bye in terms of you know Jewish music, and an old Jewish shul music and bad Israeli accordion music, that's all I know. I don't know who Debbie Friedman is, I don't know who Shlomo Carlebach is; I don't know anybody is, never heard of any of these people, okay. So Judy, who thank God could sing on key, would sing me a song, and I figure out the chords.

And then the choir and we did the choir all the time. And eventually, I got bored of a couple of the songs, and I started writing songs because the text is there. Me Chamocha write a tune to Mi Chamocha 00:34:16.22] the text is already there, no problem I can do that. I started writing melodies to these things for the kids to sing.

Interviewer: You've already got a really good lyricist. 

Interviewee: Correct, I've got the whole King David and the whole prayer book, right so whatever I want.  So we're doing this, and the youth choir is getting bigger and bigger. And at some point, Caitlyn must have been and now maybe in fifth or sixth grade. Now maybe because Cantor Rose was still there for her Bat Mitzvah, so must've been after that. I start accompanying [00:35:00.03] him as well on bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs for the Cantor, instead of an organist.

I started on with the guitar, and I learned a lot from Cantor Norman Rose 00:35:07.04 old-time Cantor about musicianship from him.  He's a crack musician. He gets to be 85, and he's retiring, he's starting to get some dementia, and they're like phasing him out. And Judy and I become the music directors. Judy and I become the music director at the Temple Emmanuel, so we're now there every Friday and many Saturdays playing music with the rabbi.

When the rabbi there Lane Steinger  00:35:42.23] retired, actually took a job in St. Louis at some regional office. They needed a rabbi, but they needed an interim rabbi while they did the rabbinic search. And the guy that they hired, it was during her Bat Mitzvah, Caitlyn's Bat Mitzvah, Mary and I listened to him once, and Mary turned to me in the pew and said that guy was raised Orthodox, you should go talk to him. Because she knew I still wasn't that comfortable here with what it all was, it's like yes, fine, I'll play music.

They weren't quite what Mary would have called pagan babies, but it's like yes, they're Jewish, I guess. These people don't know anything, right? I still had I don't know superior attitude. I met with this Brad Bleefeld, Rabbi Bliefeed [Inaudible 00:36:30.19], and he said yes, he was raised Orthodox.

And he had to decide at some point what did he want to do? He knew he wanted to be a Rabbi and what kind of Rabbi did he want to be. And he thought he could do more being a reform Rabbi bringing traditional stuff in. And it really was the first time I got to talk to somebody about the conundrum of being what kind of Jewish I was, and it was good.

Interviewer: When was this, would you say?

Interviewee: Mid-90s. Because right around then, Judy talked me to going to Hava Nashira, a song leader’s conference.

Interviewer: So I mean this is roughly the time when congregations Shir Tikvah was also trying to incorporate more traditional things into a nominally Reform congregation, but they weren't the only ones doing it.

Interviewee: They weren't the only ones, and a lot of that was from the Renewal world, it was just starting. It was just coalescing in the mid-90s.

Interviewer: Okay. But before that, you never warmed up to the Reform shul?

Interviewee: Not completely. I met a guy named Mort Woollen; he was an older guy who had been through the Holocaust, who was the sweetest guy you ever met. And he was a devout Reform Jew, absolutely believed in reformed Judaism, in Tikun Olam and all the things that are hallmarks of Reform Judaism, but he lived it. He treated everybody like this. Everywhere he went, he was a mensch; he just was all the time. And he was instrumental in having me look at liberal Judaism differently.

It wasn't a matter of there are different degrees of observance, and there's this like linear ladder of there's Orthodox, and there's Conservative and Reform, no it wasn't. Each denomination, each movement had its own way of doing Jewish, and it hadn't occurred to me that was true until I met Mort, and I got to know Mort because he was a righteous man who was a Reform Jew.

Interviewer: I'm glad you're saying this because one of the things that I don't like is you hear people say well, I'm not very religious, I'm reformed.

Interviewee: No, Mort was very religious in a Reformed Jewish way. And there are things about Conservative Judaism that's very different from the others; there's much more interest in Israel, for instance, and Zionism in a conservative congregation. Then there is an Orthodox or reform. That's one of the things that they hook into. Okay, since then, I've studied a lot of this, and that's how I found my home in Renewal, Renewal totally speaks to me.

Interviewer: But before we get there, I do want to get back a little bit and ask you a little bit about Caitlyn and Christian growing up together and, to some extent, leading separate religious lives.

Interviewee: Yes, separate religious life. So Christian, good Catholic boy that he is, [00:40:00.08] knows all the blessings on the Hanukkah Menorah. He may have forgotten some by now, but we all sing it together. Knew how the Seder went entirely, because he grew up at our table, doing the Seder and banging on the table and singing songs and all that.

Caitlyn knew all the Christmas stuff. What was interesting was Hanukkah wasn't about giving presents at all, because a week later they were going to be at Nana's house getting presents, they knew this. So Hanukkah didn't have to be about presents, it didn't have to compete. It could be its own thing and what it was its own thing was stories and songs.

We would read stories while the candles were burning and sing songs. It wasn't about getting presents, because you're going to get inundated with presents in about a week.

Interviewer: But this wasn't a problem for either Christian or Caitlyn that the other one was living a...

Interviewee: No, not at all. In fact, I'll tell the stories out of order. Not too long ago, 10-15 years back, when they were growing, when they were like grown people out in the world, Caitlyn and Christian. The religion writer for the Free Press contacted us; actually contacted Joe Klein, the rabbi at Emmanuel and we said yes, you can give him our name. We had never wanted to be the interfaith story.

Interviewer: Poster family.

Interviewee: Poster family, we'd never wanted to do that, we avoided it. But now that the kids are growing, we said yes, we'll talk to you about our whole thing. And he talks to us for a long time; he says this sounds fascinating. I'd love to talk to your kids. I said they're grown; we will give them your number. They both called, and he interviewed the two of them, which started this whole round-robin of conversations between the four of us, Mary and I, the two kids. And essentially, Caitlin told this guy I had a normal Jewish upbringing.

I went to Hebrew school for ten years, 12 years. I was at the services all the time; I did prayers before bed. I was the president of my temple youth organization; I happen to have a brother who was Catholic.  A brother and a mother who were Catholic. And Christian told the guy I don't know; I had a normal Catholic upbringing. I was an altar server; I did all the sacraments, a confirmation. I went to CYO camp, I happen to have a father and a sister who were Jewish, and Mary and I were going chi-ching.

The funny story was Christian when he was in high school was going out with some girl from Groves (High School) who was Jewish. And I don't know if their parents were so thrilled about it, but there was a NIFTY dance, right? There was a NIFTY dance, and a lot of these Jewish boys and girls were sneaking their non-Jewish boyfriends and girlfriends into the dance.

Interviewer: Federation.

Interviewee: Federation, yes. The Federation temple youth dance, and so these Jewish boys and girls were sneaking them in, and so they got caught. And there was this big brouhaha and all that. When Christian comes home and tells us all this that this whole thing that happened, we said Christian, you dummy, you're a member of Temple Emmanuel. You had every right to be there; you are a member of a federation authorized place [Inaudible 00:43:31.11] anyway. But no, they did much better.

Interviewer: So I mean it sounds like you've made this work really well, and yet not every family does.

Interviewee: No, it was a specific circumstance that we had. If Mary had not already had a child, then what do we do? I mean, there's a reason why we have these two kids, and that's it, all right. We didn't know what to do next.

Interviewer: But there were all kinds of books, I mean I'm aware that there are dozens of books written on how to make an interfaith family work. Suggesting that a lot of people struggle with that, I mean they wouldn't be writing all these books if people weren't having problems. Well, have people ever come to you for advice on how to do this?

Interviewee: Mary and I have done classes or presentations or discussions we're going to call it yours, mine, and ours how to do this whole thing.

Interviewer: I mean, blending families without a religious issue is a challenge as it is.

Interviewee: Correct. We both cared a lot, and generally, in blended families, one parent or the other doesn't care as much, and they let it be, and they just let it go [00:45:00.02] generally. Or neither of them care very much, and will let the kids decide.

Interviewer: But Mary's very serious about it.

Interviewee: Mary is serious. Oh yes, she's serious about her spiritual practice. It happens to be rooted in Catholicism. My stories about my spiritual practice, it happens to be rooted in Judaism. I'm not Jewish the way my grandfather would recognize it, she's probably not Catholic the way her grandfather would recognize it, right? It's the whole thing, you know.

But to answer the question that started this phase, what led me back to Yiddishkeit [Inaudible 00:45:39.27] and to Judaism was my Catholic wife, really. That's what did it. When I heard about this fellow named Yitzhak Buxbaum [Inaudible 00:45:49.13], who was a maggid[Inaudible 00:45:50.27], he was teaching maggidute [Inaudible 00:45:52.03] spiritual storytelling in Brooklyn. And I called him up, I looked up his website, and I called him up, and I found his two or three-year program. Distance-learning and then coming to Brooklyn once or twice a year, I said fine. I'd love to do this.

I really want to do this with music. And he tells me on the phone; he said I'd love to have you in the program as far as I'm concerned you're in. But if you want to do this with music, you should talk to a guy named Jack Kessler, who's a cantor, a chazzan [Inaudible 00:46:20.23], at Aleph and here's his number. And I called Jack when I hung up with Yitzhak[Inaudible 00:46:26.05] I told Mary well, I guess I'm in this program, I'll let you know when it's going to.

Call Jack, and Jack tells me all about Aleph and [Inaudible 00:46:33.17] Renewal, I don't know anything about Renewal. And he said everybody's got to go through to be in the ordination program, everybody's got to go through DLTI the Davenors Learning Training Institute. It's a two-year thing, meets twice a year. So there are four segments, winter, and summer. I said so it's offered again every two years, as it happens the next cohort is starting like in three weeks, two-three weeks.

And it won't start again for two years. He said I know this is too much for you to take in right now, but you should just know and hang up. I tell Mary this, and she just looks at me, and she says, well, you're going to call him back, right? I said, what do you mean? She said you haven't got the patience to wait two years; you know you don't have the patience to wait two years, call him back. And so I was suddenly in both the Maggid program and the Aleph ordination program, really because of Mary.

Interviewer: She knows you well.

Interviewee: She knows me well, yes, it's been 37 years, she knows me well.

Interviewer: At the time, what were you thinking? Were you thinking of doing this for your own benefit? Or were you rethinking of a career?

Interviewee: That's an interesting question. I was thinking of doing both of them for my own benefit and for a non-traditional career. No, I never thought that I wanted to, I guess to slicha [Inaudible 00:48:07.25] as a cantor or a rabbi and be a congregant and get a job as a congregational Cantor or a rabbi, no. Maybe at 35, I would want to do it, but no, at this point, that's not what I want to do; it's not what I want to do.

I knew that I wanted to have the, with the maggidute [Inaudible 00:48:27.27], I wanted to learn the story of the art of, really the art of storytelling and weave it with music so that I could tell stories with the guitar, I knew that. The other side from Aleph, the cantorial thing. I mean it really was Torah for its own sake, it really was, I wanted to systematize all this stuff I had in my head. I had all this music and liturgy and Torah and teachings all mushed up in my head; there was no system to any of it.

Interviewer: Was some of it coming from Emmanuel, Temple Emmanuel the things that you heard there? Or was it all outside stuff?

Interviewee: Well, the way Jack and Olive Renewal would teach, had much less to do with Reform and much more to do with a, they called it neo-Hasidic. Because that's where Reb Zalman [Inaudible 00:49:32.00] who was founder came from. So no, it was more tapped into the old stuff from when I was a kid.

Interviewer: Is that what attracted you to the renewal movement?  Is that something that made sense to you, or is that something familiar to you? Because obviously, you love the old stuff.

Interviewee: Yes, I do. To me, it seems to be authentic Yiddishkeit; it seems to be [00:50:00.05] really authentic for the 21st century. It seems to be an authentic.

Interviewer: See, someone would see that as an oxymoron, 21st century Yiddishkeit, right?

Interviewee: The whole world is in need of a Yiddishkeit, not just Jews. And the Orthodox aren't interested in the whole world; they're interested in Orthodox Jews.

Interviewer: Are there specific parts of renewal, I mean, there's the mystical part, and there's the ritual part, and they don't do a lot with theology.

Interviewee: Oh, they do actually.

Interviewer: They do?

Interviewee: Yes, they do. There's lots of stuff. They make every rabbi write a teshuvah [Inaudible 00:50:38.29] where they're like taking something and writing a paper on the Halakha [Inaudible 00:50:44.15] ruling on something.

 

Interviewer: They make people work.

Interviewee: This is what sometimes called responsa

Interviewer: Oh, yes, correct.

Interviewee: And everybody who gets Minkas a Rabbi [Inaudible 00:50:56.10] has to do that. I would love to do it even though I didn't get it.

Interviewer: Right. So what are the parts of the renewal that you found most attractive?

Interviewee: I'd like the combination of the devotional and contemplative and sometimes mystical aspects of Judaism, really from the 19th century, blended with an egalitarian forward-thinking modern approach to how we do things, and the fact that they blend them together.

Reb Zalman said [Inaudible 00:51:40.01] one of the best things that he said give me a spiritual practice that I can do 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, any more, and I won't do it as much as I want to. You got to give people something they can do, not something that they're going to aspire to forever. Anything more than 20 minutes, nobody's going to do it.

Interviewer: You speak with great affection of Reb Zalman [Inaudible 00:52:02.13] Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi how do you view him? Do you see him like a genius, a revolutionary?

Interviewee: He was a bit of a genius, as he discovered other things. As he discovered Catholicism, right? And Thomas Merton was a good friend of his. He learned Latin so that he could read stuff in Latin. When he got interested in the Sufis, he wanted to be able to read the Quran in Arabic, so he learned Arabic. So he was a bit of a genius. He took traditional concepts and mystical concepts and married them to technological ideas as well, which was really interesting that I frankly haven't seen anybody, I haven't seen anybody doing before.

Do you know what I mean? He spoke of the temple, right? The traditional Jews yearned for a return to the temple, to the Beit Hamigdash [Inaudible 00:53:09.15]. And he said “Don't think of the temple as the slaughterhouse where they're doing all the sacrificing, that's not what we mean by the temple”. He said just like at the observatory in Boulder, the Naval Observatory; there's this block of cesium that's like, what's the word?

Interviewer: Vibrates.

Interviewee: Vibrates and all the clocks in the world are calibrated to that. They don't do in the church in Greenwich, England anymore. All the clocks are calibrated to that spot. He said think of the Beit Hamigdash as neshama [Inaudible 00:53:49.23] calibrator, as a soul calibrator. That all the souls in the world had to calibrate to something.

This is how he would teach, and it was sort of like bend your mind, because oh, I hadn't thought of mystical and spiritual stuff in a technological way or vice-versa, and he did that a lot, he liked doing that. And I think he enjoyed bending people's minds, things like that.

Interviewer: I'd love to talk renewal with you a whole lot more.

Interviewee: I know.

Interviewer: But I want to make sure, no, that would be great. But I don't want to miss out on your relationship with Brother Allen's Song and Spirit, and how what that means, how that developed. And so let's start with how did you meet Brother Al?

Interviewee: So Brother Al was a, his mission, his outreach work involved raising money to help the homeless and the disadvantaged on the streets in downtown Detroit. And one of the things he did for that was he would go around to churches with his guitar, [00:55:00.03] and play songs and sell coffee. He would sell bags of coffee. And he would do this at churches all over town, he did many other things too, but this is what he did.

Interviewer: And this was his work as a?

Interviewee: A Franciscan friar. Friars are not monks, they're not monastic, they're out in the world, and they're expected if they're able to earn a living.

Interviewer: Was this a weird thing for him to be doing?

Interviewee: He's an unusual fellow. Not many friars are out there with the guitar making music.

Interviewer: Okay

Interviewee: Some, but yes he's an unusual fellow, he grew up in the Bronx in a Jewish neighborhood. His whole story is his whole story, but he was well disposed to working with the Jewish fellow anyway. So he was doing this. Certainly, he's the only one in Detroit that was ever doing anything like this. And so he was at my wife's church, at Mary's Parish and somebody there said oh, you ought to meet my friend's husband, he's Jewish, and he does the same kind of thing you do.

He plays these songs and stories songs and all this. This was in 2010; I had been doing this now for a while. So he calls up, how I forget who we talked to.  And I said it happened to be Sukkot, and we had this Sukkot up in the backyard. And I said you know what Sukkot is? He said I know what it is, but I've never really been in a Sukkot. I said you can come to our Sukkot, bring your guitar, we'll have some cookies and tea and we'll play some music together, and we'll talk.

So he comes over thinking that he's coming to a Jewish family's home, and he comes around the corner of the backyard. The backyard by the old pear tree is about a four and a half foot statue of Saint Francis that Mary's sister gave her. So when he comes around the corner and sees that, it's like the heavens open, and the choir of angels sings. What's St. Francis doing in this Jewish family's backyard? So he comes to realize that we are who we are, and we play music together in the Sukkot, and we have cookies and we talk and all this.

And we're fascinated with each other and each other's stories, and I like his music, and he likes my music. I say you know we should like play places; we should like get on stage and do stuff with you. You in the robes, I'll put on my purple Tallit and we'll cut quite a figure. Okay, fine, so we'll do a house concert first, what should we call the band? Song and Spirit that was the name of the band. And we did this house concert, and a bunch of people came, and they loved it, and somebody recorded it, and we put it online somewhere.

And Caitlyn sang with us for that, and then we did a couple of concerts here and there at churches. And eventually, in 2011, it was the 25th anniversary of when Pope John Paul brought leaders of all the different religions together in Vatican City for what was it called? I can't remember what it's called. In any event, he brought them all together for a thing, statements of world peace. And it's a 25th anniversary, and the Franciscans are making a thing of it. 

And so we went to Cincinnati to do a concert at his, the Franciscan’s main church, main parish in Cincinnati. And it got recorded; it got videotaped by the TV station. Our best video comes from that concert. And on the way home, driving home, Mary and Brother Al are in the van with all of our equipment, we thought that maybe it should be more than a band; maybe it should be Song and Spirit something. And we finally decided on the Song and Spirit Institute for Peace. And we began you know, teaching, and oh we were in the building that was owned by Our Lady of La Salette in Berkley. And I said to Brother Al I'm never going to get any Jews to come to our interfaith stuff in this church building; it's simply not going to happen.

I've got to do something, I've got to offer something that's purely Jewish, it's the only way I'm going to get any Jews in here. Because as brother Al said early on, “The river flows in one direction”. Christians are fascinated by their Jewish roots; Jews are fascinated by Christianity. In fact, quite the contrary, they're afraid of it.  We good?

Interviewer: Yes.

Interviewee:     So I said let me do Shabbat, let me do Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat, a renewal style Kabbalat Shabbat, and it's open to everybody, [01:00:00.04] so we did that. And we did it on the first Friday of the month because Temple Emmanuel had their kid’s service and Shir Tikvah has something else that was. The only people I knew were people at Shir Tikvah and Temple Emmanuel and a couple of other shuls and I knew all the rabbis and I didn't want to be poaching from them.

But I know that most of the people that are going to be attracted to us are empty nesters. So pick a day that I'm not hurting the other congregations, that's really why we did it. So we started doing that that was successful. I took Brother Al to a Havdalah service [Inaudible 01:00:37.03].at Temple Emanuel and Rabbi Klein was doing Havdalah.   He had never seen Havdalah [Inaudible 01:00:43.00], and as the candles are being put out on the wine, brother Al turns to me and quietly says you know at that moment, the Lord's Day begins.

As the candle sizzles out, it's Shabbat is over the Lord's Day begins at that moment. I said I love it, that's great. What do you guys do to celebrate that moment? He said nothing special. Shouldn't we do something special? And so we came up with this Sabbath to Sabbath. Where a number of people at Tikvah and [Inaudible 01:01:15.07] everywhere else have been to this. Where we do Havdalah [Inaudible 01:01:18.27] and before I put out the candle, I light his candle passing sacred time on from one tradition to the next.

And then we have to come up with something that could pass as a Christian Nigun [Inaudible 01:01:29.11] because there was no service. We had to come up with things that would work, that would touch the right buttons. That would elicit the right response from people about to celebrate their Sabbath, their version of the Sabbath. And so we came up with this thing, and I asked Rabbi Klein[Inaudible 01:01:49.28] who is a first-century scholar, that's what his field of expertise is.

I said was this ever done before, are we resurrecting something that had been done. He said no, by the time Sunday became the Christian Sabbath if you will, the split was complete. There were no more; Christianity was not a sect of Judaism anymore. So no, there was never anything of Havdalah turning into the Lord's Day; it never happened. But you came up with something new. “That was nice; I like that”.

Interviewer: Are other people doing it?

Interviewee: I have sent it. We've done it in a number of places, and sometimes I get emails saying can you send us the music and the script and whole thing. And I have sent it to a few places; I don't know that anybody's doing it.

You remember Hamica Lo [Inaudible 01:02:49.29] who did, not storytelling, maybe he did, and maybe it was called storytelling. Where you would like inhabit the Torah portion and play the roles and all, he would go around and do this, and he would try it. Shir Tikvah did this, and they got a training once, right? And I was there when the Shir Tikvah people try to do it themselves; it never works, he makes it work.

Interviewer: In the same way that you and Brother Al make the Sabbath to Sabbath work [Inaudible 01:03:24.25]

Interviewee: Correct. So I don't know that yes it could be done, but you'd have to have a partner who was committed to making it work, right? I imagine that I can think of a couple of people, a couple of groups where there is a firm connection between a Jewish clergy and a Christian clergy who could make it work.

Maybe it works so well because he's Catholic because Brother Al is Catholic and Catholics have lots of rituals. With me and a congregationist minister, what rituals that they have? It works well because Judaism and Catholicism are both ritual rich.

Interviewer: I want to make sure that I understand this then. Your desire, your leading services at Song and Spirit, your Shabbat services started off at least as a way of drawing Jews into the organization in general, rather than your desire or need to be a service leader.

Interviewee: That's correct. I knew I was a service leader; I knew I could do that. I just knew I could do that. I just knew it because I have been playing Jewish music and doing concerts and stuff already. And when I would do concerts, the in-between would end up being teachings that I would learn, that I'm learning from all these different people. When I was studying to be a cantor, low and behold it turned out that being [01:05:00.05] made to basically memorize the entire prayer book when I was eleven really paid off, who knew?

Who knew that I would ever use anything that seemingly useless. But hey, it's really useful to like know all the liturgy already in your head when you're learning all the different Nusach[Inaudible 01:05:20.20] and all different tunes. So it's the same kind of thing. I was completely comfortable leading services because I know the service.

Interviewer: But when you're leading the service, is that something that you're getting satisfaction from? Or are you doing it as something to get something else?

Interviewee: No, I enjoy it. I enjoy it because it's a communal thing; we're drawing energy from each other. Energy is happening in the room. When there's nothing happening, and nobody's responding at all, which sometimes happened at Emmanuel when Judy and I were the music directors, that's a drag. But when people are involved, and people are singing, I do a little bit of teaching here, a little bit of there. Now we go onto here, and now we go on to there, no it's great.

Interviewer: Do you see a difference when you're meeting services at Shir Tikvah versus Song and Spirit? And that Shir Tikvah is the end in itself; it's not a way into another organization.

Interviewee: Well, it isn't any more. I mean that Song and Spirit, it isn't a way into anything anymore anyway.

Interviewer: You're now leading service?

Interviewee: Yes. And we've got our, I mean I haven't got a congregation of several hundred, but I've got a solid forty or fifty people of which I get twenty-five or thirty, not a given thing. We've had a solid group of people; I could name you the people that are there on a regular basis.

Interviewer: Do you lead differently at Song and Spirit versus Shir Tikvah? Do you feel constricted at Shir Tikvah because it's not your own organization?

Interviewee: A little bit, yes.

Interviewer: You feel like you have to lead what that group is expecting?

Interviewee: Well, yes, but that's true everywhere. You know Hebrew quote        [Inaudible 01:07:02.26] Know before who you stand and people like to use that, that you're standing before God. No, know before whom you stand, you're not doing the same thing.

Interviewer: But at Song and Spirit.  It is your place.

Interviewee: It is my place.

Interviewer: There's no restriction; you can do it anything you want?

Interviewee: Yes. By looking at who's there, and I decide what kind of stuff we're going to do.

Interviewer: You're still reading the room?

Interviewee: Well yes, because when I'm at Ohhala [Inaudible 01:07:28.06] at the gathering in Denver once a year that both Aura and I go to [Inaudible 01:07:33.03], and I get to lead services a little bit, oh I got a crowd that knows everything by heart. I could have all sorts of Hebrew stuff that I wouldn't do here; I just wouldn't do it.

Yes, it depends on where you are, you always have to read the room, and otherwise, people aren't going to have a good experience, and I want everybody to have a good experience. Because like Havdalah candles [Inaudible 01:07:54.01] there are many wicks, the room is full of all these wicks. If we can get all the wicks lit together, it's a much more beautiful flame.

Interviewer: Are there things that you still want to do? I mean because you're an innovative guy, you're a creative guy. Are there still things that you want to experiment with that you haven't gotten around to?

Interviewee: Service leading or teaching?

Interviewer: Either one, or even storytelling.

Interviewee: Well, I get to do most of what I want to do in a service leading role, I get to try out what I want to try out because people are willing to let me introduce one or two things new when I'm doing stuff that's comfortable.

That's no problem, it's slowly unfolding, and it's good wherever I'm leading, that's fine. There are presentations/programs that I'm trying to develop, and although I haven't had a chance to do my one-man show in a while that's under Senter, the Clopper. The clopper was a guy that would clop on the shutters calling people to prayer.

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee: The Shul cloppers who would call people to prayer. Get up, come, it's time to daven or they would announce people's death or marriages or whatever. Well clopper is where my name comes from; it's where Klaper comes from. That was the profession. So Senter which is my Hebrew name. So Senter Clopper [Inaudible 01:09:35.17] was my great-grandfather.

It's a short step to making it Senter the Clopper [Inaudible 01:09:40.10]. So I've got this whole show, it's called Senter the Clopper [Inaudible 01:09:44.05] I haven't done it in a while, it's about an hour-long show, it's actually very cool. I'm trying to develop another one which I did once or twice, or I do a thing of Jewish [01:10:00.01] music in 60 minutes, 6,000 years of Jewish music in 60 minutes, I chant the whole thing or sing the whole thing. Anyway, there's that.

So there are always programs and presentations that I'm trying to develop, and I'm looking for venues to do them. It's not always easy to find a venue to do this sort of stuff in. Teaching, I've become really fascinated by a couple of things, one step back. It occurred to me not so long ago that even the greatest teachers only have a handful of teachings; they just keep doing them in different ways over again. Once I seen a Deepak Chopra, I saw him three, four times he was saying the same things, he was doing the same stuff.

That's his stuff, that's his package of teachings.  Reb Zalman[Inaudible 01:10:52.22] had a package, and this is what he did, and this is what he talked about. So I began identifying what's, I mean I might as well keep doing what I'm good at, what I enjoy what apparently people respond to. And so I figured out what it was, and I'm trying to develop those into teachable programs, right? I'm really fascinated by what I call the Jewish wisdom of Jesus. I'm really interested in exploring the most famous teacher, the most famous Jewish teacher in history.

Because neither the Jews nor the Christians have fully understood what he was about, I don't think. And so I'm developing these two tracks, a series of classes for church groups, and a series of classes for Jewish groups because it's two different things. Much of the material is the same, but then there's stuff that is completely different. So I don't know if I've got the nerve yet to offer it through Federation. We talk to Joe Klein, who regularly teaches classes on Paul [Inaudible 01:11:59.18] I'm going to ask him what he thinks of this crazy idea.

There's that; there's another I enjoy teaching like that, I enjoy, well you've been to some of the classes. I enjoy wheeling and dealing with people like that. And the more informed and educated they are, the better it is. It's always best when you're not the smartest guy in the room, you learn so much more. So you do what you can.

I'm interested in how prayers are really stories and stories are really songs. So the history of the development of liturgy is the development of story, is the development of song. It's not surprising that I would be interested in that, right? And I want to write a book, duh.

Interviewer: Going back to the original?

Interviewee: Yes. I mean I've got a lot of music I want to record.

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee: And I want to write.

Interviewer: Well, I want to thank you for taking the time out from your busy schedules to participate in this project.

Interviewee: Thank you.

[01:13:00]