Exactly What I Was Seeking: An Interview with Riki Lippitz

One of the first female cantors ordained in Conservative Judaism, Erica “Riki” Lippitz is a celebrated cantor who has received many awards, including the Yehuda Mandel Humanitarian Award (2013), the Hazzan Moshe Nathanson Award for Conducting (2018) and the Yuval Award (2018). Prior to joining the cantorate, she earned a Master of Arts in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University. Cantor Lippitz is also a co-founder of the Kol Dodi Chorale of Greater MetroWest (New Jersey). She served as a cantor of Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange, New Jersey, for 34 years.  

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me about your early life with your family and where you grew up.

I was born in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in the Chicago area in a family full of social activists, music lovers, and feminists.

My paternal grandmother Blanche Aronin Lippitz, in particular, was a trailblazer. She was born in 1901, was valedictorian of her high school class, graduated from law school when she was 20 years old and had to wait to take the bar exam until her 21st birthday. This is 1922, mind you, and women had just gotten the right to vote in 1920. She graduated cum laude from law school, as well, but she was not offered a job in law because she was female. So, she spent her entire life organizing Jewish women’s organizations. I was very much standing on her shoulders when I went into the cantorate.

Were you musically active in childhood or high school?

I studied piano from childhood on. I picked up the flute in fifth grade, then learned guitar and sang in choirs throughout middle and high school. 

Was your family active in synagogue or camp life when you were growing up?

Cantor Erica Lippitz

My grandmother, who I mentioned, was very involved. And so was her brother, Ben Aronin, who was both a Jewish educator and a composer. He wrote the song about the four sons at the Seder that is sung to the melody of “My Darling, Clementine.” My parents were involved as well. They went to services periodically, and my dad led the purimspiel on Purim. We attended Anshe Emet Synagogue of Chicago, which was an incredible powerhouse of synagogue music. Cantor Moses Silverman was one of the great hazzanim of his generation. That was a profound musical influence on me. The sound of a Conservative synagogue with a choir and organ, and very robust music, was what I thought shul sounded like.

I did not go to summer camp, but I was involved in youth groups and playing the guitar. The game-changer for me was when we left Anshe Emet and joined Beth Emet of Evanston, Illinois, also a powerhouse Reform synagogue in its day. Beth Emet takes a look at me, not having gone to summer camp, not being integrated into Jewish life. They look at me in 1972, and they send me to Israel on the Eisendrath International Exchange program that had just been created in 1967. They sent two junior year high school kids to Israel for a full summer and then into an Israeli high school for a semester. That was life-changing. I gained fluency in Hebrew and the deepest of Israeli connections.

What did you do after high school?

When I went to college I really thought I was going to be a music therapist. That field was just launching in the late 1970s. So, I went to get a joint degree in music and psychology at the University of Michigan. In many ways, I never left music therapy. I just found a way to channel it.

Why didn’t you become a music therapist?

I began looking at schools where I could get certified and they were not a good match for me. I was interested in the spiritual effects of music on community and nobody was doing that. It was more like using musical instruments for physical therapy. Lucky for me, the person with whom I was staying in Boston—while visiting one such program—was a TA at Brandeis in the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service. We were discussing my dissatisfaction with the music therapy options and he said, “Why don’t you come with me to Brandeis tomorrow? This sounds like what you’re looking for.” I walked in and that was it. It was exactly what I was seeking.

Cantor Steve Sher, Joe Black and Riki Lippitz perform “Dodi Li”. Chicago, 1981.

After graduating from Brandeis, I came back to Chicago to be the director of the Hillel at Loyola University, and I also became the part-time cantor at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois, doing the High Holidays, special Shabbat services, and b’nai mitzvah. I also conducted purimspiels and choirs. That was a fantastic training ground, and it was there I realized that this is what I wanted to do full time.

What was it like starting out at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) at that time when there weren’t many women in the cantorate?

I started in 1983, and the admissions process was wonderfully personal and encouraging. Rabbi Morton Leifman was the dean then. I had looked at Hebrew Union College. But, there wasn’t a lot of flexibility in that program, and I already had a degree in music and was semi-fluent in Hebrew. I remember saying to myself, “I don’t need a degree; I need the knowledge.” I didn’t know the traditional nusaḥ, but I was a professional musician. I could learn this.

And what I found at JTS is that although the institution was very traditional, there was such openness to training anyone who wanted to learn. Part of the story of women coming into the cantorate that I think is not amplified enough is that, in many other professions, people cared more about keeping women out than they cared about the needs of the profession itself. To their credit, what the faculty at JTS, and the cantorial faculty specifically, cared about was that anyone who was going to be out there leading a service do it with the right nusaḥ, the correct Torah tropes, and that we represent the cantorate with integrity, knowledge and professionalism.

Were there any teachers that had a significant impact on you when you were at JTS?

Our nusaḥ teachers, Hazzan Max Wohlberg and Cantor Charles Davidson, were the core of the faculty, and I felt their support throughout my time there. Hazzan Henry Rosenblum really took it upon himself to make sure that women had the kinds of preparation and opportunities to practice what we needed in order to take pulpits and do our jobs successfully. He really distinguished himself by being very personally invested in our professional success.

How did you transition from student life into the professional world?

Everyone at JTS took some sort of part-time pulpit when they were ready. I took the pulpit of Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts, a Reform synagogue led at that time by the brilliant Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. I took that pulpit so I could study with him. It was just beautiful mazel because they needed what I had to offer. I worked with them my entire time at JTS and I’m eternally grateful for everything that experience taught me. Then, my teacher and mentor, Hazzan Henry Rosenblum, decided to take a job in Chicago, and his pulpit at Oheb Shalom Congregation became open. Oheb Shalom was established in 1860 as a traditional synagogue but was fairly halakhically progressive. It became one of the seven founding congregations of the Conservative movement. In worship, they employed a choir and organ, stood for the Sh’ma, and opened the ark for Aleinu. Egalitarianism had come to Oheb Shalom a decade or two before the rest of the Conservative movement, and Henry was no small part of that. By the time I got there, women were wearing tallitot, leading services, and chanting the Torah.

The rabbi of Oheb Shalom at the time, Alexander Shapiro, was one of the great rabbis of his generation, a president of the Rabbinic Assembly and a fearless leader in Jewish life. He told the interview committee that if the female candidate was the equal of the male candidates, he’d like to put Oheb Shalom on the map. He’d like to show that there isn’t a glass ceiling for capable women.

Cantor Lippitz sings “Sh’ma Koleinu” by Meir Finkelstein with the Oheb Shalom Chorale and Professional Quartet.

It was a great shidduch. I still had a lot to learn. I was not the seasoned hazzan that my predecessor was, and I wasn’t the seasoned hazzan that most of the other candidates were. But I had ruach, I had spirit, I had invention. I could handle the musically complicated elements of the job. I could work with professional musicians and play guitar and create a family service. That was the new thing then, and I think I was the only candidate who could play guitar.

The relevant piece from my teen years is that I had come from both the Conservative and Reform movements and this ended up giving me the right skill set. So, we started to develop all kinds of creative liturgy inside the rubric of a traditional synagogue and it worked really well. And I never left, because this was the perfect pulpit for me.

Could you share some musical experiences and influences that have shaped you as a cantor and artist?

I’ve been smitten with Jewish choral music since I sang with Zamir Chorale of Boston under Josh Jacobson. And then when I came to JTS, I sang with the Zamir Chorale of New York with Mati Lazar. Both men have been significant mentors for me. I created a choir a few months after coming back to Chicago from Brandeis, and Cantor Joel Caplan and I created the Kol Dodi Chorale in 1991. Eighty-five people showed up to the first rehearsal and Kol Dodi has birthed two more choirs in New Jersey. Throughout my career, I have always had a choir, sang in a choir, or directed a choir. Jewish choral music could have been my whole profession, if I’d maybe taken a left turn instead of a right.

I also worked with Beged Kefet, a folk group, and it has been one of the most joyful projects of my lifetime. Almost everyone in the group was a rabbi or cantor, and the group began at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem in the early 1980s. Their tzedakah project was to sing and raise money for charity, and it became a high-level, professional ensemble and a vehicle for many compositions by Billy Dreskin, Benjie Ellen Schiller and Leon Sher.

2003 recording of "Heal Us Now" by Beged Kefet.

Are there any particularly meaningful or memorable moments that stand out to you over your career?

In 34 years, there are more moments than I could list. But here’s what I think was very important to me.

First, I’m a creative person, and Oheb Shalom was very open to keeping music an important element of synagogue life. We did excellent Jewish music in all kinds of genres, pretty much every month, special musical services with instrumentalists, a quartet, and the choir. We developed guitar-based, family services in which kids came up on the bima and co-led with me, which was still a kind of radical thing to do then. Those kids who sang with me around 1990—I’m now doing their weddings and naming their children! I also liked incorporating the music of Turkish Jews or Italian Jews and introducing the richness of these kinds of traditions to people who were not aware of them. We did that for more than 30 years in these special services. I was so blessed to land in a place with such enormous love of creativity, and that’s why I stayed. This will be my shul for the rest of my life.

Second, when I came to Oheb Shalom, not everybody was thrilled to have a female cantor. Some people were afraid of my presence because they thought I was coming to destroy something they loved. And so, understanding that fear, I didn’t take it personally. I knew that all I had to do was put my heart and soul into showing them how much I loved the same Jewish music they loved. I didn’t change the music. I added music, but I didn’t take anything away. And that proved to be the most important thing.

I have carried myself for a lifetime, as did my grandmother, knowing that everything I did and said, and the way I presented myself, and every element of my professional life would represent women everywhere, whether I wanted it or not. It has been the greatest privilege of my lifetime to represent more than myself. I have the joy of being one of the first female practitioners, so that I could open the path for the extraordinary women who have followed me.