Erev Elul spread from the East on the Performing Arts Center in Ashdod. In the plaza outside, a couple on the eve of their wedding asks to be photographed among the waterfalls in the arena plaza. The bride and her entourage are debating whether to be photographed in the traditional wedding dress or the bare dance dress. The groom wants a decision, the photographer skillfully reassures him. Meanwhile, in the Tabernacle itself, tradition and modernity continue to struggle.
Behind the scenes, a graceful bustle of kamanja drains a host of stress, anxiety and excitement from the moments before the performance. "While you were debating, I went down to the amazing sea here," says Nero Abekasis, singer, oud player and philosopher in a shepherd's robe. Here, right here. And on the sea you can take things out. And I know everyone is trying hard to make it happen well, and I want to ask forgiveness from everyone I hurt today and on other days. Being Niro, even if I don't want to, is hurtful, it's a bit like being Sevres. Because you're sensitive on the inside, you grow thorns, and sometimes my exaggerated humor involuntarily stabs people. So I ask all of you – forgiveness."
Two chairs sit Jojo Avihatzira and Neria Moyal, in a Panama hat and Humphrey Bogart hat. The two put on a poetic version of a non-stop stand-up comedy show. Teasing, laughing, exaggerated body movements, prove that when it comes to musician humor, the many decades that separate the two mean nothing. Some friends snack on sourdough bread with tahini and eggplant while discussing the different types of spicy of the Jewish communities. The phone rings, Yehuda Edri receives a phone call from his life as a lawyer. "Tomorrow I'm in court in Nazareth," he sighs as if accepting the verdict, smiling and looking out the windows at a shining Ashdod sunset.
Illumination on the beach in Sinai
On the wall hang posters of performances by international tenors, flamenco guitar virtuosos and Eastern European divas. A guest entering an event would have a hard time understanding what it is that binds such a strange group together in this place. Hipsters, high-tech, bohemians, settlers, lawyers, bankers, musicians, people of faith and retired communists, young people, veterans and all the years in between. Behind the scenes, the "Piyut Ensemble" is a crazy rock and roll circus of laughs, teasing, rising emotions and obvious forgiveness for all the mess that comes with a group of individuals doing things together.
"Piyut Ensemble" at the Krakow Festival, photo: Courtesy of Jeewish Culture Festival Krakow
A few moments later, the members will put on the colorful tunics, the reserve hook will fade away, and the ensemble members will come to the front of the stage. There, in front of the astonished audience, the whole Sahla will turn into Selichot, the energies of teasing will increase and rise to an erupting spirituality, the music will rise, and the singing will seek to break through the ceiling of the Tabernacle, climb beyond the clouds and break through the gates of the sky. Welcome to the Selichot Tour, where the Holy Trinity – sex, drugs and rock and roll – is converted into the Holy Trinity: love, forgiveness and liturgy. The same energy, but renewed from its antiquity.
"There's something timeless and awe-inspiring about traditional music, you have to be idle in front of it. After all, it is something that is so old and ancient that comes to you from the root of the world, something present and eternal. But if you gave tradition this honor in the first place, then you also have the place to find within this ancient root a range of renewal and possibilities for renewal," muses Yair Harel, music director of the Piyut Ensemble.
It is no coincidence that Harel begins the interview precisely from these questions between tradition and innovation. The poetic ensemble is a paradox in its essence and very existence. People young and old, most of them on the continuum between secular and religious, who turn ancient and forgotten piyyutim, hits that are 500 years old and more, into a living culture. And so she is revived with enthusiasm with her brothers, dedication and a lot of pleasure.
"I know there are people who see me, long hair, John Lennon glasses, and don't understand what the connection is," says Avi Cohen, the ensemble's founder and artistic director, in a deep bass voice, "the cultural salad that I grew up in a Moroccan synagogue, from where I went far to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake.
"In the '90s, I had a successful bar called the Cobalt in Jerusalem. It featured The Witches, Monica Sax and all the rock bands of the era. When I closed, I went to Sinai to think about what to do with myself. I found myself lying hunched out, and from the outside she tapped some minimal darbuka, and from the sound of the waves came a gentle singing - 'My friend, have you forgotten?' And I'm in this moment, and it's incredibly powerful, and I'm amazed by the moment and its intensity, and I didn't realize it would be such a moment, but I definitely understood that it's a milestone in time, a point of reconnection."
Cohen, a theater man and medical clown, was for many years part of Rina Yerushalmi's Bible Project. "The Bible was about culture and secular writers, and suddenly when I heard 'My friend, have you forgotten?' sung from the outside by Shimon Lev Tahor – who later became a member of the Piyut Ensemble and now leads sacred poetry circles – I realized that poetry and poetry play on the deep places within me. Cosmic timing, when I returned to Israel, I received a call from the stormy of the wild dancers. She was looking for facilitators for the Communities of Service project in Jerusalem, and I joined.
Livnat Ben Hamo and Shai Sabri, Photo: David Peretz
"After a year, Yossi Ohana and Meir Buzaglo, the organizers of Kehilat Sarut, asked me to form an ensemble around the feitan Haim Locke. That's how we started gathering this special group. I quickly realized that you need someone with a deep background in this world to lead it musically. When I met Yair Harel from the Piyut website, I knew I had found it. Fortunately for us, the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East sponsored us and adopted us. Thus we became the poetic ensemble of the Ben-Zvi Institute, a work that revives the ancient knowledge and living heritage of the Jewish communities in the East."
When the soul calls - come
In performances, Cohen presents them as the "youth department" of the ensemble. I talk to 84-year-old Simon Cohen, 80-year-old Eliyahu Edri and Jojo Avihatzira, whose even a simple question like his age is answered with the impossible answer: "How old am I? When the three of us are in the same place, it's magic greater than any number math. And in general counting, it's totally pathetic! Now we are here in the middle! And here there are songs, boom! We sing and people go crazy! You get to the most dreamlike times, that's how it is when everything I learned in the Holy Zohar, and everything the prophets said, happens. We are most enveloped in music, in Havruta, Ben Porat Yosef, wrapped in humor. Moroccans, French, Arabs, emissaries... And because I'm one of the shluchim who doesn't write down age, write that I don't know how old I am."
Neta Elkayam and Shai Sabri,
Simon Cohen smiles beneath the representative beret: "I came to piyyut as a little boy in Morocco, I was in a choir with Joe Amar, he was my Hebrew teacher, and the piyyutim always attracted me. I am neither a singer nor a musician, but my soul called me to go to an evening of 'singing communities' in Emek Refaim. I sang what I knew from Joe Amar's choir, and the next day Yair Harel told me, 'Stay, I have something for you.'"
Edri also came through "Communities of Service": "I had a surveying office, I sent my son to measure in Musrara, where he contracted the bacterium, started humming in 'Communities of Service,' came and told me, 'Daddy, come.' I told him, 'My dear, I'm after work, I want to rest.' But I came once or twice and couldn't leave, I feel like it's like a family because my son is also in the lineup."
"I never dreamed that I would be in music, I was a dancer at Club 54 in New York, but the clubs - it's all nonsense," Avihatzira jokes, "Then I repented, I was busy with Torah and mitzvot, that I completely forgot what music is. I have a brother-in-law, Victoria Hannah, who told me, 'Jojo, someone is looking for people for his choir.' I came, I sang to him, they told me, 'Welcome.'" As someone who saw him perform, it's hard to believe that this energy bomb, with all his charisma and talent, started performing on stages at an age when others are retiring late.
Neria Moyal and Jojo Abuhatzira, Photo: David Peretz
Simon: "Jojo brought us many things, including a great gift, the repertoire of the Avihatzira family, which everyone knows as a Kabbalistic family. In my personal opinion, they took it to a place of beliefs and made a trade out of it. JoJo rebelled against it. He continues the true tradition, the modesty and love of man, the poetry of the spirit of the desert."
Avihatzira: "Our music is lullabies of tribes from the desert, with sacred songs. It's the songs we used to sing at home, that's how it is when you grow up in a very, very old house. Tradition is always within you."
Edri: "In Morocco, every city wrote its Selichot, it's not just a hash of words, Jojo brought us the authenticity of Avihatzira, and with that we fly to perform in Poland, and ostensibly, what do Poles have to do with it? But the piyyutim are the soul of the community, everything that is authentic in the community is there. And that's what goes into people's hearts and stays there."
When Harel enters the room, Avihatzira compliments him in his own unique way: "Look what it is, you took dachshunds and made icons out of them."
Harel laughs: "The fact that we are such a diverse group of people creates a living beit midrash, each brings his own thing: Nero brings Khalijit Bedouin music from the Gulf, Hanani from the territories with blonde wigs, speaks fluent Arabic and plays a builder, everything connects. I know we don't operate in the language of the music industry today. Every song with us is hours and hours of research. We bring an idea and open it up, just like a progressive rock band of yesteryear. We shut ourselves in the studio and work on it for hours and days, in order to fine-tune the balance between synagogue pietans and a superbly professional group of musicians, without losing the primal and innocent sound or the wild quality of this music."
Between curling and distortion
Last month, the Piyut Ensemble embarked on a tour as part of the publication of the book "Selichot Tour", initiated by businessman Mishael Vaknin. "A couple of friends went to Jerusalem, they called and said they wanted to see a Selichot tour and what I recommend," he says, "I told them, 'Come, I'll take you, but for something authentic, not tasting tours for tourists.' Only after I finished speaking did I realize what a task I had undertaken. I love piyyutim, prayer melodies are my essence. My father used to wake me up for Selichot when I was a little boy, and since then I can't miss that experience. That's how, at three o'clock in the morning, I went up to Jerusalem with my friends. On the way, I gave them a briefing, like before entering the museum.
Jeju Avhatzira, Simon Cohen, Eliyahu Edrei, Cinematography: David Peretz
"When morning came up and we left, they told me, 'Mishael, we're in shock. And voila, we totally didn't know it that way.' Now you see, these are people who are serious consumers of culture. And I said to myself, if it touched them, then there must be something more to do with it. I went up to the National Library in Jerusalem and asked to see all the Selichot texts they had in the library. Through them I reached all kinds of libraries of ancient manuscripts in the world, and began to collect and collect until it began to accumulate a proper volume. Then I turned to the best intellectuals and academic researchers to write articles about Selichot in order to place Selichot at the highest cultural level. My son suggested that I add a QR code next to each piyyut so that people could also hear the Selichot themselves. I came to a performance of the Piyut Ensemble and I see Yair Harel, who studied with me at Yeshivat Or Etzion, that's how we started this joint journey."
Your great love for the subject of Selichot and the meticulous attention to the quality of the book are well felt. This is a comprehensive and fascinating book, which places Selichot and the music that accompanies them in their proper cultural context - as the best work of the Jewish people.
"Yair Asulin told me that this book canonizes Selichot, and this is a sentence that made me very happy. I think there is something in the request for forgiveness that has to do with their time on the calendar at the end of the summer, before the holidays. Add to that the fact that the Selichot are recited in the morning service, which in my opinion gives them a lot of strength. It's an event free of all the fatigue and distraction of the modern world. There is something anarchist and egalitarian about Selichot for everyone, such great acceptance and an open door that brings out the initial cry of man. I remember, for example, how in a Beitar Jerusalem State Cup match was 1-0 behind, and suddenly the whole crowd started shouting and singing, 'We sinned before you, have mercy on us.'
The ensemble in concert. "We sing and people go crazy", Photo: David Peretz
"It was really important to Mishael that we record 'Vathana Validate' to a melody by Yair Rosenblum," says Cohen, "on the face of it, a melody that is less close to our natural worlds. I was reminded that in the "Broken Prayer" project, which I lead with Yankla Segal, a project that follows in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen and Jewish resonances in his work, we sometimes incorporate a line from "Validated" in the song Who by Fire, which,
like Rosenblum's melody, was created with a connection to the Yom Kippur War.
"Here we kind of turned it around. The point of gravity is 'validated' and Cohen's poem, translated by Kobi Meidan, is 'The Guest'.
What came out expands everything, both east and west. I love that, the connection between gentle curling and distortion."
Harel: "In recent years, the singing of Selichot has become a very popular phenomenon, sometimes the Selichot in the football stadium start to sound like the clubs in Ibiza. Still, when you compare it to Selichot in the privacy of synagogues in the middle of the night, with a few veterans singing with great intimacy, then you realize that in this distance something might be lost. That's why we sought to bring the Selichot we recorded to a place with deep artistic expression, but that would remain exposed and my prayers on a bigger stage."
Vaknin: "That's why I chose them. I wanted something that preserves the synagogue and gives it a kind of touch that connects it to the big stages, to more people, that puts it in the context of culture."
A joint journey on stage
The Selichot Tour album comes in two versions: the synagogue version is based on voices only, and the full ensemble version, with percussion and instrumentation. It is there that the unique and wild side of the poetic ensemble is expressed. When you expand the boundaries of the synagogue into the world around it, the music rises to the realms of tribal trans, experimental rock, and a powerful ritual of "come on, mess" and spiritual ascension.
The audience also feels the strong wind blowing from the stage. "Last night we left the hall," says Yael Offenbach, the ensemble's director, "and a young couple, not religious or anything, with such tattoos, came and told us that they had come cynical, and the performance succeeded in peeling away the cynicism! Every moment of the show is something incredible. The music manages to cross the line of religiosity and sectarianism, and whoever comes gets sucked into it and doesn't deal with definitions."
It is not only in Israel that the ensemble members work magic on the audience. I first encountered the Piyut Ensemble a year ago at the Andalusian Festival in Essaouira, Morocco. Like hundreds of Moroccans, Spaniards and tourists from all over the world, I left their concert excited. Without a shadow of a doubt, it was one of the best performances at an excellent festival in itself. I called them "the metallics of poetry," which was mostly a compliment to the metallica.
"When we go on stage," says Neria Moyal, one of the ensemble's singers, "I feel like we're starting a journey together. It's a pipeline that connects me and has broken through many barriers and personal defenses. It takes me above everything else and connects me to something bigger and bigger than myself. I feel in a Sufi Zikr ceremony, a Jew, or anything else. I'm in the conduit of connection, and it's really a huge gratitude to be part of the poetry ensemble.
"Sometimes when all these Selichot comes, you say, 'Who has the power to 'Lord of Selichot' again, we've sung it countless times? But when we begin this journey and you fly with these strengths and you suddenly hear 'Shema your Father,' it leaves behind all the old notions of 'forgiveness, iniquity and atonement,' and you find yourself cleansing and starting all over again, like a process of preparing for the new year."
In the meantime, the Piyut Ensemble continues to tour the country and the world, performing before tens of thousands of international festivals in Australia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Morocco, and soon India. Now think about how to translate "Selichot Tour" into another language, and you will understand how strange and unique to Jewish culture is the phenomenon of Selichot days leading up to Yom Kippur, with its piyutim and accompanying music, as well as the ensemble that performs it.
Cohen: "This is perhaps the only ensemble most of whose members live in a halachic framework, which hosts and sings with singers such as Raymond Abekasis, Victoria Hanna, Neta Elkayam, Lubna Salama, Livnat Ben Hamo and Rif Cohen. It's the only show in the world where you can see wigs curling with women singing." Offenbach adds: "Tonight there are two women singing Selichot on stage, and I myself have played percussion in the ensemble before."
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Shai Sabri, who is a guest at the concert together with singer Neta Elkayam, gives a Happy New Year greeting before the performance. "When your first album came out, I would get in the car, drive off and sing with it to the shows. As a fan of the Piyut Ensemble, it is a great honor for me to be a part of this and to be part of the voices that connect together in this profound thing. And everyone here is so sweet that I'm really happy to do these shows! And may we have a happy and blessed year, full of great music and new creation, and that you will meet only good eyes this year."
Just before they turn the Performing Arts Center into an airport for outer space, Avihatzira turns to me with his unique gaze and wonders: "David, did you write all this? Not?! Very good, we won't blush. Why, in the last days there is no ancestral right, there is only what you do in your own right, this is what you have. And I think it's happening very, very strongly to us now, and when you are told that 'I have never heard such piyutim or selichot in my life,' then I say, what is Kiddush Hashem if not to bring joy like this to people? Even in the midst of forgiveness, finding joy, it is what it is." √
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