Between Two Shabbatot

What is a Torah? In this episode, Hazzan Noam goes back to October 25th, when Temple Etz Chaim finished writing a new Torah scroll donated by a member family. Its last hundred letters had been left as outlines for the congregation to fill in. At the Mazel Tov Station in a corner of the Paskow Sanctuary, people who had just held the scribe's quill said the Shehecheyanu over little cups of sparkling grape juice and told him what it was like. The kids said it was cool, amazing, and long, and that the feather was very soft. The grownups talked about their families, the shul they grew up in, and bat mitzvahs still to come. Plus a conversation with Rabbi Dr. Jeffrey Summit, ethnomusicologist at Tufts University and author of Singing God's Words, about why music tells people so quickly whether they belong in a synagogue, why we chant Torah and don't just read it, and what he heard when he asked some 400 people why they chant it.

Find Jeff's books and articles at https://www.jeffreyasummit.com/

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected]. 

What do we get from watching our parents at work? In this episode, Hazzan Noam thinks about the buildings many of us grew up waiting around in, and what kids pick up there, then turns to a panel of experts with nearly three decades of combined experience as the children of a working rabbi. Paige, Shai, and Isaiah Averbach do their best impressions of their dad’s sermons, suggest a few changes to Shabbat services, and sing the Shir Hamalot their mother sings them at bedtime. Plus a mid-season conversation with Rabbi Ari Averbach about Shabbat at home, raising kids as a rabbi, and what he’s taken from this season’s guests so far. The conversation ends with a game called “Hollywood or Holy Word?”

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

Where does a sanctuary take you? In this episode, Hazzan Noam looks at the faux-stone wall behind the bimah in Temple Etz Chaim's Paskow Sanctuary and finds himself back in the windowless old sanctuary at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, singing V'shamru on Friday afternoons as a student at Pressman Academy. He follows the question through a sixteenth-century poem about how old Shabbat is, a melody from nineteenth-century Berlin, what we picture when we picture an old-fashioned Jew, and the literary scholar Svetlana Boym's two kinds of nostalgia. Plus a conversation with Hazzan Dr. Matt Austerklein, cantor at Congregation Anshai Torah in Plano, Texas, and a historian of the cantorate. He takes Hazzan Noam on a tour of three synagogues: a German village around 1400, Prague in 1679 and Vienna in 1830. Then the two of them trace where the melodies of TEC's Torah service come from, before the conversation ends with a game called the Cantorial Yearbook.

Read Matt's weekly Substack, Beyond the Music: https://mattausterklein.substack.com/

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

What language do you speak in shul? In this episode, Hazzan Noam looks at how much of Jewish life we learn without being taught, from the amen in the Kaddish to the words that fly around at kiddush, starting with one recent slip by Rabbi Ari. Plus a conversation with linguist Sarah Bunin Benor, professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and linguistics at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and host of the Heritage Words podcast. She talks about Jewish languages most of us have never heard of, what makes the way American Jews talk a Jewish language of its own, and the Hebrew "infusion" of American Jewish summer camps. The conversation ends with a game called Shemanigans.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

Why is the Hashkivenu everyone loves so hard to sing without a piano? In this episode, Hazzan Noam tells the story of leading Craig Taubman’s melody at a shiva minyan in a backyard in Simi, and follows the question through camp songs, synagogue organists, the singers who once filled in the cantor’s pauses, and what happens to a congregation’s favorite tunes when the accompaniment drops out. Plus a conversation with musicologist Samantha Cooper, host of the Sounding Jewish Podcast, about growing up Jewish in the Toronto area and the question she asks every guest on her show: is there such a thing as a Jewish sound? She also discusses her new book on Jewish immigrants and the New York opera world, from the box office to the Met stage. The conversation ends with a game called Sounds Jewish to Me.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

How does Lecha Dodi go? In this episode, Hazzan Noam plays a few possible answers, from the melodies sung most Friday nights at Temple Etz Chaim to one he wrote in high school and doesn't sing here. He follows the question through building a Shabbat playlist for the congregation, a crowded field of new Jewish music, and an essay asking whether we've composed enough new melodies, with help from Rabbi Ari Averbach and Chaplain Benny Sommerfeld. Plus a conversation with ethnomusicologist Rachel Adelstein about the tunes she calls "songs that go like this," why so few of them carry their composers' names, and how a new melody makes its way through a congregation one voice at a time.

Listen to the Shabbat in Thousand Oaks playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4geYCvysYUnoy9bjtceiOd

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

Why bring a three-string beginner's instrument up to the bima? In this episode, Hazzan Noam tells the story of the strumstick he first heard on a fifth-grade class trip and still plays today, and asks what an instrument with eight notes can offer that a piano with eighty-eight can't, with help from Psalm 150, a childhood Simchat Torah, and Rabbi Ari's Yom Kippur sermon. Plus a conversation with Joyce Bronstein, in her thirty-third year directing the religious school that now carries her name, about growing up around Fairfax, the Red Vines she trades for "I love religious school," shaking Golda Meir's hand at thirteen, and her father singing Ein Keloheinu.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

What counts as listening? For the Season 1 finale, Hazzan Noam looks back at a season that turned out to be about something other than what he planned, and asks what a room full of people can do that a voice in your ear can't. Plus, for the last week of the season, the microphones turn around. Three conversations with the people who hear more of this work than anyone: Kelly Fields-Meyer Gould on origami dragons, adaptive riding, and the four gaits of a horse; Irma Sommerfeld on a borrowed jacket at a singles dinner and what it's like to be married to a chaplain; and Vanessa Averbach on Schulweisian philosophy, homemade challah, and the Oxford comma.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

What if teshuvah isn't regret? In this episode, Hazzan Noam traces one verse across three days in July, from the floor of the Winer Chapel on Tisha B'Av to the end of a Shabbat morning Torah service, and finds the same sentence asking for two things at once. He looks at what he learned to do alone, the one sound of this season he has never been able to make himself, and the rehearsal that showed him the difference between being welcome and being needed. Plus a conversation with Carol and Buzz Schoenkerman, at Temple Etz Chaim six days a week by his count, about the Friday night a rabbi crossed the room to introduce himself to a stranger in the back row, the plants Carol hands to anyone who will take them, and the two of them finding each other again fifty years after Northwestern.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].

Why does one week stay with us and the next one disappear? In this episode, Hazzan Noam asks what a wordless melody at 6:53 on a Friday night is actually for, and finds an answer in a single line of L'cha Dodi — and in the two very different kinds of coffee he drinks. Plus a conversation with our clergy assistant, Jill Rosenberg, about the forty-six years between her thirteenth birthday and her bat mitzvah, what the sanctuary sounds like from a hundred feet away, and five phone calls she never saw coming.

Between Two Shabbatot is a weekly podcast from Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Hazzan Noam Fields-Meyer Gould. Questions and thoughts welcome at [email protected].