Going Home for the Holidays

When I checked in at the historic inn around the corner from the synagogue, the owner handed me my key in an envelope marked “Cantor Roseanne.” I texted to my cantorial school friends’ WhatsApp group chat: They think I’m a cantor!

Rosh Hashanah services the next morning started at 10 a.m., so after I ate an energy bar and a banana, I had time to wander around the town green, reading the Jewish surnames on the memorials for WWI and WWII. This town near Hartford was once part of the “Catskills of Connecticut,” but now the resorts are gone and the Jewish population is dwindling. The rabbi told me they were hoping to get more than 25 people in the sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah morning; only 15 had come to Ma’ariv the night before.

I swam in the kittel I tried to order, so I had decided to just wear a white dress. As I studied my face in the bathroom mirror, a scrap of show tune played again and again in my head, as often happens to me at the most incongruous times. This time, it was from Les Miserables: “There is a lady all in whi-ite, holds me and sings a lullaby ....” I stepped out of the bathroom, and picked up my large print Mahzor Hadash, the custom tallit I ordered on Etsy with the opening words of Hineni screen-printed on the atara, and my pitch pipe, and put them into my backpack. A lady all in white, that’s me.

The trees were still green and full as I walked to the synagogue. When I turned the corner, everything smelled like fabric softener from the laundromat across the street. “Hi, Cantor!” said the man volunteering for security, as I arrived.

“Uh, student. I’m a fourth-year cantorial student,” I said, accepting a bottle of Poland Spring water he offered me.

Could I do this? I didn’t have a choice—I was already there. Hired as the High Holiday cantor. Yet somehow, I had never even yet led a Shabbat morning service from beginning to end. I knew I could get through the Torah service just fine, but Musaf was … a lot. Would my voice hold up?

I stood in the lobby, just outside the double doors of the sanctuary, as the rabbi finished his sermon. There were 45 people. I had been asked to sing Hineni, the cantor’s personal prayer on behalf of the congregation, coming in from the back of the sanctuary, and I really hoped I wouldn’t trip. My pitch pipe was in my sweaty hand, and no amount of water was going to help my awful dry mouth.

The rabbi stopped speaking. I quietly played an E and fumbled the pitch pipe into my pocket, wiping my hand on my skirt.

Hineni, I sang, swallowing. Ha’aniyah mima’as. Nireshet v’nifchedet ….

Here I am, unworthy, scared and trembling ….

I am 5 years old in suburban Philadelphia, and the children’s service has just finished. My fingers are sticky from apples and honey. I run down the hallway to the big service, to the overflow room behind the sanctuary. It is a sea of legs as far as I can see, because the grown-ups are standing. Far away is the rabbi, and the cantor, with his high white hat and scary, booming voice. An usher helps me find my mom and dad. They are in their going-out clothes, and my mother is so pretty with her long skirt, with her hair down. I snuggle gratefully against their legs. “I guess it’s time to go, Bob,” says my mom to my dad.

I am 10 years old, and my dad is taking me to Kol Nidre, which he calls my “special birthday service” because I was born on Yom Kippur. We run through the parking lot at dusk, and I am hugging his velour tallit bag. “It’s the cantor’s big night, Rose! He’s going to sing lots of fancy stuff!” We are hurrying because my dad says the Kol Nidre prayer is at the beginning of the service, and we don’t want to miss it. I am happy just to have a night alone with my dad, but I also like making a game of listening for the cantor to do vocal tricks, like singing in falsetto.

I am in college, and visiting my parents for the High Holidays. We take turns sitting with my grandmother up front. She always buys an extra seat for her husband, who died when I was 15. The melodies sound wrong because they are different from Shabbat. We are in the part called Musaf: The additional service. I idly wonder why there is an additional service when the service is already so long, but I like it when the cantor and the choir sing about everyone passing under God’s staff like sheep, because the choir does a staccato marchlike thing, and the cantor sings over them. When we get to the Kohanic blessing (“May God bless you and keep you ...”), Grandmom puts her hand on my knee and mutters ken y’hi ratzon, let it be so. She whispers that her grandmother used to do the same thing.

I am 31, and my mother says she will walk back and forth outside the synagogue with my 3-month-old so I can go in with my husband to say hi to Grandmom, but “please,” she says, “don’t stay too long because the baby will have to nurse again in less than two hours.”

I am 35, and I think that the High Holidays will always and forever be the same, with two trips to Pennsylvania, and sitting with my grandmother, and always breaking the fast with a huge extended family bagel-and-lox feast at 5 p.m., even though I vaguely know that there are services on Yom Kippur night.

I am 42, and there is really no point in visiting my parents for Yom Kippur because I am divorced and the kids are with their dad. So I go to my huge, old Conservative synagogue in Manhattan and sit in the balcony. The cantor’s voice is like warm honey; it feels like an embrace. At Neilah, right before the break-fast, she sings a spirited El Nora Alilah, and with 1,400 people in the sanctuary, the balcony shakes with all the singing and stomping.

I was almost 46 when I started cantorial school at the Jewish Theological Seminary. You could say I was called, because it took me by surprise. I was a theater kid: From my teens through my 20s, I studied theater and took voice lessons. In my 30s, performing took a back seat as I focused on raising my three kids. But when my oldest prepared for his bar mitzvah, I asked the cantor if there was something I could do to enhance his service. “I’m a singer,” I said, feeling completely foolish because it was years since I had sung professionally.

But she gave me music to learn, and suddenly, I was a singer again. As it turned out, she was away the weekend of his bar mitzvah, and I ended up learning Shabbat Mincha and serving as the ersatz cantor.

“You were great! You should go to cantorial school!” joked my ex-husband’s aunt as we left the sanctuary for the reception.

Except that it wasn’t funny to me: I was already quite seriously wondering how I could get the required two years of college-level Hebrew and the audition portfolio of songs together to apply.

Cantorial school is five years, full time. It’s uniquely hard if you’re a single mom to three kids. Or if you start in 2020 on Zoom during a global pandemic. But it’s most especially difficult when you realize in your first semester that you are somehow slightly dyslexic with learning music, because there are piles of it to learn.

In the first week of cantorial school, three professors suggested that perhaps it wasn’t the place for me. And even though I had studied Hebrew for two years, restarted voice lessons, learned to read Torah and how to lead parts of Shabbat services, and took music theory at the local music school, I agreed after a few weeks that maybe it wasn’t going to work.

Then something miraculous happened: People offered to tutor me. One was my voice teacher. But two were strangers—an upperclassman who called to offer help when I admitted on the WhatsApp chat that I was struggling, and a congregant of my nusach (liturgical melody) teacher. They set up regular meetings with me, and called themselves Team Roseanne. Once I know music, I can perform it, but to learn it, it has to be broken down into the tiniest bits of pitches and rhythm.

Team Roseanne—plus my assigned coach-mentor, a wonderful retired cantor with infinite patience—got me through three years of cantorial school before another cantor-mentor told me it was time to take a High Holiday job. “I’m not ready!” I protested. “Just apply,” she said.

So, in the summer of 2023, while sitting in the garden of my pastoral care internship at a local nursing home, I Zoomed with the president and rabbi of a shul in Connecticut. “Sing Avinu Malkeinu,” said the president. I was so nervous I had to Google the words, but they hired me on the spot.

Team Roseanne and my coach worked with me tirelessly to make sure that the people in Connecticut would have High Holidays. “It’s your first time,” said my coach. “The important thing is to just get through it.”

Hineni. Here I am, still standing at the back of the sanctuary, and all my life, I had only ever heard the High Holidays sung in someone else’s voice. Now this congregation would hear the prayers in my voice. I needed to give them everything I learned in school, yes, but also infuse my own experience of the High Holidays: the pageantry and solemnity, the breathless excitement, the warmth of parents, the grandmother’s hand on your knee, the lullaby, the honey, the raucousness, and, of course, the marching sheep.

They loved me. I was simply their cantor. Their lady in white. A young mother in the congregation sent me home after Rosh Hashanah with a loaf of sourdough bread, still warm.

On Yom Kippur, the president of the congregation announced from the bima that she had my contract ready for next year. Then she ran a fundraiser to pay me 50% more, “but,” she said, “this offer is only to have you. If we post the job at JTS, we will offer the original amount.”

Hineni. Here I am a year later, in my last year of cantorial school, preparing to go back to Hartford. Last year transformed me. Since then, I have led many more services: Shabbat, and Rosh Chodesh, and Pesach, and Shavuot. But I don’t think I would have had the confidence had it not been for this tiny shul in Connecticut, the first place I’ve ever been called Cantor Roseanne, the first place that trusted me.

I will be a real cantor soon, and I don’t know what the future holds. This is a temporary job. But, at least for this year, returning will be like going home.