The Jewish High Holy Days—a 10-day celebration that begins Sept. 8 with Rosh Hashanah and ends with Yom Kippur—are filled with music. For the services, an ordained cantor, trained in the musical arts, usually leads prayer services along with a rabbi.
That’s the case at Temple Beth El in Santa Maria, though the leader for the upcoming ceremonies also happens to have a cabaret background. Rebecca Joy Fletcher is an ordained cantor, yes, but is also an actress, classically trained singer, and playwright.
Among her accomplishments, Fletcher counts a long list of Jewish-based work. Based on her expertise in cabaret and her long-standing love of Israel, Fletcher studied Tel Aviv’s little-known cabaret culture of the ’30s and ’40s, then created a song-and-story theatrical cabaret that explores her findings.
She also helped create Improvokatzia, an improv theater ensemble of immigrant actors in Jerusalem. She also performed regularly in cabaret and classical concerts hosted by Mishkenot Sh’ananim, a center for tolerance and the arts in Jerusalem.
Fletcher said she’s proud of her accomplishments as a playwright and performer, but she explained that she’s also a Jewish clergy person committed to creating transformative public experiences.
She can claim a long list of cantorial experience both on and off the pulpit. She served the community by delivering sermons and sermons-in-song while she was cantor of Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation of Washington Heights. She also taught adult-education classes on relevant topics: performance during the Holocaust, Judaism and the environment, and the history of Jewish theater. She served as cantor of Temple Judea in Massapequa, Long Island, and as cantor and arts organizer for Greenburgh Hebrew Center in Dobbs Ferry, where she organized a community-wide Hanukkah arts event.
“Most of the performance work I do is all wrapped around Jewish history or archival,” she said. “It’s not synagogue, but it surrounds the culture and heritage of being Jewish.”
In that respect, Fletcher emphasized the importance of her role as cantor for High Holy Days and her commitment as a person of the clergy.
“I’m coming in at the most awesome time in the Jewish calendar loaded with spiritual and personal transformation,” she said. “And I’m coming in to lead this congregation.”
For Temple Beth El’s High Holy Days, Fletcher will act as both solo and cantor, encompassing both roles in “kolbo,” as it’s referred to by the clergy. This is the first time Fletcher will lead kolbo, rather than just as cantor.
Fletcher said her performance career is similar to her work as cantor—but with one important and distinct difference.
“I have a very deep belief in the unique power of live performance and in the relationship between audience and performer. It isn’t too different from the relationship between cantor and congregation,” she explained. “The difference is that performance may be spiritual or uplifting, but unless you do a religious performance, it’s not religious. It’s not in the service of God.”
Arts Editor Shelly Cone is thinking of moving her deadlines to the Jewish calendar. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 2-9, 2010.