Victor Cohen
Our traditions in large part define our community. Many of us are named after our grandparents, giving us a link to past generations. When our community first arrived in the United States, we focused on staying close to each other and to keeping our beloved traditions alive. We treasured our pizmonimand our different customs. Our community was well-known for how connected we were to our past and how we worked together to keep from assimilating.
Over the past century, we have largely avoided being consumed by the culture around us, popular culture has still seeped through, in ways large and small. We follow sports, listen to popular music, and participate in popular American activities. This is not all bad. However, unfortunately, being distracted by the culture outside of our own has meant that over time, our own songs and customs have started to become forgotten. Few people in our community now wake up for Bakashot, like those attend the Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem.
Certainly, our traditions have been completely abandoned. In large part, the younger generation is bringing them back, studying the songs of our ancestors and reviving them. Someone leading the charge is the prominent community hazzan, Ikey Levy. He has been a hazzan for over ten years and has been the hazzan for the Eatontown Synagogue for the last four years. Let’s listen to some of Ikey’s insights into the world of our heritage with traditional music and how it is making a comeback today.
Building a Connection to Our Heritage Through Hazzanut
Ikey has always had a great voice, but he did not always sing. Here’s how he got his start. Ikey’s father liked singing the song Habibi at the Shabbat table with Ikey’s older brother Aaron, who was eleven when Ikey was five. One Friday night, Aaron, who also has a great voice, was not around. So, Ikey’s father called him over to sing, and was astonished by what he could do.
Ikey’s father taught him the basic pizmonim and took him to various sebets on Shabbat so that he could hear how others sang. “He’d take me to two sebets a day sometimes just to hear them,” Ikey reminisced.
Then Ikey’s training really went to another level. “When I studied in Israel,” he said, “I went to study by Moshe Habusha with a group of five other boys. Habusha is one of the top hazzanim in the world.” Ikey studied there for nine months, and Habusha gave Ikey a strong foundation in hazzanut, from which he could expand.
Inhazzanut,there are certain musical scales called ma’amat. They start and end on certain notes, and when training to become a hazzan, you learn how to sing many of them.
One can incorporate his own creativity when it comes to when and how the ma’amat are used within a passage. “Sometimes when you listen to the music or have instructions from another hazzan, you have instructions on how to infuse one maqam with more personality,” Ikey said.
He explained that the key for an aspiring hazzan is to listen to Middle Eastern music, which will help you expand your options. In a way, it is similar to learning to play chess. You can study by learning all of the different openings, or studying different patterns, but there is something special that comes with watching a true master perform. The same goes for hazzanut, and the more a hazzan listens, the more he can become inspired in his own songs to try out different methods. It is a highly creative, fulfilling pursuit with lifelong learning.
Educating the Community
Ikey taught pizmonim in YDE for five years, then taught keriah and pizmonim in Hillel Yeshiva for two years. Currently he tutors privately, and also tries to help encourage knowledge of our community’s traditions. To that end, he began a community minhagim WhatsApp chat, which is not dedicated only to hazzanut. In the chat he informs members about traditions from Aleppo, Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Egypt. “Things get mixed up,” Ikey said, adding that “we just want to know where each custom originates from.”
Certain customs we follow today were not always done universally. “In Halab, they did not stand for Alenu Leshabeah.” Everywhere else in the Middle East, they stood.
“Aleppo used to be unique in that way.” Ikey said he knows one elder who, following this custom, still sits during Alenu! “I’m not saying that we all start changing what we do, but to me it is fascinating to see where certain customs originate from. In Syria, some didn’t have the custom to bow at all for Barechu, others did a small bow based on the Ben Ish Hai’s opinion, but in Egypt they stood up and bowed.”
The Weakening of Our Customs
There was a certain beauty to the old customs, accompanied by a level of devotion and a sense of community that is not easy to capture in words. Ikey described how he used to go to Bakashot when he lived in Brooklyn. “In my time in Brooklyn, I’d wake up Shabbat mornings 6am for Bakashot by Rabbi Mansour’s old Knis. Between 6:30 and 7:45, every Shabbat morning, Menachem Mustaki, Mordechai Salem, and Haim Eliyahu, were all there.” When Moshe Habusha, Ikey’s teacher from Israel, came in, the whole room filled up.
“It was very electric in the building,” Ikey reminisced. “It warms my heart when we do those things, because people forget what our community did in the old days in the Lower East Side and in Bensonhurst where they’d sing Bakashot in people’s houses.
“Unfortunately the greater part of Bakashot, most of our community has forgotten,” Ikey said. But pointed out how parts of Bakashot live on in other forms, such as songs, for example: Ki Eshmera Shabbat and Yom Zeh Shiru Lae-l were originally from Bakashot. Today, the Bakashot still are heard early Shabbat mornings at Rabbi Mansour’s new Knis.
Ikey recalled howsebets used to run, “lead by the hazzan, the crowd would sing pizmonim well into the afternoon with the Hacham speaking words of Torah either before or in between. Today, however, there’s more emphasis on speeches from friends and family members along with other genres of songs being sung with much less of our pizmonim in focus. Again, I’m just pointing out the change.”
The New Revival of Our Customs
In an interesting twist, though, this decline is beginning to reverse itself where it was least expected. It is the younger generation that has begun to revive the old music. While some of the melodies are a little archaic, there are many that are still being sung today. “There are nineteen-year-olds singing in Arabic today,” Ikey said. While much of the decline was due to the overwhelming popular culture, we are starting to see a certain yearning for what came before. “If you look at Shaare Zion today,” Ikey said,“the younger crowd is reviving the old ways within the community. That is happening.Our job is to keep it going for as long as possible.”
Ikey pointed to a positive development. “The hazzan David Shiro is putting out albums of new songs, taking our old songs and putting new packaging to them. If people hear it, they might be inspired to hear more.”
Hopefully, the revival of our community’s old ways continues to grow from here. We have the unique ability to look both back to our history and forward to our future at the same time. Informed and enriched by the traditions, songs, and ways of our past, we can strive towards the future, holding close to what makes us special.
Hazzan Ikey Levy performs professionally at weddings and special occasions. Please contact him at 347-715-0350. He can also be found on Instagram @hazzan_ikey and on YouTube at youtube.com/@IkeyLevy.