The Fence Around Each Other: Reflections from the WCN Conference

Women Who Lead in Harmony

This week, I gathered with women who spend their lives leading their communities into harmony. We came together in Richmond, Virginia, at the beautiful and historic Congregation Beth Ahabah, for the annual conference of the Women Cantors’ Network.

I am usually one of those leaders with my hands out. I truly and deeply love creating and holding space. Support and connection are most of what I do. I hold the room. I lead the song. I steady the people in front of me.

This time I came in hoping to be held, instead (though I would not have been able to articulate that before this experience). This was my first musical conference since before the pandemic. The last time I attended one, I was still “Miss Emily,” and so much has changed since then, in my world and in the world. A dear friend encouraged me to join, and I said yes because I have been hungry for communal singing and shared spiritual connection. I have been working SO hard to get my next project, “Pray and Play,” out into the world that I think I have been neglecting my own personal practice of both. This conference was a beautiful soul playground. Walking in, I felt vulnerable. I did not arrive as the strong one. I came because I had been feeling isolated and alone, and I wanted to connect. I basked in spending the week as part of a chord.

What I found was a whole room of leaders taking care of each other. And slowly, over the week, I let myself become one of the people who got held.

They Warned Us About the Risers

The sanctuary is breathtaking, when we were first oriented about the space, they warned us about the risers. The steep ones flanking the bimah are not steps at all, though your feet want to read them that way. We would be moving up and down around them all week, in and out of every service. So we were careful. But here is what I watched happen. People faltered near those risers, again and again, all week long. And not once did anyone hit the ground. The hands were always already out, reaching before the stumble instead of after it. In every single service, I saw women watching one another’s paths, thinking one step ahead for somebody else’s feet. Outreached arms were offered as preventative care.

The sanctuary was built in 1904 to feel monumental, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, with the bimah lifted high on a raised dais beneath a great painted arch. The risers are steep because they were built for height and for grandeur, to raise the bimah up where a whole room could look toward it, not for many bodies to move up and down all week. More than a century later, a room full of women took that steep, grand architecture and made it less intimidating and safer to experience personally. We helped each other elevate. 

A Fence Around Each Other

We build a fence around the Torah to protect what is holy. S’yag la-Torah, the sages called it, a fence around the Torah. What I saw at this conference was a room full of women who had quietly built that same fence around each other.

The Women Cantors’ Network was born in 1982 by a brave community builder, Cantor Deborah Katchko-Gray. I learned the oral history this week and understand that this pioneer felt isolated. She was one of the only women in the cantorate, excluded in the male oriented professional organizations, and found herself without sufficient collegial support.   So she made the thing she needed…and now I it was ready for me when I needed it. More than forty years later, the network still describes itself in one word more than any other, and that word is support. Open, accepting, warm, supportive, our founder said. It affects you spiritually and emotionally to have this support. People gave deeply personal testimony in the closing circle that they have never felt this before.

Those Who Support Need Support

Cantor burnout is real, and the same is true for songleaders, rabbis, and every leader whose calling is to hold others. That truth reached me because of something I believe deeply- so much so that I founded the Songleading For Kiddos Support Squad to offer to the folks who nurture the next generation in song (which, interestingly, has yet to have the opportunity to welcome any men). Those who support need support too. Women cantors spend the whole year being the strong ones, carrying the room and holding other people’s grief on the hardest days and other people’s joy on the brightest ones. In Jewish community, we are tasked with mood music and steady hand on everyone else’s worst and best mornings. And the Women Cantors’ Network is the one place where the people whose whole calling is to catch others finally get to be caught.

Held Enough to Be Brave

You can see it in how loose and brave everyone becomes once they trust the catching. A woman in her nineties leads from the microphone, and beside her a young woman in cowboy boots leans into a guitar. People dance out of the pews. We wear ridiculous hats. We take the goofiest possible selfies and laugh until we cannot breathe. We turned off all of our recording devices and told true (NSFW LOL) stories late into the night, bonding and laughing over our shared experiences.  That nurtures our spiritual development, too.
It is what holy looks like when people feel safe enough to stop bracing. Held enough to be undignified. Safer, and so braver. Closer, and so more fully ourselves. 

Lifted Up

By the last day I felt like the “in crowd” and let other hands hold me. I sang and cried and laughed late into the night with women who I just met who I think will be important in my life.
I sang louder than I intended. I let myself be seen by people I had only just met. I leaned on others instead of being the one leaned on. None of it felt like losing my footing. It felt like finally having somewhere to set it down.

I came in feeling nervous. I am leaving feeling brave. The same room I walked into feeling vulnerable is the room that lifted me up.

That is what the risers taught me, and it is what I think Jewish musicianship, and womanhood, were always meant to be. We watch each other’s paths. We reach before the stumble. We put a fence around one another so the holy thing inside each of us stays safe. We are sacred for it, and we are closer for it, and we are brave because of it.

And where there are hands already reaching, there is a place to belong. Next summer, in Philadelphia!