Oyb nit nokh hekher

 

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Liner Notes

Maurice Rauch’s Yiddish cantata Oyb nit nokh hekher is based on the same story by Isaac Leyb [Yitskhoh Leyb/Leybush] Peretz that was used by Sholom Secunda for his cantata in English, If Not Higher, which is included in Volume 17 of the Milken Archive. The notes accompanying the Secunda piece have further details with regard to the original story and its author.

Rauch’s librettist for this endeavor was the eminent Yiddishist and Yiddish literary advocate Itche Goldberg (1904–2006), with whom he collaborated on a number of works written initially (as in this case) for the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus in New York, which he conducted for many years.

Born in Apt, Poland, Goldberg grew up in Warsaw, where he acquired a modern secular education at a Zionist school. As a young student, although he knew even then that he was not headed for a personally religious life, he felt driven to gain Judaic knowledge, and he wanted to attend the Jewish teachers seminary in Warsaw, which also had among its students many Hassidim who, despite the school’s modern worldview, sought by their enrollment to avoid military conscription. The minimum age at the seminary was sixteen, but when Goldberg was thirteen, he persuaded the head of the seminary, Rabbi Posnansky—also the rabbi at the famous modern but still orthodox Tłomackie Synagogue in the city—to admit him.

He emigrated to Canada in 1920 and a few years later began teaching at socialist-oriented Yiddish schools in Toronto as well as at those of the left-leaning Yiddish-speaking Zionist circles (in particular the Labor Zionist Farband). In 1932 he moved once again, this time to New York, where he settled permanently and became intimately involved with the Ordn (Jewish People’s Fraternal Order), which had recently been organized (late 1920s) and was admittedly aligned with the Soviet Union and the Yiddish-speaking Communist milieu. His principal interest, however, eventually was cultural, which for him meant the revitalization and promotion of Yiddish language, literature, and related music and their humanistic dimensions and history. He directed the cultural and educational departments of the Ordn and its network of schools. Like Peretz (at whose funeral he was present in Warsaw at the age of thirteen), he was committed to Yiddish culture as the primary engine of a secular (but nonetheless spiritual) Jewish identity, and he was convinced that the human values at the core of Yiddish literature were still not fully tapped as a potential primary source for a secular Judaism. He edited a number of Yiddish journals, including Yungvarg (Youth) and Proletarishe dertsiung (Proletarian Education), authored textbooks for left-wing Yiddishist schools, wrote a book on Yiddish dramaturgy, and produced numerous essays that were published as collections. And he published the literary magazine Yidish. He was also a professor of Yiddish literature at Queens College in New York for fifty years, and one of the principal figures responsible for the successful transplantation of Yiddish culture to America and for its establishment and expansion as an American and American Jewish phenomenon.

Rauch’s score differs significantly from Secunda’s, and not only by virtue of its use of the Yiddish language and its musical sensitivity to linguistic details and nuances. Secunda’s piece is geared more toward tasteful but forceful operatic display—which is understandable inasmuch as he had in mind the brilliant tenor voice of the renowned opera star Richard Tucker as he composed it—whereas Rauch’s approach more closely reflects the folk character of the tale (or at least its outward trappings), its protagonist and antagonist, and the surroundings. Secunda composed his cantata for a professional chorus that he knew would not be a Jewish one per se, although good amateur choruses could perform it as well. Rauch’s work, however, was aimed specifically at Yiddish-speaking folk choruses, which he and Goldberg viewed as “people’s choruses” whose members would not only understand every word and idiomatic expression of the Yiddish but also would identify with the story’s positive, humanitarian dimensions and the central message that meshed with their socialist or even farther left sensibilities.

Even more divergent is Goldberg’s carefully considered libretto (his first collaboration with Rauch), which is at once more profound, more nuanced, and more faithful to the underlying story than Samuel Rosenbaum’s more Americanized, more contemporary, and less authentic treatment for the Secunda cantata. In a nearly seamless way, Goldberg lays greater stress on the secular humanism at the heart of the story, which in his interpretation is veiled only for effect by the Hassidic—and thus religious, God-centered—context. For many readers of Peretz’s work, that emphasis was also his intention, indeed the central point of the story.

For Goldberg, the Litvak, underneath his talmudic exterior, is not so much a religious skeptic of Hassidism and its emblematic magical beliefs (the traditional Litvak tag) as he is a symbolic doubter of humanity and its potential for goodness and kindness on its own—without religious motivation (Peretz himself came on certain levels to accept Hassidism’s role in constructing and promoting such values, even as he continued to scorn its primitive folkways, unworldliness, and exploitative abuses). This Litvak was Peretz’s creation, which he used to surround his own variant (one of many) of a story—the kernel of which had grown as a Hassidic legend about R. Moshe Leyb of Sassov—of a selfless, charitable rebbe for whom human kindness trumps religious ritual obligations.

In typical American fashion, Rosenbaum’s libretto is more romantically linked to invented pseudo-nostalgia and to perceptions of the Hassidic world as an admirable bastion of spirituality, Jewish substance, and warm interactions. Goldberg’s libretto—more like this and other Peretz stories that merely used the Hassidic environment as a backdrop—never becomes truly immersed in that world and its insular life. Rather, Goldberg, along with Rauch, appears to be an outside if fascinated spectator. But he perceives the Nemirover rebbe not so much as a religious hero driven by devotion to God or by the moral centrality of the Torah and Divine teaching, but as an even more worthy secular model of human ethics and morality.

Following the premiere in New York, a sister chorus in Detroit that was also affiliated with the Jewish Music Alliance and the Ordn—part of the network of leftist choruses that before the 1950s merger had been established by the International Workers Order (see the biographical sketch on Rauch)—decided to add this cantata to its repertoire and to program it at one of its major concerts. When the administrative programming and repertoire committee realized that the story concerned Hassidim, a rebbe, and prayers, they abruptly canceled those plans on the grounds that a piece tied in any way to religion or religious themes—or even depicting them—could have no place in the mission of their staunchly secularist and fiercely antireligious chorus.

Not because he was the librettist, but because he believed so firmly in the underlying nonreligious or extra-religious message of the story, Goldberg traveled at his own expense to Detroit to convince the committee that the concept of humanism expressed by the actions and deeds of a rabbi or rebbe does not make the story religious. To the contrary, he explained, the story underscores an opposition to a restrictive “God orientation” as well as to a more narrow, religion-based social awareness; here, the rebbe’s true religion was humanism, for which he and all the other religiously related elements are merely vehicles for expressing that set of values. In fact, Goldberg continued, the story demonstrates that humanism—indeed, secular humanism—is a higher and more worthy worldview than religion; that the “higher” in Peretz’s title means not only that the rebbe ascends higher than heaven—higher than religion—and that humanistic values are higher than religious ones. Also, he pointed out that a part of Hassidism was actually intertwined with humanistic concerns; moreover, like the Yiddishists and their chorus, Hassidism was, after all, a “people’s” movement—thus making it “a bit of socialism.” Not only did the story and his libretto transcend Hassidism or religion, or even specifically or exclusively Jewish values, but it could also in theory have had an entirely different setting and set of characters to demonstrate the same humanism. Thus, this particular setting and these characters are those with whom the “Jewish folk” of Europe could identify.

In summing up his argument, Goldberg referred to a vaguely similar story about the BESHT (the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism), who is said to have heard a crying child one day while he was on his way to the synagogue. Knowing that he would be late and even miss some of the required prayers, the BESHT nevertheless stopped to attend to the child and calm him. “This, too, is socialism,” Goldberg proclaimed, and in the end he prevailed.

 

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Lyrics

• English
• Yiddish

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Credits

Composer: Maurice Rauch

Performers: Ira Biegeleisen, Bass Baritone;  Choral Society of Southern California;  Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale;  Martha Nagy , Soprano;  Nick Strimple, Conductor;  Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra

Additional Credits:

Translation: Eli Mishulovin