By Casey Cantrell

Plotkin Chapel is nearly empty as Rabbi Sari Laufer takes the bimah, her Mac laptop in tow. In the pews, Stephen Wise Temple’s rabbis and cantors sit together, following along on their own laptops as Rabbi Laufer begins to read a passage—a verse in Hebrew, then a commentary in English—from the working draft of Sha’ar HaShamayim, the new Wise machzor.

“‘Let there be light,’ ” she reads.

She pauses, then interrupts herself. “Are we concerned that it’s an incomplete translation?”

A couple of clergy members chime in. Together, the group decides to amend the text: “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

Rabbi Sari resumes reading, but she’s quickly interrupted again. “Should that comma be here?” asks Rabbi Ron Stern.

The walkthrough continues like this—spurts of reading, followed by interruptions to discuss everything from the structure and flow of the text, to the quality of the writing, to the accuracy of translations. Notes and comments are meticulously added to the document, and revisions are made.

It is early in the morning on a day in May. Outside, a blanket of fog lingers over the campus, obscuring the view of the San Fernando Valley below. But inside, the conversation is warm and spirited.

“Does anyone think this is not gorgeous?” remarks Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback after one particular passage. “It’s gorgeous.”

The clergy team might be having fun, but don’t let that fool you: Between the bouts of banter, they’re hard at work on an ambitious project more than four years in the making—the creation of Wise’s very own machzor.

They’ll meet for three hours today to read the text out loud, discussing and debating and making notes. They’ll carry the work to their homes and back, tinkering with the translations and commentaries until they’re just right. They’ll dedicate time, energy, sweat —all in the hope that the new machzor will vivify the High Holy Days like never before for their congregation.

“It’s a tremendous gift,” says Rabbi Beth Lieberman, a freelance editor on the project. “The clergy have put all of themselves into it. It’s a gift of love to the congregation.”

A Machzor for Everyone

Before embarking on the project, the clergy agreed: The machzor had to speak to the entire congregation.

“We have a tradition here of doing things tailor-made for us,” says Cantor Lam. “Our community is diverse. We had to make something that could speak to our people.”

That required a closer look at the language used in the liturgies and commentaries, ensuring the text would be accessible to every background—young and old, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, Reform, and Conservative Jewish traditions. One point of emphasis was how best to depict God.

Take the classic High Holy Days prayer, Avinu Malkeinu. “Its central metaphor is God as Father or King,” says Rabbi Lieberman. “A lot of people love it, but for others, it doesn’t resonate.”

As it turned out, the group found a solution in an unexpected place: Ariana Grande music videos.

“I attended an Ariana Grande concert earlier this year, and she opened with ‘God Is a Woman,’ ” says Rabbi Lieberman. After sharing her experience with the others, the clergy gathered around a laptop and “started watching her music videos together.”

The pop singer’s music inspired Rabbi Laufer to mine for an alternative version of Avinu Malkeinu. Eventually, she discovered an Israeli prayer book that had substituted female imagery in place of the traditional masculine descriptions. Both versions of the prayer appear side-by-side in Sha’ar HaShamayim.

That placement was intentional, explains Cantor Emma Lutz. “We were very careful about the language,” says Cantor Emma Lutz. “If you never saw God referred to in a maternal way, we wanted to include that, but we also wanted to respect traditionalists. We kept a lot of traditional stuff that other Reform communities don’t include.”

“It hits every generation,” adds Rabbi Lieberman. “It’s multi-vocal in terms of theology, practice, philosophy, language. It’s a machzor for the present as well as generations to come.”

“Part of the joy is having a conversation with texts throughout the millennia,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “We have psalms that are 3,000 years old, we have a poem that’s 1,500 years old, we have texts written as recently as this year.”

That includes a commentary from the late Rabbi Richard Levy, who passed away in June.

“We realized it would be very meaningful to have his voice somewhere in the machzor,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “All of these voices—they make it exceptionally invigorating.”

“Diet Coke and Tuna Salad”

Of course, a multi-vocal machzor requires a multi-vocal team to create it. Inside the chapel, the clergy present an impressive showcase in dynamism—knowledgeable, opinionated, a wide range of perspectives.

For any other group, a project of this scope would likely result in disaster, as the work gave way to petty squabbles and battles of ego. But not this team, says Rabbi Lieberman.

“They have so much energy and wisdom and talent,” she says. “It’s clear what they do is out of love. They work well together. If you want to see what your Wise clergy is like, it’s in this prayer book.”

“Our team is very diverse—different ages, different backgrounds, different approaches to liturgy and theology,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “You’d think that would create additional challenges, but people here actually like each other. There’s a lot of goodwill and esteem for one another.”

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the friendship between Cantor Lam and Cantor Lutz.

To describe the new machzor as Cantor Lam’s long awaited baby would be an understatement. Few communities create their own machzorim, and for good reason. It’s time-consuming work that requires a level of knowledge and dedication that’s unfeasible for a single person to manage. Since the 1980s, the cantor has tried multiple times to develop a new machzor, to no avail. It wasn’t until the addition of a new partner in Cantor Lutz that changed everything.

Sitting in his office, Cantor Lam and Cantor Lutz peer over piles of books and papers spread across his desk. (“My office isn’t usually this messy,” he says.) Although they’ve only been colleagues for a few short years, they speak with the ease of lifelong friends, finishing each other’s thoughts and exchanging wisecracks freely.

“There’s humor,” says Cantor Lam, describing the Wise clergy team. “We have a lot of people who are quite funny.”

“And people who think they’re funny,” quips Cantor Lutz.

It was this rapport that provided the missing spark to turn Cantor Lam’s longtime dream into reality. Arriving newly-ordained from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, Cantor Lutz immediately gravitated to the work of developing a new machzor. Working from past “beta versions” and post-High Holy Days feedback from the congregation, the two cantors dove into the exhaustive work of translating.

“We spent a couple of days at Nate’s house, translating hundreds of prayers,” says Cantor Lutz. “It was the most fun, enriching, intense work.”

“Once we started working, we were so in sync,” adds Cantor Lam. “Not only is Emma a fantastic comedian, she is also very smart and organized. She was excellent at keeping us on track.”

For the next two years, the pair would diligently chip away at the project, producing a new draft of the beta version (utilized in 2018), fleshing out commentaries, translating and retranslating, tapping out inspiration on the piano.

“The chemistry between Nate and me—it was the right time and right energy,” says Cantor Lutz. “Working, working, laughing, laughing. Then we would come to some part in the text and be moved to tears. That’s our process in sum: diet coke and tuna salad, dumb jokes and meaningful conversations.”

The entire clergy team added their support as well, supplying commentaries and feedback. But few were more integral to the success of the project than Rabbi Zweiback, says Cantor Lam.

“A lot of it starts with the leader,” he says. “Rabbi Yoshi is a special guy—smart, committed, incredibly witty, musical. When you see someone work as hard as he does, he inspires everyone under him to work just as hard.”

“We listened to each other,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “I tried to do my best to make sure everyone was involved. And we were. We worked together.”

Illustrating the High Holy Days

Inside his campus studio, Wise Artist-In-Residence Mario M. Muller examines a draft of the machzor printed on large sheets of paper. He spreads them out on his desk, carefully analyzing the placement of his artwork throughout the book.

For about two years, the silver-haired artist has worked on an ambitious, one-of-a-kind project: to create a series of images for the machzor. His output in that time has been staggering—more than 200 unique images in his signature black-and-white style, only about half of which are in the final book.

Artwork in machzorim is rare; if it exists at all, it generally operates as the artistic equivalent of elevator music. But as Muller pores over the sheets of paper scribbling notes, it’s clear that these images are not just flashy adornments.

“It’s about finding a rhythm,” he says. “I think of it as a symphony. You are in the moment, you know what’s playing, but you don’t know what’s coming on the next page, or the last page.”

It is this energy of anticipation that Muller hopes his artwork captures. When he was first approached by Rabbi Zweiback about the project, Muller insisted that his images not be tied to particular services.

“From the onset, I made it clear I didn’t want it to feel like a PowerPoint presentation,” says Muller. “Anything that becomes expected turns into white noise. It’s devalued. I wanted my images to say, ‘Wake up! Repent!’”

As he composed his illustrations, Muller kept returning to the themes of redemption and renewal. His images are masterful manipulations of space: Objects seem to bleed off the page, drawing the eye “offscreen.” An image of stones embedded in cement pulls the gaze downward, while a canopy of leaves does the opposite.

“I spoke to Yoshi about the corporeal relation to images,” he says. “The images are received in a posture. It’s like those pictures of the evolution of humankind—we’re looking up, we’re not looking down anymore. We’re looking at what’s ahead of us. That’s the metaphor of inward to outward, from repentance to absolution to renewal.”

“He inspired my thinking about how art and liturgy could come together,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “Mario’s style—it was so perfect for the book. You have music and text and art and community coming together into something spiritually uplifting.”

Muller emphasizes that his art has always focused on inviting interpretations—trusting the story embedded in the image as well as the viewer to take it in.

“It’s about talking up to the congregation,” Muller says. “It’s saying they’re here for the right reason, so let’s all be present.”

The Beauty of the Text

It’s now June. Once the clergy put their finishing touches on the machzor, they won’t have much of a break. After all, there are High Holy Days services to plan, music to rehearse, logistics to organize.

But even with the workload ahead of them, this group of rabbis and cantors remain confident that their efforts—the long hours, the sleepless nights, the tears and frustrations—will be worth it.

“I’m tremendously grateful that this community has given our clergy and staff the opportunity to dream a project like this and make it real,” says Rabbi Zweiback. “We chose the more difficult path and I know it will be a decision that our community will deeply appreciate.”

The Wise community has done more than just “appreciate” the project: they supported it in full force. A fundraising campaign took very little time to ensure the publication of the book. The clergy team is deeply grateful for the trust and faith of the congregation.

“Our tradition says that each generation is supposed to write its own Torah,” says Cantor Lam. “You have to look for revelation.”

“Hopefully, the machzor will be an epiphany to people,” says Cantor Lutz. “We want people to feel the support of the community, to see all the amazing things we’re doing under Rabbi Yoshi’s leadership.”

But the work goes deeper than a few services in September. For Cantor Lam, the machzor was a lifelong dream come true; for Cantor Lutz, it also marks the beginning of a new life—one as a mother-to-be.

“As I’ve been editing, I look at these images of God as a parent,” she says. “I look to the tradition to help me guide my life.”

It is the clergy’s collective hope that the machzor will inspire their congregation to do the same—and to find joy in the old prayers.

“This was a joyful experience,” says Cantor Lam. “It made me fall in love more with the text. I hope our congregation will feel the joy we experienced.”