Finding What Makes the World More Beautiful: An Interview with Vera Broekhuysen

Vera Broekhuysen serves as cantor at Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley in Massachusetts. In June 2016, she was ordained by Hebrew College and also earned her master’s degree in Jewish education. She was a member of the Greater Haverhill Clergy Association, a founding member of the Merrimack Valley Sanctuary Network, and is a member of the steering committee of the Boston T’ruah cluster.  

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Where were you born and where did you grow up?

I was born in Boston and grew up in Cambridge with my parents, Martin and Jacqueline, may their memories be for a blessing, and a big extended family with many different faiths and backgrounds. We belonged to the Tremont Street Shul, but we didn’t go regularly. We went on the high holidays and possibly for a yizkor or b’nai mitzvah occasionally. We would do Friday nights at home. Hanukkah and Pesach were really big in my home.

What role did music play in your childhood?

I grew up in a house with a lot of music. My father was classically trained in piano. My mother loved folk music. She adored John Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. I began violin at age three, which didn’t last long. I started piano lessons when I was eight, and that lasted about four years. I started singing in children’s choirs and operas around that time. I began voice lessons when I was 15 or 16 and then continued through college and cantorial school.

Did you play in any orchestras or sing in choirs in high school?

I sang in choir and chamber choir, and a little bit with the jazz band. And I also sang with Village Harmony, a teen folk song and world music ensemble. I started that when I was 13. That involved summer camps, full weekends of rehearsals, and two weeks of touring each year. We went to Nova Scotia, Italy, and the Republic of Georgia several times. That was a major part of my musical life for eight years and it’s still deeply at the core of what I do.

Vera Broekhuysen (top, left of center) with Village Harmony, 2000.

What was your experience like in the Republic of Georgia?

I visited the Republic of Georgia four times. Georgia has many culturally and musically distinct regions within it. I spent most of my time in Svaneti, a highlands region in the north. I did two summer tours with Village Harmony, one semester during my undergraduate studies, and then an extended music and language workshop where I stayed for about two and a half months. At that point, I was pretty happily pursuing as close as the University of Toronto would let me an undergraduate degree in ethnomusicology.

Were any teachers at the University of Toronto particularly influential for you?

Professor James Kippen was big for me—just a marvelous teacher and person. Professor Celia Cain had really interesting and compelling experiences as a female academic that she shared with us. There was a wonderful klezmer teacher, Brian Katz. He was deeply connected to the Yiddish and Klez Kanada world.

I found myself pursuing Jewish music projects without ever really making a thing of it. For one course, I did a project on Salomone Rossi. For another course, I ended up doing a project on klezmer and jazz. Then, one year I saw that the klezmer performance ensemble could be taken for credit.

I thought, “Oh, that sounds great. I’d love to do that.” So, I show up and Brian says, “What instrument do you play?” I said, “Well, I’m a singer.” He said, “No, what instrument do you play?” And I said, “I own a violin.” And he said, “Great, you’re a fiddler. Bring the violin next time.” Luckily, there was another much more accomplished fiddler in the band who I could play with. And I scraped by as one does.

What did you do after you graduated?

I wanted to stay in Toronto at that point. I really loved the city and the cultural life there. I did some professional choir work. But I ended up only staying for less than a year because my father became ill.

How did you wind up at Hebrew College and what motivated you to go there?

I kind of fell into it. My father died in 2008, and while I wasn’t well-acquainted at that point with the Jewish customs around it, I essentially stopped making music for a year.

Then, I went to the Rochester Folk Art Guild in upstate New York for the summer. There were a great group of young people working on the farm who loved singing and making music. Later that summer, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. I was planning at that point to pursue nursing studies.

A friend I’d made that summer at the guild put up a Facebook post saying that he was going on a road trip to visit some national parks, to see the West and do some hiking. He wanted a companion to drive and hike with. I looked at that post and thought, “School can wait. This is the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to do my whole life.”

We talked a lot about religion on that trip. He had become an observant Catholic as a young adult. He was very curious about Judaism and wanted to talk about religion. What were our rituals? How did we support each other as a community? What did study look like? What did theology look like?

These were questions that I hadn’t thought or talked about since before b’nai mitzvah, if ever. And those conversations got a lot of wheels turning. I also completely defy anybody to spend extended time in the national parks and not start thinking about that which is bigger than ourselves.

So, there were a variety of spiritual experiences, including one very shocking moment of spontaneous prayer—having my father’s loss in the mix, the anticipation of losing my mother, and starting to think more about Judaism; the pleasure and joy of making music again was in there, too.

It all kind of came to a head on the way home when I was staying with some cousins in Atlanta. We went to church one Sunday morning and the minister preached from Miss Rumphius, the book by Barbara Cooney. The story is of a girl whose grandfather tells her that she must find something that makes the world more beautiful. The moral of the story is to find that thing that makes the world more beautiful for you and then go do it. So, I was sitting there in that church. We had just sung a beautiful hymn, and I was thinking: “I’m interested in people; I’ve been thinking more about Judaism; I love singing. What can I do with that?” And there was this light bulb of, “Oh, I could be a cantor.”

Had you considered the cantorate as a career path before that?

No, I knew pretty much nothing about it at that point. There were not many cantors in my life when I was growing up, other than Beth Levin (now cantor of Temple Shir Tikvah in Winchester, MA). And, I didn’t have experience with congregational work. But I went home and started Googling. I talked with some of my parents’ more observant friends, who took me under their wing and said, “Well, come daven with us. If you’re interested in being a cantor, get into a shul.”

Knowing my mother’s diagnosis, I wasn’t interested in going far away. Hebrew College was just a few miles away. So, I called and talked with Cantor Louise Treitman about it. I didn’t apply anywhere else. And, in retrospect, I think I ended up in the best place I could have. With every week that goes by, I appreciate more and more that I was trained in a pluralistic setting. Interfaith work has always felt like home because that’s how my family is. That has served me really well.

Were there any faculty at Hebrew College that were particularly influential for you?

All of them in various ways. Cantor Dr. Brian Mayer was the Dean of the School of Jewish Music and of the cantorial program. And he brought—the word that comes to mind is yikhes. He had such a sense of the history and the legacy and the living tradition of hazzanut and nusaḥ that was incredibly grounding for me, not having grown up understanding what that looked like in practice.

Cantor Lynn Torgove, who came to the cantorate from an opera background, was just an amazing teacher of the power and the skill of how to deliberately use and shape one’s voice and presence to serve the congregation.

Cantor Louise Treitman was a really important mentor to me for her musicality and professionalism. She teaches by being and took such care of the students through rocky times. Cantor Jeff Klepper was wonderful at teaching how to have a lot of fun with people in Jewish musical settings, and how to pull large groups of people together in song.

Dr. Joshua Jacobson is this incredibly generous well of knowledge about Jewish music and its history. He’s someone who understands how music lives in and keeps people whole. I got to sing under his direction in the Zamir Chorale of Boston for several years.

Rav-Hazzan Scott Sokol helped me build up knowledge of things I missed out on not going to Jewish summer camp. I also learned from and had important relationships with rabbis and other teachers who were not cantors. It was a good education.

Amy Lieberman is an incredible conductor and singer who directed, with Cantor Torgove, Kol Arev, Hebrew College’s chamber choir. I learned a lot from her about professionalism, about what it means to care about what you do, and how to make music as beautiful as it can be no matter what the obstacles are. She was and is an incredible teacher and model for me.

Cantor Broekhuysen with the Zamir Chorale of Boston performing at AwePsalm. Temple Emanuel, Massachusetts, 2017.

Could you reflect on some of the more memorable experiences from the early part of your career?

The first experiences I had leading people in prayer were at Hebrew College during our morning davenings. I used that as a kind of boot camp when I started cantorial school because this was pretty new for me. I had only recently established a davening practice at that point. I didn’t know the tunes. I didn’t know the words. I had a hard time keeping up as we went through the morning service. Three or four months in, things started picking up.

At that point, the cantorial students took responsibility for Friday mornings. That involved a more traditional davening pattern, and that was explicitly a space for us to use and hear nusaḥ.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time I led a morning service. I had my siddur and I had my tallit and I was facing east. I made a call and the people praying responded. A wave of sound came up behind my back and over my head and I could feel it moving forward. It was extraordinary. It was this moment of recognizing that part of what it means to lead people in prayer is to give the signal for this kind of outpouring.

And then came internships, both formal and informal. I had the great joy of being a member of the Jewish community in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Rabbi Ben Weiner and his wife, Cantor Elise Barber. Ben helped me learn the community minhag, and that was probably the first place I got used to leading a congregation and seeing how people responded. That was where I learned to adjust my volume and pace and to respond to what the people were giving me.

Max Wohlberg's Psalm 23, featuring Cantor Vera Broekhuysen.

Could you comment on the relationship between the community and the prayer leader?

Someone once said that the job of a religious leader is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That’s not usually used in a musical sense, but I would say there’s always a balance, a dance, and sometimes a puzzle to any given service or any given moment. One adapts as one goes. But there are questions:

• How much familiarity does my community need just to enter the stream of what’s happening, whether that’s nusaḥ and davening, a congregational melody, or silence and meditation?
• When and how does one do things that are new, whether from musical preferences that people have expressed an interest in or things that I would like to add? It is different still when it’s in the cause of musical and Jewish diversity.
• How do you craft or facilitate an audio and physical environment in which people's hearts, voices and spirits are engaged and free to get what they need?

You have to constantly—forgive the pun—keep your ear out for what your community is singing and how they respond to what you try. In this community here in Sudbury, there are traditions that are really important to them and I am mindful of this. The emphasis on congregational participation here is also really high, which I love, but that means I lay off the ornaments and the hazzanut a bit. I think these are things that sh'likhei tzibbur always have to think about.

Could you describe an event or activity in your career that was a highlight for you?

There are two moments that are linked together. The first was at one of the first services I led, and a congregant was drumming with me. We finished a song and I just let the silence percolate for a bit. It took me a long time to learn how to do that. But that silence just kind of settled and then we were ready for the next thing. That felt really amazing to let the music sink in and digest.

The second was this past spring when we brought Aly Halpert and Molly Bajgot to do a participatory concert. The three of us sang together, and Aly led and taught throughout the evening. After she finished one of her first songs, that same silence was there. And she turned to me and said, “They know how to leave a silence in the air”. To me, this was an amazing musical and spiritual affirmation of our sacred space. It’s a privilege to be in a place where that's part of the culture, where people will sing along and they care about the music.

Is there an issue that you’ve been passionate about during your profession? 

The issue I’ve spent the most time with is immigration. I’ve worked with the Merrimack Valley Interfaith Sanctuary Network to assist, support and advocate for immigrants in the area and beyond. My congregation offers support to a local worker's center that provides important services to immigrants. I’ve also spent a lot of time with T’ruah. I serve as the co-chair of the T'ruah Massachusetts Cluster.

Currently, I work a lot on gender diversity in Jewish prayer and liturgy. I’m really interested in this and I think it’s an important equity and inclusion issue. There’s so much incredible work out there from Cantor Ze'evi Tovlev and Marcia Falk, and from all of these creative liturgists and theologians figuring out how to bring gender diversity into prayer.

Finally, my heart continues to break about what is happening in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank. I believe that lasting peace for every person in the Holy Land requires Palestinian autonomy, safety and wellbeing. Those conditions feel extraordinarily difficult to achieve in this moment.

Is there anything that you’d like to say to someone considering going into the cantorate today?

Please do! The Jewish world needs you. Judaism needs music. It has been said that just as Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews. And the same is true for music. As long as Jews have kept music—like Shabbat—so, too, has music kept the Jews. Music is where our history lives, where our language lives, where our hopes live, where our intergenerational interactions live, where the laughter that keeps us sane and healthy lives, and where so much of what is precious and empathetic and good in our lives is located. Our songs help reinforce and share and teach all of that.

Jewish music is a living organism. Just like Torah, it will doubtless evolve into things I can’t even imagine now. But we sing because we’re human, because we’re Jewish, and we are enriched by people who make it their life’s work to help us sing.

This interview is part of our Voices of Change: 50 Years of Women in the American Cantorate series.

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