Meredith Greenberg is the new cantor at Temple Ner Tamid.
Photo by Johanna Ginsberg
September 4, 2008
Meredith Greenberg is in love with Yossele Rosenblatt, her career, and her new congregation.
That’s a big change from the day in 2002 when she realized the singing career she had always dreamed of turned was turning out to be exquisitely unfulfilling.
Eight weeks ago she joined Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield as the new cantor. On Friday, Sept. 5, she will lead Shabbat services together with Rabbi Steven Kushner at the synagogue for the first time.
She can barely contain her excitement about her new community.
“Ner Tamid is an extremely musical group,” she said, sitting in the kitchen of the Maplewood home she moved into a year ago with Leora Perlman (daughter of famed violinist Itzhak Perlman) and their two sons, Gilad, four, and Nadav, two. “Every day I have in my office, say, a kid who is a pianist who for her tikun olam project is playing concerts in old-age homes — and she’s really good — and people who play harmonica and saxophone. It’s so rich musically. I feel like I’ve landed in a pile of shmaltz.”
“She has great musical training. We liked that,” said Gary Blackman, head of the Ner Tamid cantorial search committee that selected Greenberg. “She’s very spiritual and connected well with the members of the committee. She has a beautiful singing voice, and she sings with great soul, neshama,” he said.
Greenberg, 32, follows Cantor Samantha Natov, who served the congregation for two years. Natov left the congregation after having her first child. She followed Cantor Jessica Epstein, now at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston.
Greenberg eschews denominational identification. It’s no surprise that she ended up at Ner Tamid — until just a few years ago, it was affiliated not only with the Reform movement but also Conservative Judaism. Today it is affiliated solely with Reform Judaism, but congregants, according to Greenberg, identify with both movements.
She is enrolled at the Academy of Jewish Religion, an independent seminary in Manhattan, rather than the Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist schools of sacred music. With still a year’s worth of credits to complete before being formally invested in the cantorate, she said, “I’m so ready to be a cantor.”
The search committee at Ner Tamid had no qualms hiring her despite the fact that her investiture won’t take place for another year. “It’s not a concern for us,” said Blackman. “We did our due diligence. Meredith was very forthcoming about her situation, and based on the collective wisdom of the president, the rabbi, and the members of the committee, we have made a careful choice.”
Greenberg comes to Ner Tamid after having served a student pulpit at Temple Sinai of Bergen County in Tenafly. Although that congregation asked her to stay, she felt she needed more experience and more freedom to explore musically, she said.
“What I’m finding so far at Ner Tamid is they don’t just want to do it only one way,” she said. “With the very fixed organ sound at Temple Sinai, it was always the same. I knew I wanted to be in a place where it’s okay when I do some parts of a service a cappella and maybe with some percussion, but not full harmonic accompaniment.
“That’s when you can take chances. If you have someone accompanying you, you have to be respectful. The choir here now knows every time I sing, it’s different, and they go with it.”
She loves the hazanut style of Yossele Rosenblatt (1882-1993), the Ukrainian-born cantor who wowed congregations and concert audiences alike in the early 20th century.
“I’m in love,” she swoons at the mention of Rosenblatt, but added that she works hard to combine his traditional influences with sounds more in tune with contemporary tastes. “It’s a serious merging of the hazanut world with the NFTY sound,” she said, referring to the Reform movement’s National Foundation for Temple Youth, which has long been associated with folk melodies and instrumentation.
The future of the cantorate, she said, is to go “from a real hazanische style into easy-to-sing-along tunes in easy keys and back to hazanut. The congregation has something to gain from listening, and the hazan has something to gain from congregational participation.”
Career change
Greenberg grew up in a Reform congregation in Hollywood, Fla., but didn’t really embrace Judaism until her mid-20s. “I went back to it almost like a conversion,” she said. “I went from being someone who takes Judaism for granted to someone who takes every detail of being Jewish and processes it.”
She attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts for part of high school and earned a bachelor’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music.
When she graduated, she began pursuing a career in voice. But, she said, “I was finding that I didn’t like the way that performing for an audience was this very exclusive thing. You never interacted with anyone you were communicating for. There was something a little bit empty, even though the music was fulfilling and exciting. It didn’t have that extra depth I was searching for.”
She landed a job teaching sight-singing at Manhattan School of Music, but, she said, “I wasn’t happy teaching. Jewish stuff had started to be exciting in a way I had always wanted music to be.”
That’s when Leora Perlman said to her, “‘Why don’t you just be a cantor?’ Here I was shul-hopping and doing all this Jewish stuff and trying to get connected Jewishly. I was just like, ‘Yeah.’”
Asked what it is like to be in a musical field with a father-in-law like Perlman, she shrugs it off. “Next to my own parents, my in-laws are my biggest fans,” she said.
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t feel pressure. “When I was still hoping to be an opera singer, I knew if my in-laws were in the audience, they were listening in a certain way.” That made her put a certain amount of pressure on herself, she said.
Her father-in-law had a more difficult time accepting her relationship with his daughter. The two met in 1994 and were married in a Jewish ceremony in Key West, Fla., in 2001. (They had a civil union ceremony in 2007 and are contemplating a legal marriage as well.) Wary at first, Perlman’s parents ultimately accepted them.
As she throws some corn and summer squash into a pot, she offers her recipe for fulfilling her role at Ner Tamid.
“I want to lay down really strong roots in this congregation. I want a community that maybe has been going away over the last few years from being Shabbat-centric and just having fun, to seeing being Shabbat-centric as fun,” she said.
Greenberg has already instituted a new program for b’nei mitzva families requiring them all to articulate the mitzvot they will take upon themselves as a family.
“I want to push them not to sign their kids up for violin lessons at 10 a.m. Saturday morning, but to make this part of their life.”
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