BRATTLEBORO — The cantor has always played a central role in Jewish religious services as the person who leads a congregation in the singing of prayers. But until modern times, the role traditionally has been performed by males.
While Orthodox synagogues still follow that tradition, some Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist synagogues have opened the post to women.
Kate Judd, who will be installed as the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Heharim's (Brattleboro Area Jewish Community) spiritual leader on Sunday, Sept. 29, considers herself a cantor first, and a rabbi second.
“Many churches have cantors in place of rabbis, and up until the 20th century, the cantor was seen as more important,” Judd said. “They historically led the services. I firmly believe that the music is as important as words of the prayers, and those words don't get up and into people's hearts if they're not sung.”
Judd grew up in Marlboro. Her late father, Richard, was a professor at Marlboro College for many years. Her mother, Suvia, taught French and art at Marlboro Elementary School. She died last year at the age of 87.
Judd said she got involved in singing through her mother, who sang for many years in the Community Chorus under the baton of Blanche Moyse, and took piano lessons with Madame Moyse.
Judd started her musical study under Moyse and, after graduating from Marlboro College in 1982, embarked on a path she hoped would lead to a career as a classical singer.
After graduating from the Longy School of Music in 1987 and the Alexander Institute in Boston in 1991, she worked as a voice teacher at the Brattleboro Music Center and at The Putney School.
She said that, over time, she discovered that live performances “only distanced me from the joy and excitement I had felt about singing. Still, there was within me a yearning for connection with something vast and uplifting, which at one time I had found in listening to and singing classical music of all kinds.”
Judd said she made the rounds of the local churches looking for a spiritual connection “where music and worship could be in the same space. But Christian dogma was alien to me. The services that struck me as more effective in their ritual, like the Episcopalians, were always more forceful about their creed, while those that lacked the dogma, like the Unitarians, seemed to have abandoned the rituals that I sought.”
The turning point for her, she said, was singing the Kol Nidre at the High Holiday services led by then-BAJC Rabbi Noah Kitty in 2002.
An intense experience
Kol Nidre is both the opening prayer and the name for the evening service that begins Yom Kippur. It means “All Vows,” and asks God to forgive any vows people have made to God but not kept.
She said she saw a notice in the Brattleboro Reformer that Kitty was offering a series of classes in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. While she began exploring Judaism after she married Robert Miller, a longtime political and labor activist, she said she took the announcement “as a nudge from the Universe.”
Judd said knew Kitty slightly, and she found her “dynamic, funny, and knowledgeable.” At the end of the third of the four classes, Judd said, “she said to me, “You should come and sing the Kol Nidre at Yom Kippur evening services.' I did not immediately say no. I was hesitant, though. 'Noah,' I said, 'You know that I'm not Jewish.' 'Oh, it's not a problem,' she told me.”
And that is how Judd was thrust into one of the most sacred days on the Jewish calendar, leading the one of the most beloved and significant moments in Jewish ritual.
“Bathed in candlelight and filled with a small crowd of worshippers, the Quaker Meeting House [in Putney] felt to me like the right place to offer ritual – both homey and solemn,” Judd wrote in her High Holy Days message for this year's service.
“I remember very little about the rest of the service, but chanting the Kol Nidre I remember perfectly. It was entirely still in the room. I could feel the total attention of the congregation. Yet though I was at first nervous, it did not seem to be the nerves of performance. I was not afraid of making a mistake, of sounding ugly, of botching my technique. I was wholly absorbed in what seemed to be pouring through me.
“Chanting Kol Nidre, I felt a connection with Something or Someone I thought I had long ago lost. There was no discontinuity between my voice, my breath, my bone and muscles, and a vast Presence. I was not performing, I was not thinking, I was being, and my being seemed to be in the control of some greater Being. This was my first glimpse that G-d might not be, for me, something I would know with my intellect, but rather, like Job, something I experience in my flesh.”
Judd said it would be facile to say that night is was led her to become a Jew and to pursue the cantorate. But a little more than a decade after that night, after years of study and hard work, she is now leading the congregation that Rabbi Kitty gave her a chance to sing for.
A different way
Judd, who has served as BAJC's interim Spiritual Leader for the past year, said she is deeply honored and moved to be stepping into the role on a more permanent basis.
“I definitely feel the weight of the responsibility of this job,” she said.
She has been a student at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., since the fall of 2007. She is entering her next-to-last year in the Cantor Educator Program, from which she will emerge with a Master of Jewish Education and her ordination as a cantor.
“Hebrew College has a fantastic cantorial program that is done on a shoestring,” Judd said. “It's also a pluralistic seminary, so I get to study with all the great rabbis and cantors from Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and other movements.”
She considers the BAJC a challenging assignment because it has a “very diverse population,” but that going to a pluralistic institution such as Hebrew College “helps me be responsive to a broad spectrum of Jews.”
In the coming months, Judd hopes to ramp up the BAJC's Community Education Program, and have more social events at the synagogue on Greenleaf Street, such as Jewish movie nights, or Jewish musical nights.
She also appreciates the challenge of being a religious leader in the most irreligious state in America. But Judaism, she said, is not like other religions.
“You can be Jewish and not be observant, or not even believe in God,” Judd said. “Judaism is all about devotion to the necessity of argument. It is built into the faith to question everything. That's why it is often seen as a good spiritual fit for people who like to think.”
Judd said she always hoped she would come back to Brattleboro.
“But I never expected when I went to cantorial school that I'd end up the leader of this congregration, a congregation that has embraced me so warmly. It is an unexpected joy for me.”