When 17-year-old Jonathan Klein was asked to compose a contemporary sacred service he wasn’t thinking beyond his Massachusetts youth federation for which it would be performed. He was thinking about jazz—the primary focus of his musical studies. And he was thinking about the common link between jazz and Jewish liturgical music: improvisation.

At the request of one of his father’s colleagues, Klein composed a sacred service meant to resonate with a younger audience. The initial performance was well-received, and he was asked to perform it at other synagogues in the region. Shortly thereafter, the father’s colleague, Rabbi David Davis, suggested he make a recording.

Davis had been Klein’s father’s assistant rabbi in Worcester. But by this time he had gone to work for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism).

Arrangements were made for a recording session to take place in New York. The composer Charles Morrow was hired as producer and Klein was asked whom he might like to have at the session. When the session date finally arrived the studio was filled was some of the leading jazz musicians of the era: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Grady Tate, Jerome Richardson, and Thad Jones.

To Klein’s recollection it was simply a matter of phoning the musicians union, which he believes Morrow did. “Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter were playing with Miles [Davis] at the time,” Klein recalled. “They were part of that famous quintet. But it didn’t mean they wouldn’t do other work.”

Also in attendance at the recording session were singers Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Antonia Lavanne, both of whom went on to have successful careers in classical music.

When Gershon Kingsley arrived in New York in 1946 his dream was attend Juilliard. But he was self-taught and lacked a high school diploma. Juilliard would not accept him. So, at age 24, he moved to Los Angeles, finished high school while attending Cal Arts, and supported himself by playing organ in synagogues.

“They asked me to write a small liturgical setting—for bar’khu or sh’ma,” he recalled more than fifty years later, “so I became a ‘Jewish composer’ by default!”

Before his arrival in the United States, Kingsley was born in Germany and had witnessed the rise of Nazism. At age 11 he joined a youth Zionist group in Hamburg. Then, at 16, he travelled on his own with a faction of that group to Palestine and spent two years on kibbutz. He later lived in Jerusalem, studying music and playing jazz in between stints of military service.

While the few liturgical settings he composed in Los Angeles provided an initial foray, a summer spent under the tutelage of Max Helfman at the Brandeis Arts Institute inspired the composer to remain connected Jewish music for the remainder of his life.

Of equal importance to Kingsley’s development as a composer, however, was his early fascination with the Moog synthesizer. Kingsley recorded several albums featuring his own compositions and arrangements, many of which reached international audiences and remain popular among Moog enthusiasts today.

Kingsley’s worlds of electronic and Jewish music came together on multiple occasions. He composed several works of Jewish connection utilizing the Moog as a primary—sometimes even only—instrument, including several sacred services.

The Hush of Midnight

If it is clear at this point that the experimental attitude of the 1960s profoundly influenced American synagogue music, readers would be forgiven for wondering about the folk movement that provided most of that era’s definitive soundtrack.

That influence would be most forcefully felt in the following decade. With Debbie Friedman’s harnessing of the folk sound for the sake of creating original music for Jewish worship, the course of Jewish music in America changed dramatically. But before Debbie Friedman, there were two cantor-composers who looked to 1960s folk music to demonstrate Judaism's continued relevance and usefulness to the era's most pressing concerns.

Charles Davidson first manifested the spirit of the 60s in a modern s'lihot service titled The Hush of Midnight. As Neil Levin explains in his notes to this piece:

The Hebrew word s'liḥot refers to the collective penitential liturgy, the daily recitation of which commences prior to Rosh Hashana and continues through Yom Kippur. The s'liḥot are generally recited just prior to dawn as vigils (ashmurot), preceding shaharit, or the morning service. In Ashkenazi custom (outside specifically Hassidic circles and some communities in Israel), the first such recitation has come to take the form of a formal service, beginning at or just after midnight on the Saturday night—technically, Sunday morning—prior to Rosh Hashana. It thus serves as an inauguration of the penitential season.

For The Hush of Midnight, Davidson took portions of the standard s'lihot liturgy and combined it with liturgical poems by Ruth Brin (1921–2009), a poet of the post-War era whose work exerted significant influence on modern Jewish liturgy. Davidson set the combined texts to original music.

At the time of its conception, Davidson referred to this work as "a service for our time," calling for an "assembly youthful in spirit," cantor or cantorial solo, guitars, piano, and drums. "The poignant cries of past suffering and the suggestion of bodies swaying in prayer do not lurk unabashedly in the background," he has explained. "They proclaim themselves over the beating of drums and the throbbing electric guitars."