Hugh Jackman and Darcey Bussell join us for Breakfast

Pause for Thought

From Baroness Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi at the West London Synagogue.

Tonight the choir at my synagogue will be singing Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92- in Hebrew. He wrote it in 1827 for a famous Viennese cantor, Salomon Sulzer. What seems remarkable is that such a distinguished Christian musician as Schubert would have even gone to the synagogue to hear the cantor, let alone composing something especially for him. But dig a little deeper and it turns out that lots of people went to hear Sulzer sing. And all over Austria, Hungary and Germany there were cantors who could just as well have been opera singers, and sometimes combined the two, right up until the 1930s. These men were so highly regarded musically that music lovers would relish a chance to hear them. They were awarded Imperial honours, became royal favourites, and taught others to sing, Jews and non-Jews alike. But these days, we visit each other’s places of worship all too rarely, and have even fewer encounters with each other’s music and traditions, except perhaps Christmas carols and a few Christian hymns that most people know. Yet wouldn’t it be wonderful if we knew each other’s sounds and rituals, if we opened up to each other more generously and more frequently, and gave people a chance to see and hear what we do? We do welcome visitors in our synagogue, as do many mosques and temples, churches and gurdwaras. But I can’t help feeling that those 1820s guys stole a march on us- anybody who was anybody, Jewish or not, went to hear Sulzer. Is there a modern equivalent, a musician, a chanter, a preacher, that anyone who’s anyone would bust a gut to hear now in any place of worship? I’ve heard wonderful choirs and musicians in churches, and moving chanting in gurdwaras.There’s a lesson from 1827 we could all learn from!