Shabbat Shirah Concert Unites Cultures

Joy. That describes the feeling in the room as musicians from different faiths, cultures and races raised their voices in song during Congregation Bet Haverim’s annual Shabbat Shirah celebration. An audience of 350 strong listened to, sang along with, and even spilled into the aisles to dance to the music.

The sheer talent in the room was matched only by the passion of the performers. Members of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church choir along with Oakhurst Presbyterian Church and Columbia Theological Seminary’s singers joined with Bet Haverim’s nationally-renowned choir and band to perform a mix of traditional Hebrew and Christian gospel songs. Special guests Lapidus and Myles, a rabbi and Christian gospel vocalist duo popular in the Jewish community, also took to the stage with their original music.

Titled, “At the Water’s Edge,” the concert brought disparate communities together in song to celebrate Shabbat Shirah (Sabbath of Song), the Torah portion in which the Israelites, freed from slavery, stand before the parted waters of the Red Sea and, with equal parts fear and courage, cross to the other side where they break into song.

But the aptly-themed evening wasn’t just about the Biblical past. Each year, Bet Haverim’s Shabbat Shirah celebration also focuses on what’s going on in the current world. And this year’s show was a response to the fear and anxiety that many people are feeling. With the war in Israel, rising antisemitism, a huge political divide and governmental policies that are making many feel disenfranchised, the members of this thriving and diverse Reconstructionist temple, founded in 1985 by gay and lesbian Jews in Atlanta, is at its core a place that is dedicated to inclusion.

An audience of 350 strong listened to, sang along with, and even spilled into the aisles to dance to the music at Bet Haverim’s Shabbat Shirah concert.

“Today, again, we are at a precipice,” said Rebekka Goldsmith, Bet Haverim’s director of music and spiritual arts and one of the night’s organizers. “A moment where we don’t know if the waters are going to part or what’s going to happen. But we can look next to us. We can see who’s here with us. And we can do this together.”

The night’s collaboration did not disappoint. From the opening “Mi Chamoca” to the traditional spiritual “Wade in the Water,” to original songs from Lapidus and Myles, Will Robertson, one of the evening’s organizers and the multi-talented director of Bet Haverim’s choir (Robertson also has a Grammy nomination for sound engineering as well as being a composer, arranger and music producer) kept the show going as people both old and young spilled into the aisles and even off the stage to dance in shows of spontaneous joy.

“There is such an interconnectedness that is in this room,” Dr. Emorja Roberson, director of the Oakhurst Presbyterian Choir (the other being the renowned Dr. Tony McNeill of Columbia Theological Seminary), told the audience. “The people who are here, it’s a symbol that you are not alone.” This from a man who not only had never been in a Jewish temple before, but who enthusiastically learned and taught his choir Hebrew for the show.

At a time when many Jews feel isolated and unsupported, these words and this gathering of different faiths and cultures in support of each other felt needed.

“It felt like we were surrounded in love by these other choruses, these other communities,” said Howard Weiner, a Bet Haverim choir member who found himself with tears in his eyes. “And in a time of all this antisemitism, I felt like we were heard and seen and supported and it was amazing,”

Audience members felt it, too. “I felt very stirred by it and, at a time, close to tears,” said audience member Elizabeth Cohen.

At the beginning of the show, Goldsmith told the audience, “May this be a balm for the heart, a nourishment for the soul.”

And judging by the reactions in the room, it was.