Eileh Ezkerah: These I Will Remember
By Cantor Hayley Kobilinsky
The Eileh Ezkerah with which most Reform Jews are currently familiar does not bring to mind familiar melodies. While thematically, E
Eileh Ezkerah: These I Will Remember
By Cantor Hayley Kobilinsky
The Eileh Ezkerah with which most Reform Jews are currently familiar does not bring to mind familiar melodies. While thematically, Eileh Ezkerah fits well with Yom Kippur, it does not hark to the sounds of the High Holy Day melodies we typically quote. What, then, is to be done with its text? Often, the “From Creation to Redemption” segment found in the CCAR’s Gates of Repentance is simply read aloud. Traditionally, the Eileh Ezkerah would be chanted briefly. In this example, Hazzan Leibele Waldman is heard chanting a dramatic and morose recitation of the beginning of the text. While listening to the first minute or so, bear in mind that Waldman here chants the liturgy in its entirety (and this is only the first half of a twenty-minute-long musical selection). Compare this with the simple chant which begins the version by Hazzan Israel Alter. LISTEN The 34 seconds of Alter’s much longer chant is the entirety of the excerpt of the long piyyut (or poem) found in Gates of Repentance. Such few words leave little room for interpretation or word painting.
Some congregations have chosen to replace Eileh Ezkerah with an alternative. As was discussed in the first installment of studying Eileh Ezkerah, Rabbi Richard Sarason notes that replacing the Eileh Ezkerah piyyut with excerpts and additional thematically similar material is not new; it was removed from some machzorim before the Holocaust due to its content, and reintroduced following the war in various versions.
