Resonating repentance: selichot and the performance of Mizrahi identity in the Israeli public sphere

ABSTRACT

The present article explores the revitalization of the Sephardi selichot (penitential prayers) custom in recent decades in Israel. From melodies that formed part of an early morning synagogue service described in the 1970s as declining in popularity, by the 2020s, Sephardi selichot have established a highly audible place in Jewish-Israeli culture, via large-scale concerts, media broadcasts and popular recordings that define the public Israeli soundscape during the month of Elul and the “days of penitence” between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. These new renditions of selichot have made significant inroads into Israeli public culture, in part through their ability to align the musical-emotional desires of the audience with the artistic and cultural agendas of audiences, musicians, culture brokers and local politicians. The cultural ecology sustaining this transformation embodies deep-rooted processes of change in Israeli society, including the increasing visibility and perceived coolness of Mizrahi culture, and the increasing prominence, since the 1990s, of elements of religious Judaism in Israeli public culture. In this article, we examine how the transformation of the selichot into mainstream auditory culture is articulated through the interweaving of conservative and innovative elements, anchoring a musical-religious repertory in public spaces that resonate both national and religious meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Selichot
• Mizrahi Jews
• Jewish music
• Israeli music
• Israeli culture

Shulẖan Aruch OH 581:1:

נוהגים לקום באשמורת לומר סליחות ותחנונים, מראש חודש אלול ואילך עד יום הכיפורים.

It is customary to rise [each day] before dawn to say selichot [penitential prayers] and taẖanunim [supplications], from the beginning of the month of Elul until Yom Kippur.

9:10pm, 19th September 2023, Sultan’s Pool outdoor concert arena, Jerusalem. A shofar sounds, accompanied by an instrumental arrangement of “Adon haSelichot'” the best known piyyut (sacred poem) of the Sephardi selichot. Israeli countertenor David D’Or, well known for his successes spanning popular, classical and world fusion music, makes a dramatic entrance to the stage for the first of his annual “Selichot Yerushalayim” [Jerusalem selichot] series of concerts. As he sings the traditional melody of Kol Nidrei, from the opening of the Yom Kippur prayers, an ancient, illuminated manuscript of the text is projected on a screen at the back of the stage. “What an honour it is to say the selichot together with you in this amazing place in Jerusalem” announces D’Or, wearing a white baseball cap and donning a tallit. “We want to bless you tonight!”

D’Or is joined on stage by four well-known Israeli singers, all popular musicians with Mizrahi roots: veteran rockers Mosh ben Ari and Ehud Banai, young pop star Eden Hason and musiqa mizrahit star Shlomi Shabbat. To an audience of some seven thousand people, mainly secular and traditional Jews, including older men and women, the five singers perform piyyutim from the High Holiday prayers, interleaved with songs from the singers’ personal repertories, deemed appropriate to this concert due to their reference to notions of faith, prayer and Judaism. The well-known selichot tunes elicit the most audience enthusiasm: the show begins and ends with “Adon haSelichot,” the most popular piyyut of the selichot, and the musical director strategically places other well-known piyyutim like “Ben Adam,” “Ya Shema Evyonecha” and “Anenu” throughout the show. The full texts of the piyyutim are projected on the huge stage backdrop to facilitate audience participation, which it successfully elicits.

The singers are accompanied by a rich thirteen-person orchestra of acoustic and electric instruments, and five male backing singers clad in buttoned up white shirts with kippot, echoing the festive clothing worn by religious Jewish men on Shabbat and holidays. These backing singers act both as a male “congregation,” answering the singers in the traditional call and response, and also as experienced soloists performing ornamented mawwal (solo improvisatory) sections, representing their own Moroccan, Yemenite or Sephardi Yerushalmi traditions.¹

Singer Mosh Ben Ari, uncharacteristically covering his long dreadlocks with a large black hat, finishes his section of the performance by remarking, “It’s a night of prayers – I’ll probably end up tonight at the Kotel [Western Wall].” His remark summarizes the paradox of this event: the singers are at once performing prayer by indexing traditional melodies sung at this time of year – just five days before Yom Kippur – donning ritual garb (tallitot) and festive clothing, and blessing the crowd, signifying that this is more than just a concert but a ritual and spiritual musical event – but at the same time acknowledge that the “real” prayers of selichot will be taking place about an hour later that same night, a few hundred metres away at the main plaza of the Western Wall.

Selichot (pl.; singular: sliẖa, lit. repentance) are Jewish penitential prayers. While the term originally referred to prayers said on fast days, today this term primarily refers to a specific prayer service said daily in the early morning hours during the yearly penitential season, from the beginning of the month of Elul until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, then continuing during the Ten Days of Repentance which end in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as codified in the Shulẖan Aruch, cited above.² Liturgically, the core framework of the selichot service includes repeated recitations of the 13 midot (Attributes of God), viduy (confession), and taẖanun (supplication); these elements are interleaved with piyyutim (religious poetry) and prayers abundant with religious emotions of supplication, repentance and begging for mercy.

The practice of reciting selichot daily during the period leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is common to all religious Jewish traditions: Sephardim begin reciting selichot the day after Rosh Hodesh Elul, and Ashkenazim after the Shabbat immediately preceding Rosh Hashanah or after the previous Shabbat if Rosh Hashana falls early in the week. Selichot form part of a range of communal and personal practices of introspection, confession and penitence mandated by Rabbinic tradition during this period of the Jewish calendar. Nevertheless, during the past thirty years, Sephardi³ selichot have gradually acquired an additional status in Israel as popular religious culture. While observant Jews continue to recite selichot in the synagogue during this period, for many Jewish Israelis, selichot are primarily encountered outside the synagogue as the soundtrack characterizing this period of the year in the public sphere, whether performed on the concert stage, overheard from the radio at a market stall, sung as a football chant, or sounded in the car from one of the many popular recordings uploaded to streaming services like YouTube and Spotify.⁴ Rather than being heard every day in a prayer service, then, piyyutim from the selichot as performed by popular artists, find a new place as everyday music during the month of Elul, forming a shared Jewish-Israeli soundscape, a musical signifier that marks this period of time apart from the remainder of the year and reaffirms the relevance of the selichot outside the synagogue walls.

This soundscape is unambiguously ethnically coded. It is Middle Eastern-Sephardi; more specifically, it stems from Syrian and Egyptian Jewish musical traditions which were adopted by the larger Sephardi communities and have more recently become a pan-Sephardi repertory. Unlike the piyyutim of Ashkenazi selichot, which are characterized by heavy, difficult poetry, led by the prayer leader, with occasional mumbled responses by the congregation, and are virtually unknown to those who do not attend services, the accessible rhymed texts of the Sephardi selichot, emphasizing themes of personal and communal repentance, are set to some of the best-known and most beloved melodies of the liturgical year. These catchy, rhythmic melodies are ideally suited to congregational participation – or, as the anecdote above illustrates, to crossover performance as popular music, drawing upon a sonic aesthetic shared with other fields of Mizrahi-identified music culture, such as Mizrahi pop. In turn, as popular music, the melodies of the selichot have become a conduit for musicians and their audiences to share religious excitement via musical production and consumption, and to articulate a commitment to shared values, including religious belief (faith in God and preparation for the upcoming High Holy Days), ethnic heritage (Sephardi Jewish traditions), social intimacy (family heritage and brotherhood among coreligionists) and ethnonational Jewish-Israeli identity.

The values cited above echo the core of Mizrahi-traditionist [sic]⁵ Jewish identity (masortiyut), which sociologist Nissim Leon has characterized as “an emotional inclination to be part of what is perceived as ‘tradition’,”⁶ emphasizing heritage, personal identity, family life and ethnic ties,⁷and located “somewhere between a lifestyle that is fully observant of religious laws, customs and rituals, and a lifestyle that is completely secular.”⁸ The transformation of the selichot discussed in this article reflects the increasing prominence of Mizrahi masorti culture in the Israeli public sphere as a dynamic field of cultural production and consumption, in which Jewish religious materials perceived to be traditional acquire new contexts and meanings as they are reproduced, consumed and shared. Rejecting secular/modern and religious/secular dichotomies, Yaacov Yadgar suggests that Mizrahi traditionists see modern Jewish identity as anchored in a thick sense of ethnonational Jewish identification, coupled with a consensual list of religious observances, which nonetheless allows individual flexibility rather than adopting the full observance of Jewish law as codified by rabbinic tradition.⁹

While typically criticized by rabbinic authorities for its compromised commitment to religious adherence, and considered by secular Zionism as a vein of religiosity and folklore, masortiyut is today perhaps the most prominent expression of mainstream Israeli Jewishness. The cultural ecology sustaining the rise of selichot as a popular genre of performance outside the synagogue, and their gradual incorporation into a consensual Jewish-Israeli soundscape, reflects deep-rooted processes of change in Israeli society, in particular, the increasing visibility and perceived “coolness” of Mizrahi culture,¹⁰ and the increasing presence, since the 1990s, of elements of religious Judaism in Israeli public culture, and a renewed interest in the Arabic music and language of Middle Eastern Jews.¹¹ This has coincided with the growth and strengthening of the Mizrahi middle class in Israel.¹² In the transformation of selichot into a tradition primarily mediated through musical practices, these cultural changes are reflected and refracted through changes in the field of musical production and consumption in Israel, including the mainstreamization of musiqa mizrahit from the 1980s onwards.¹³

In considering masorti Judaism as a field of cultural production, we join the recent turn in the study of religion towards lived, vernacular religious practices¹⁴ and the ways in which they are understood by those for whom they hold meaning. Recently, ethnographers and sociologists of Jewish practice have considered ways in which post-secular and post-Orthodox Jewish religious practice might be taken seriously via ethnographic approaches that seek to displace the epistemological centrality of formal text-based codes of religious custom, while also differentiating it from the secular “civil religion” nationalism described in studies of Israeli national culture.¹⁵ These approaches resonate with recent literature, particularly in the ethnography of Islam, calling scholars to take seriously the practices and agency of individuals whose religious lives unfold within conservative cultural and religious frameworks, seeking ways to highlight meaning-making and experience without reducing their practices either to the codified language of religious authority.¹⁶ In Jewish studies, they represent a significant divergence from academic work that has typically either consensually used rabbinic norms as a yardstick for the assessment of religious practice, or has highlighted progressive religious practices that consciously critique or rebel against those norms, seeking to adopt liberal Western values (for example progressive religious movements seeking gender equality in Jewish ritual). The new forms of selichot we study are in conversation with rabbinic tradition rather than attempting to conform to it, yet at the same time they reinforce, rather than undermine, the significance of selichot as a prayer tradition. They are non-controversial, enabling participation by people of a range of levels of observance, highlighting not cleavage but rather interdependence between “secular” and “religious” spheres.¹⁷

While previous studies of masortiyut in Israeli culture have primarily focused on religious observance,¹⁸ and political and cultural leadership,¹⁹ the present study, by contrast, explores the agency of a loose network of musicians and culture brokers in transforming the repertory of the selichot into a conduit for shared emotional experience, while at the same time pursuing diverse aesthetic, political and economic goals. In the following discussion, we first turn to the selichot themselves as a musical and cultural resource, exploring why Sephardi selichot have achieved a level of popularity not shared by any comparable religious repertory. We then turn to the role of culture brokers in creating a platform for the selichot in Israeli public culture, and then to the role of musicians in shaping shared norms of performance via musical arrangement and performance practice. Finally, via the lens of gendered performance, we probe the tension between tradition and innovation as religious repertory becomes part of the wider popular Israeli soundscape.

Why selichot? Sephardi selichot as musical and cultural resource

Why have the Sephardi selichot undergone this popular transformation, which is not shared by other religious Jewish repertories, or by the equivalent Ashkenazi repertory? What textual, emotional and musical qualities have led to the current popularity of selichot, and what makes them so amenable to adaptation on the concert stage?

Liturgically, the selichot service is abundant with religious emotions of supplication and repentance, expressed in primal requests for Divine forgiveness and providence, preparing the individual and the community for the upcoming High Holy Days. The voice in its liturgical poems is alternately singular, emphasizing personal faith, individual sin, and personal salvation; and plural, seeking communal redemption for the entire Jewish nation and emphasizing the individual's belonging to a community and a people. As such, the religious sentiments expressed resonate both with popular Jewish-Israeli ethnonationalist sentiment and with modern notions of spirituality and self-improvement. Unlike the opaque poetry of their Ashkenazi equivalents, the Sephardi piyyutim are written in accessible everyday Hebrew, formatted in simple poetic forms of recurrent patterned formulas which make the texts easier to remember. These formulae include repetitive litanies incorporating changing descriptive terms such as “Anenu elohey Avraham, anenu,” simple rhymed poems such as “Adon haselichot, boẖen levavot” and poems with recuring refrains such as “Lema’ancha Elohai”(with the refrain “Adonai hakshiva va’ase al te’aẖar”).

While the vidduy, taẖanun and 13 midot are the liturgical heart of the selichot service, in the Sephardi tradition the piyyutim are its musical heart. For many people, the musical rendition of the piyyutim encapsulates the selichot experience for which they come to the synagogue. Their simple poetic forms lend themselves easily to repetitive metered melodies sung by the prayer leader with congregational response, or by the prayer leader and congregation together.²⁰ Historically, in Sephardi and Mediterranean communities (such as the Baghdadi, Persian and Aleppo communities) local traditions dictated the melodies for the piyyutim of selichot. Some melodies for the same piyyut differed entirely between communities. Other melodies showed similarities between communities, evidencing shared historic roots of shared pan-Sephardic melodies; for example, “Ya Shema Evyonecha” has been called by Edwin Seroussi “one of the most ancient melodies of the Sephardi liturgical repertoire” due to its widespread dissemination.²¹ Points of contact between communities facilitate melodic exchange; for example the Sephardi-Yerushalmi melody for the piyyut “Adon haSelichot” was apparently disseminated by shadarim (emissaries sent to the Diaspora to raise funds for Jewish communities in pre-state Palestine), becoming popularized among all Sephardi communities by the twentieth century.²²

Since the 1970s, however, this process of contact and influence has sped up exponentially. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1972–1983) and his disciples sought to unify the prayer traditions of Mizrahi Jews in Israel,²³ promoting the Aleppo tradition as adapted by Jerusalem communities, known as “Sephardi-Yerushalmi” – which Yosef considered prestigious – as a pan-Sephardi style. In this way, melodic traditions specific to particular ethnic communities have gradually been replaced by the Sephardi-Yerushalmi tradition, leading to a homogenous pan-Sephardic selichot repertory in Israel, in which the melodies of the core piyyutim of the selichot are shared by most Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, and have been adopted by prominent cantors and performers, even though they might have grown up reciting selichot according to a different ethnic tradition.²⁴

Today, these melodies are familiar to most Mizrahim and even to many non-Mizrahi Jews, whether from synagogue, educational institutions or recordings. The repetition of the selichot service every weekday for 40 days in the Sephardi tradition (with minor changes during the ten days of repentance) ensures familiarity with the texts and their melodies.²⁵ Musician and producer Elad Gabbay observed, “The songs [of the selichot] are so straightforward, and easy, and flow … everyone Sephardi can sing them just because they're Sephardi … even the most Ashkenazified [of the Sephardim] know selichot.”²⁶

Alongside the appealing religious-emotional content of the selichot piyyutim and their simple, memorable melodies, a further element has contributed to their move into the popular cultural sphere: their timing. Selichot is a weekday prayer service, which affords flexibility that is not available for either Shabbat or holiday prayers: amplification can be used, and prayers can be broadcast or recorded. As such, the popular soundscape of the selichot that has developed in Israel is rooted in a much longer history of recording and broadcast practices. Even in Mandatory Palestine, the medium of radio enabled selichot to cross from the synagogue to the living room, where they were heard in a musical context, framed by the light music typical of the radio programmes at the end of the day. Just a year after the 1936 establishment of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, on 1 September 1937, the schedule for Jerusalem radio included the following listing: “Arab Eastern music performed by Zakay Abadi: ‘Selichot' of Aleppine Jews.”²⁷ Similar musical broadcasts of piyyutim from the Sephardi selichot continued during the 1940s during the High Holiday season. From 1950 onwards, Kol Yisrael broadcast three selichot services live each year, expanding to four in the 1970s, including both Ashkenazi and Sephardi rites.²⁸ As large waves of immigrants began to arrive in Israel from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean countries, in the 1950s and 60s the selichot services broadcast on Kol Yisrael expanded to represent Yemenite, Persian, Moroccan, Libyan and Greek traditions, evidencing the wide variety of ethnic musical-liturgical traditions practiced in Israel at the time. Since at this time, Kol Yisrael was the only broadcast station, this practice served to familiarize a wide listenership, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, with musical traditions other than their own, validating alternate musical customs of selichot as a legitimate part of the Israeli Jewish soundscape.

Culture brokers: reframing selichot as performance

The developments outlined above cemented the ground upon which creative approaches to the Sephardi selichot developed from the 1990s onwards: a shared canon of Sephardi-Yerushalmi melodies, and the establishment of a place for the selichot not just in the synagogue but also as broadcast media, reframed as listening material alongside other auditory entertainment. Nevertheless, today’s broad performance scene directly owes its existence to the initiatives of a loose network of Jerusalem-based culture brokers – municipal workers, heads of cultural institutions and musical producers – who themselves felt a close attachment to Mizrachi traditions and had the opportunity to propose and allocate funding for musical events based on the selichot. Their vision and ideology of bringing selichot into public spaces, sometimes stemming from personal childhood experiences of attending selichot in the synagogue, made these concerts possible. In turn, these concerts disseminated the idea of selichot as music, based on their upbeat lure and sweeping potential, and created performance opportunities for musicians. As musician Elad Gabbay emphasized:

at the end of the day you have to remember, that if a musician’s phone rings, they will come and perform. If it doesn’t ring, they will stay at home. And the ones who cause their phone to ring are project managers like Y [cultural activist in a non-profit organization and school principal], who grew up with [the selichot], who love it, who believe in it, who want it, but they themselves are not performers, they are producers. They know how to put on [a performance].²⁹

Government – or municipal-organized selichot performances also serve as a platform for local politicians, who open the concerts with speeches.

Hayim ben Shimon, long-time head of the culture department at the Jerusalem municipality – known to all by his acronym, Habash – traces the immediate ancestry of today’s selichot events to a meeting that took place in 1992 at the Jerusalem municipality. Paytan Eli Matityahu and singer Moni Armoza approached him to propose that the municipality fund a staged evening performance of selichot. Probably building on the success of 1969 play Bustan Sephardi, which featured a nostalgic scene set in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighbourhood, in which characters were woken for selichot and sang “Adon haSelichot,” Matityahu and Armoza proposed to frame selichot as a nostalgic journey, the performance space shared between a storyteller and musical performers. Habash declined to fund the performance, wanting the musicians first to prove that their event would attract an audience. They staged the event independently, attracting a capacity audience to the newly built Beit Shmuel concert hall, followed by a walking tour of the Old City to view the selichot sung in synagogues firsthand, later concluding with selichot at the Western Wall.

“It was … wow!” recalls Habash.

They blew the shofar and sang and played. The atmosphere in the crowd – there was some 400 people in a space that fits about 200! There was huge demand – when they said “Selichot, selichot!” everyone wanted to see it. It was wow.³⁰

He was convinced that this concept showed potential to engage a large audience, and under his direction, beginning in 1993, the Jerusalem municipality began to hold yearly open-air performances of selichot. Held on the night before Yom Kippur eve, these events were timed to end just before the final selichot prayers held at midnight at the Western Wall, so that the thousands planning to visit the Western Wall could very naturally walk the few hundred metres from Safra Square for the prayer service when the concert ended. Habash’s events quickly expanded, both in audience and in musical visibility. For the first two years, the events were held in a small park, Gan Daniel, adjacent to the municipality buildings, but then expanded to Safra Square – a large open square between the municipality buildings with a capacity of 4000 – attracting audiences that filled it to capacity. Musically, the events gained prestige through collaborations with non-profit cultural organizations such as Beit Avi Chai and Beit Hillel, whose budgets enabled Habash to invite well-known mainstream Israeli singers such as rockers Berry Sakharof and Ehud Banai to perform selichot. The mainstream appeal of these concerts further cemented the notion that Sephardi selichot were a cultural commodity that could performed and consumed by all parts of Jewish Israeli society, and did not belong exclusively to religious or Mizrahi populations. These events and similar ones continued under the sponsorship of the municipality and local cultural organizations and were soon joined by private endeavours, ranging from “selichot tours” in the Nachlaot neighbourhood and the Old City, which presented a romanticized history of Sephardi culture and prayer traditions to primarily Ashkenazi audiences, sometimes accompanied by musicians hired to play music on the streets as tour groups passed – to David D’Or’s yearly series of “Selichot Yerushalayim” concerts, which are high-budget commercial endeavours attracting audiences of thousands. D’Or’s selichot concerts started in around 2015, and moved to the Sultan’s Pool, Jerusalem’s largest outdoor venue, in 2019. According to news site Arutz 7, in 2021, within a week of ticket sales opening, 20,000 tickets had been sold to D’Or’s series of four selichot concerts.³¹

While selichot concerts have in recent years become part of the regular programming of synagogues, cultural organizations and municipal culture departments throughout Israel, Jerusalem remains the centre of such activities. During the week preceding Yom Kippur, a variety of events referencing the selichot and High Holidays are held every night, including several large events at the Binyanei ha’Uma convention centre in addition to the events described above. This position reflects the centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish heritage, the large number of Jewish cultural institutions based in the city, the religious Sephardi heritage of neighbourhoods like Nachlaot, and the popularity of large public selichot services held at the Western Wall³² – but also reflects a conscious decision on behalf of the municipality, headed by mayor Moshe Lion, himself a Sephardi paytan, to cultivate selichot as a Jerusalem tradition. Reflecting on a recent conversation with Moshe Lion, mayor of Jerusalem, musician and producer Elad Gabbay recalled suggesting to the mayor that Jerusalem was already saturated with selichot events and that they should seek to expand these to other areas of the country. “No,” responded the mayor, “[it should be] only in Jerusalem. … Whoever wants to drink, has to go to the fountain and fill up for himself. The fountain is here.” In this spirit, the Jerusalem municipality maintains a website listing selichot events, proclaiming Jerusalem as “Israel’s Capital City of Selichot” and inviting audiences to “Come and be moved [lehitragesh] by selichot in Jerusalem,” while offering directions and details of parking lots to those planning to attend from out of town.³³ These selichot performances provide significant work for musicians: the week preceding Yom Kippur is the busiest week of the year for many performing musicians, including non-local musicians who commute to Jerusalem for selichot events.

Shaping the sound of selichot: music and musicians

Alongside live performances, in the early 2000s, the increasingly popular strand of selichot concerts began to translate into musical recordings. The “musicalized” nature of the Sephardi-Yerushalmi liturgical style, with considerable elements adapted from Ottoman court music and later from urban Arab music³⁴ acts as a musical bridge enabling the selichot melodies to easily fit into the soundscape of popular Mizrahi music.

Reflecting the cohesiveness of the selichot as a single musical-emotional event, the most popular of these recordings are not of a single piyyut, but rather piyyutim medleys that seek to distil the essence of the selichot repertory into a single musical entity. Stylistically, such medleys echo performance norms for popular religious Mizrahi music at weddings and special occasions. The first such recording to achieve commercial success was child star Meydad Tasa’s CD album “Selichot” released in 2008. In this album, Tasa performs a series of selichot to a synthesized upbeat backing track, with prominent darbuka, strings, bouzouki-style guitar and solo nay. Six of the tracks are piyyutim from the selichot service, one (H̱on taẖon) is from the Rosh Hashana prayers, and the final track (Shema Yisrael) is a musical rendition of an unmetered section of the selichot prayers, the kabbalat ol malchut shamayim [acceptance of the yoke of Heaven].³⁵

More recent selichot medley recordings have been released directly to digital platforms, particularly YouTube.³⁶ Due to multiple platforms, and often multiple uploads of the same material, it is not possible definitively to rank the popularity of different medleys; however, the top two (Meydad Tasa and the Revivo project) have view counts on YouTube in the millions, towards the middle-higher end of Israeli religious popular music on the platform.³⁷ This is all the more remarkable given that this repertory is relevant for only forty days of each year, outside of which few would find reason to listen. Also notable is the increase in the pace of new recordings in recent years.

Delving into the contents of six popular selichot medleys on YouTube allows some insight into the distillation of the piyyutim of selichot into a canon of popular melodies. The contents of each medley, in order of performance, are listed in the table below. In the case of medleys presented as individual song videos, the view count for the most popular song is listed here:

Table

Meidad Tasa 2008^38 3.3 million views (Ben Adam)	Revivo Project 2013^39 5.4 million views	Avishay and Itzik Eshel 2014^40 300k views (Adon haSelichot)	IDF Rabbinate 2019^41 347k views	Daniel Sadon and friends 2020^42 1.4 million views	Itay and Nitay Tsarfati 2023^43 500k views
Ben Adam	Ben Adam	Ben Adam	Ben Adam	Ya Shema Evyonecha	Ben Adam
Adon haSelichot	Ya Shema Evyonecha	Ya Shema Evyonecha	Ya Shema Evyonecha	Adon haSelichot	Adon haSelichot
El Nora Alila	Adon haSelichot	Adon haSelichot	Et Shaarei Ratzon	Ben Adam	Elecha H’
Anenu		H̱on Taẖon	Avinu Malkenu (Ashkenaz)	Et Sha'arei Ratzon	Merom Meromim (part of Elecha H’)
Elecha H’		Elecha H’	Bezochri Al Mitati		Ya Shema Evyonecha
H̱on Taẖon		Lecha H’ Teshukati (Yemenite)	Raẖamana (Ashkenaz)		Shaday Nisgavta (part of Elecha H’)
Ya Shema Evyonekha		Adir veNaor	Adon haSelichot		Anenu
Shema Yisrael (Kabalat Ol Malchut Shamayim)		El Nora Alila

Comparing the six recordings elicits a clear core repertory of selichot. Three piyyutim appear on all six lists: “Ben Adam,” “Adon haSelichot,” and “Ya Shema Evyonecha” – indeed, these are the only piyyutim included in the Revivo Project medley, the most popular of all. Yet rather than directly borrowing the format of the selichot service, all six medleys play with the order and content of the material included, creating musical-emotional journeys that sometimes differ sharply from the content and order of the selichot service itself. Five of the six retain the opening position of “Ben Adam,” the first piyyut of the selichot service, whose text serves as a call to prayer, paraphrasing the book of Jonah which is read on Yom Kippur (“Son of Adam, why are you sleeping? Get up and call out in supplications!”). However, here the similarity ends. Two choose to end with “Adon haSelichot,” the most well-known of the selichot, and even though “Anenu” leads directly into “Adon haSelichot” in the selichot prayers, this structure is not preserved in Tasa’s recording. Perhaps the most dramatic change to the structure of the selichot occurs in the Tzarfati recording where three excerpts of “Elekha H’” are sung to different melodies (a common practice in performing this piyyut) but another piyyut (Ya Shema Evyonekha) is inserted in the middle.⁴⁴

Further, four of the six recordings extend the repertory beyond the selichot service itself, placing material from Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur alongside the selichot. The Eshel recording ends with “El Nora Alila,” a piyyut for the end of Yom Kippur, symbolically extending the soundscape of selichot until the final moments of the Days of Repentance. Meidad Tasa, Avishai and Itzik Eshel, Daniel Sadon and the IDF rabbinate likewise all include one or more piyyutim from the High Holiday liturgies. The recordings of both the Eshel brothers and the IDF rabbinate likewise expand the community of the selichot, adding material from ethnic-musical traditions outside the Sephardi-Yerushalmi repertoire. The Eshel brothers include “Lecha Eli Teshukati,” a piyyut by Avraham Ibn Ezra said at the end of Yom Kippur, here sung in Yemenite pronunciation to a 2004 melody by Yair Gadasi. The IDF rabbinate moves still further afield, adding two piyyutim from the Ashkenazi tradition: “Avinu Malkenu,” which is said in the High Holiday prayers and during the days of repentance (but is not part of the selichot prayers), and “Raẖamana,” the setting of a single line of the Ashkenazi selichot prayers to a nigun from the Lubavitch Hasidic tradition, attributed to Rabbi Meir Shlomo Yanovsky, grandfather of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. Commensurate with the IDF Rabbinate’s role in representing all religious soldiers, their medley recognizes the centrality of the Sephardi-Yerushalmi selichot to the national soundscape of Elul and the Days of Repentance, yet nods to two of the best-known Ashkenazi melodies from this period, pointing even more explicitly than the other recordings to a shared Jewish-Israeli soundtrack for this period.

A similar canon of repertory is reflected in the programming of selichot concerts: a performance during the ten days of repentance might include Rosh Hashana piyyutim, even though from a liturgical point of view, their time has already passed.⁴⁵ Like the IDF rabbinate recording, David D’Or’s “Selichot Yerushalayim” concert in 2023 interspersed Ashkenazi High Holiday prayer sections among the Sephardi piyyutim; these included Kol Nidrei from Yom Kippur and “Avinu Malkenu” composed by Max Yanowsky. By contrast, a more intimate 2023 concert with renowned Sephardi-Yerushalmi paytan Moshe Habusha and the Hiba orchestra in Givat Shmuel adhered to Sephardi repertoire including all the “greatest hits” appearing in the table above, but Habusha saw the concert as an opportunity to perform several lesser-known piyyutim for selichot which were not generally sung congregationally due to their complexity or due to a shortage of time. About the piyyut “Maẖey umassey” Habusha reflected, “They do not always appreciate it in synagogue but, in a concert, we can perform the things that we like.”⁴⁶

Beyond repertory, the consensual soundscape of the selichot adapted in performances and recordings also embodies two forms of musical performance practice that serve to heighten the emotional and musical content of the events while retaining core elements of the way selichot are conducted in the Sephardi synagogue: mass congregational singing, and virtuosic vocal solos (mawwalim). These musical features are ingrained in performance practice, afforded by the textual and poetic structure of the selichot, and serving as sonic markers of authenticity, notwithstanding the instrumental accompaniment and arrangements which are a radical departure from synagogue practice.

In the synagogue, selichot are not just about listening, but about congregational participation. Relating to the power of mass singing in religious contexts, Ruth HaCohen proposes that the participatory vocalization of shared repertories constitutes the group as a “vocal community” through the power of communal emotions, collective beliefs and a canonic repertoire.⁴⁷ In the case of selichot, the formation of such “vocal communities” acts as a powerful experiential bridge between the personal and communal aspects intertwined in the selichot prayers themselves, which seek atonement for both the individual and the community. Aiding this experience of community, selichot invite the congregation to join as one body, whether in motions (bowing at “va-ya’avor”) or in communal singing. It is no coincidence the best-known pan-Sephardi selichot melodies, “Ben Adam,” “Ya Shema Evyonecha,” and “Adon haSelichot,” are also the simplest to sing, facilitating mass participation. All three have short, rhythmic melodies, comprising short, regular musical phrases with repeated motifs or melodic sequences which facilitate retention of the melody, especially as the melody is repeated many times (for example, each of the twelve textual phrases of the piyyut “Ben Adam” is sung to the same four-bar musical phrase). The narrow melodic range (a sixth in “Adon haSelichot,” a fourth in “Ben Adam,” “Ya Shema Evyonecha” has a wider range but moves stepwise) also contributes to the singability of these melodies.

Contrasting with the emotional aesthetic of mass participation is one of the opportunities the selichot offer to showcase vocal virtuosity and improvization. This primarily occurs in two parts of the selichot service: the final lines of the piyyut “Anenu,” and the 13 midot. “Anenu” is constructed as a litany, the prayer leader singing “Anenu” (Answer us) and then referring to the names of God; each time the congregation responds by repeating the line. In the Sephardi-Yerushalmi tradition, it has become customary for the hazzan or paytan (or in some congregations, a number of congregants will take it in turns) to use this piyyut as a basis for vocal virtuosity, embellishing the initial “Anenu” of each line with a short improvised mawwal, rendered differently for each line. This can significantly extend the piyyut: while Meydad Tasa’s recording of “Anenu,” in which he lightly ornaments the lines without breaking the rhythm of the piyyut lasts just two minutes, at a 2023 concert, Moshe Habusha, following the practice of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, extended the piyyut to over five minutes by inserting extended mawwalim showcasing his mastery both of vocal technique and of the Arab maqamat – and that of his backing singers, who he invited each to sing a line.

This virtuosic improvization references the field of musical emotion known as tarab, an emotional state invoked by Arab classical music, and shared by musicians and expert listeners across the Arab world.⁴⁸ Tarab is not specifically associated with religion, though vocal improvization is used in the Muslim call to prayer, and musical and religious listening practices share emotional import in the Arab world.⁴⁹ It is however part of the musical enjoyment of the Sephardi Yerushalmi liturgy, both in participation and in appreciation of experienced prayer leaders. Together, then, audience participation and references to tarab music complement and enhance the religious-emotional atmosphere evoked by the selichot.

Shared meaning: reinforcing and renewing tradition

If the renewal of musical repertories and performance practices are at the heart of the selichot soundscape, the visual and gender framing within which this soundscape is performed and encountered points to some of the ways in which artists continue to perform their respect for a culturally conservative tradition, even as selichot move beyond the synagogue walls and into events and recording studios. New events and recordings draw upon three particular elements: male bonding, spaces indexing Jewish heritage, and visual indices of Jewish tradition, in order to emphasis the framing of selichot as a “traditional” repertory, even when performed outside the synagogue. These elements are illustrated by the following two video clips that accompany the performances discussed above:

A short advertising clip released in 2021 ahead of David D’Or’s series of “Selichot Yerushalayim” concerts distils the nature of the concert into 30 s.⁵⁰ As the clip opens, David D’Or, dressed informally in a white T-shirt with a black hooded vest and a white baseball cap steps out of a stone doorway, beginning to sing mid-way through the piyyut “Anenu”: “Answer us, Knight of Jacob, answer us,” to a melody from the Libyan tradition, reflecting his own heritage. As he turns onto the path outside, he nods to two figures who join him walking on either side, both holding guitars: veteran Israeli rock icon Ehud Banai and younger singer-actor Idan Amedi. These two figures, sing the next line, “Answer us, the One who answers in the hour of mercy, answer us.’” Meanwhile, D’Or moves ahead, greeting singer Avraham Tal with an enthusiastic high five. Singer Amir Benayoun joins from the other side, and Tal and Benayoun take the next line, “Answer us, Shield of David, answer us.” The atmosphere is jovial as the group continues to walk down the path singing and playing, followed by three backing musicians; Tal raises his hand as if calling to an imaginary audience to sing. As the background music continues, the screen cuts to a panoramic evening shot of Jerusalem’s Old City, looking across the Temple Mount/Haram as-Sharif to the New City.

In placing selichot firmly outside the synagogue, and in the voices not of religious cantors but of five popular Israeli singers of Mizrahi origin, this clip, like the concert it advertises, reframes selichot as a popular pan-Mizrahi heritage. The move outside the synagogue is not only indicated by the literal move to a street setting but also by the visual language of the clip, which indexes multiple elements of Jewish tradition. If not in a synagogue, the stone streets in which the musicians walk nonetheless place the selichot in a heritage site: Jerusalem’s Old City. The group passes a display of ceramic mezuzot and hamsot, and D’Or claps a long Yemenite shofar in his hands. The singers, whose background is well known to audiences in Israel, embrace a range of religious observance, from returnees to Jewish observance to secular musicians. None wears a kippa; two wear baseball caps, one wears a flat cap, and the other two are bareheaded.⁵¹ Their group singing echoes the congregational singing of the synagogue, yet the diversity of this group seems to replace the traditional religious minyan with a convivial social group.

Similar themes are echoed in the 2019 video “Raẖem Aleinu” (“Have mercy on us”) produced by the IDF Rabbinate (see above for track list). The title image of the video appears to show two soldiers patrolling Jerusalem’s Old City at night with a flashlight in but, at closer inspection, the “flashlight” turns out to be a darbuka. The video places the performers – a group of officers singing solo backed by a group of soldiers who act as backup singers – in various locations in and around the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, which serves as a backdrop signifying tradition and authenticity as the group sing, clap and perform the selichot.

In addition to being defined by musical repertory and by performance practice, the soundscape of selichot is strongly male-coded. Orthodox synagogues are places of male sociability and male musicality: for observant men, the commitment to pray three times a day, preferably in a minyan, engenders sociality among those who share the commitment to attend. Selichot form part of a wider male-coded religious vocal tradition in which women may participate as listeners and co-congregationists but generally have a less intimate familiarity with the service owing to less frequent attendance at synagogue. Women’s seating, usually in a separate gallery relatively far removed from the male congregation, removes their voices from the sound of the congregation, coupled with societal and halachic norms discouraging women from singing in full voice.⁵² Further, women do not have the opportunity to build vocal skills through the traditional route of participation in prayer leading and are generally not exposed to the sound of female voices singing selichot.⁵³

The male soundscape of selichot characteristic of the synagogue is retained in a majority of the new platforms for selichot. In both of the clips cited above, the selichot remain a place of male sociality: all the singers and the backing musicians are male. The majority of recordings are by male musicians who are themselves religious (IDF rabbinate, Daniel Saadon, Ilay and Nitay Tzarfati, Meydad Tasa). Nevertheless, religious observance alone does not account for the absence of women from the recordings: the Revivo project is an all-male crossover group, which has performed secular repertory together with female guest singers but retains an all-male lineup in their religious medleys; likewise the absence of female performers from David D’Or’s selichot concerts is notable since in his wider repertory he has frequently collaborated with female singers (including Yasmin Levy, Etty Ankri and Anna Zak).⁵⁴ The choice to appear alongside only male singers is probably partly a commercial one, opening his concerts to an audience of religious men who would be unwilling to attend a concert that included female singers. But it also allows a group of not traditionally religious singers to claim a sonic signifier of authenticity for their performance. This signalling of authenticity, however, goes beyond sonic elements: D’Or and his guests, like their counterparts in other recordings, perform not only a male soundscape but also male camaraderie. In the IDF video, that singing merge the male bonding of army service with that of the synagogue: they engage in participatory behaviours typical of celebratory singing in the synagogue: drumming on surfaces, dancing on the spot, raising hands in expressive gestures, and group circle dancing. The musicians in David D’Or’s performance likewise adopt similar within-group communication, emphasizing the “congregational” nature of the performance; here the gestural language adopted by the musicians and their audience draws more on the norms of a rock concert, another primarily male soundscape. Both performances nonetheless frame these moments of male bonding through culturally coded Mizrahi gestures including exaggerated hand clapping and back slapping.⁵⁵ As such, the gestural repertory here echoes recent Israeli popular culture in portraying a Mizrahi masculinity that is “strong, masculine, attractive, and religious,”⁵⁶ and links male Sephardi synagogue culture to Mizrahi “fun culture,”⁵⁷ a connection further echoed in the anchoring of selichot concerts and recordings in the musical style of Israeli musiqa mizrahit, a genre dominated by male soloists.

Notwithstanding the preservation of the male soundscape typical of the synagogue performance of selichot in the most significant recorded and concert selichot events, a growing sensitivity to gender representation in the Israeli public sphere means that many concert producers using public funding associated with the wider secular public include female performers in selichot performances. Some concerts are prominently egalitarian: in 2023 the yearly selichot concert held by the Jerusalem municipality at Safra Square featured two female and two male singers, accompanied by a mixed ensemble, the Jerusalem East-West Orchestra. Others seek to find an acceptable compromise when religious male singers are unable, for religious reasons, to share the stage with female singers. In 2023, a televised selichot concert held outside the Knesset featured the (mixed) Ashdod Andalusian Orchestra, accompanying five male singers and one female singer (paytanit Shir Ifrah), in a programme including selichot, piyyutim and popular songs on themes related to religious faith and sentiment.⁵⁸ This time, the producers embraced a compromise that made it possible for all the artists to participate. Following opening words by Knesset chair MK Amir Ohana, Shir Ifrah opened the concert with a thirteen-minute set, including “Ozreni El H̱ai,” a popular piyyut not connected to a specific occasion, and “Et Sha’arei Ratzon,” a piyyut for Rosh Hashanah. After her performance, Roey Azulay, conductor of the Ashdod Andalusian Orchestra, thanked Ifrah and then turned to welcome the audience. Following his speech, Lior Elmalih appeared on stage singing “Ben Adam” the first piyyut of the selichot. Together, Azulay’s welcome and Elmalih’s piyyut symbolically marked a restart of the concert and a move into the repertory of the selichot, with the remainder of the concert performed by male singers only (female backing musicians remained). Strictly Orthodox singer Shuli Rand was last in the programme, further distancing him from Ifrah’s performance. The performance ended with blasts on the shofar, followed by “El Nora Alila” performed by all the male singers, performing camaraderie as discussed above – dancing in place and singing the responses together. Ifrah’s absence from this number was notable, not least in light of the presence of Ashkenazi singer Shuli Rand, who unlike Shir Ifrah is a vocal outsider to the Sephardi tradition, yet was nonetheless given a solo verse.

A different “solution” to the inclusion of women is notable in an increasing proliferation of separate women’s music events during the month of Elul.⁵⁹ Given that women are excluded as performers from synagogue selichot, selichot performances offer a way also for religiously conservative women, who do not perform alongside men, to perform. During the last few years, the municipalities and religious councils of several Israeli cities have sponsored events featuring female performers performing for all-female audiences during the month of Elul. While such events might be seen as a further innovation, it is an innovation that reflects a consensus of convenience: as Habash noted, in religiously conservative settings this formulation is expedient for all: the municipality is seen to be providing events for women, and at the same time, women do not appear alongside men in selichot events, thus avoiding controversy in religiously stringent circles. Unlike male and mixed selichot events, which tend to only include music, womens’ events generally include few melodies from the selichot themselves, rather combining a range of cultural elements, including hatarat nedarim with a rabbi, religious homilies by female religious figures, and performances by one of more artists, also often interspersed with stories and short religious thoughts related to the season. Moreover, the repertory performed at these events is generally not focused on selichot but rather encompasses pop music with spiritual content, piyyutim and other religious songs connected to the Elul and High Holiday season.⁶⁰

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the revitalization of the Sephardi selichot custom via its transmigration into popular concerts and recordings, which index Mizrahi identity and Sephardi traditions as they articulate a shared, seasonal Jewish-Israeli soundscape during the month of Elul and the “days of penitence” between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Neither rejecting religious tradition nor adhering to halachic norms, these new renditions of selichot, mediated through the apparatus of popular culture, have made significant inroads into Israeli public culture, in part through their ability to align the musical-emotional desires of the audience with the artistic and cultural agendas of musicians, culture brokers and local politicians.

The meteoric rise in popularity of selichot during the past ten years has coincided with the cultural agendas of influential politicians who have sought to increase the visibility of Mizrahi culture in public spaces, including culture minister Miri Regev (2015-2020)⁶¹ and Jerusalem mayor Moshe Leon (2018-). Notwithstanding this sponsorship by those whose interests they conveniently serve, however, selichot performances remain a site of grassroots, everyday musical and religious creativity, whose meanings are not determined by rabbinic authority but rather by appeal to shared tradition and values. As a public auditory culture, selichot recordings and events articulate traditional norms of performance practice, the performance of gender in public space, and religious emotion, while facilitating participation by people who are not strictly observant. While comparison with Ashkenazi orthodoxy has tended to paint masorti religious culture as weak or fluid,⁶² this popularity shows the opposite: it is precisely the flexibility of Mizrahi traditionism that has afforded the shift in the purpose, position and function of selichot, allowing them to absorb new meanings at the same time as they achieve popularity without controversy or dispute. These new meanings, we have argued, are carried by the musical nature of selichot, which forms a consensual shared repertory that makes space both for participation and virtuosic solos, and which dovetails easily with the sonic world and cultural values of Mizrahi pop styles which have come to dominate Israeli popular music.⁶³

In turn, the new position of selichot as a consensual soundscape of the season of penitence preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur points to wider changes in Israeli Jewish society's relationship towards the religious components of its collective identity. Scholars have long examined the (re)creation of Jewish holidays in Israel through the lens of the secular nation state, reshaping Jewish festivals as civil religion and in effect creating newly invented festivals:⁶⁴ Tu Bishvat became connected to the ideology of building the land, Passover was celebrated in the kibbutzim as a festival of spring, emphasizing national redemption and deliverance, Shavuot was celebrated as an agricultural festival, and Hannukah as a national festival celebrating a military victory. By contrast, the new popularity of selichot reinforces rather than challenges the religious meaning of the season, yet builds on neoliberal models of popular culture and technological affordances of the twenty-first century to blur the lines between religious observance and musical consumption. For many Jewish Israelis, who experience ongoing national and personal insecurity, the prayers for life and salvation embodied in the selichot resonate as deeply relevant, yet they no longer find their own place in the synagogue. The concert setting, surrounding the listener with many others singing these same words and living the same dilemmas, affords a transformative moment of pause and introspection, framing personal and societal transformation in the meeting point between shared musical repertories, sonic signifiers, ethnic heritage, religious belief, and ethnonational Jewish-Israeli identification.⁶⁵

Ethics

Ethical approval: University of Haifa Ethics Committee ref. 084/23. All interviewees were recorded and quoted with consent.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Moshe Habusha, Haim Ben Shimon and Elad Gabbay for their time, and Netanel Cohen (Musai), Dan Deutsch, Rachel Werczberger and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (“Embodying spiritual sound: new musical practices among religious Jewish-Israeli women,” grant number 2138/22).

Notes on contributors

Abigail Wood

Abigail Wood is a senior lecturer in ethnomusicology at the Department of Music, School of Arts, University of Haifa. She is a former co-editor of Ethnomusicology Forum. In 2019 she held a visiting fellowship at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. Her research is primarily concerned with musical life in urban spaces, from contemporary Jewish music to the reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the contested soundscapes of Jerusalem's Old City.

Naomi Cohn Zentner

Naomi Cohn Zentner is a lecturer in Bar Ilan University's music department. In 2024, she held the Katz Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and in 2019 she was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies focusing on early Jewish music. Her research interests lie in historical ethnomusicology, religious aspects of Israeli popular music, and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions.

Notes

1 Video excerpts of David D’Or’s 2021 Selichot Yerushalayim concert, with a similar lineup, are available here: https://youtu.be/J9xkFLWse4c?si=FkuOuK3CpUTQQWNw (accessed March 28, 2024).

2 In this context, ‘custom’ (minhag) refers to a custom that has the status of a religious obligation.

3 In this paper, following conventional usage we use “Mizrahi” to refer to Israeli Jews with their family roots in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, “Sephardi” to refer to the liturgy used by these Jewish communities, and “Sephardi-Yerushalmi” to a specific style of reciting prayers (nusach) associated with the Aleppo community. For explanations of the former see Leon “Hareidism versus Traditionism”, and for the latter see https://www.nli.org.il/he/discover/music/jewish-music/piyut/traditions/sfarad-jerusalem (accessed March 31, 2024).

4 Supporters of the Beitar Jerusalem football team sing “Adon haSelichot” at a match https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_x0TDc9CAY (accessed March 27, 2024).

5 See Yadgar “Maintaining Ambivalence”.

6 Leon, “Hareidism versus traditionism”, 299.

7 Leon, “Secular origins”, 27.

8 Leon, “Hareidism versus traditionism”, 305.

9 Yadgar, “Maintaining Ambivalence”, 399.

10 See Abutbul-Selinger, “Subordinate by Choice?”.

11 Haviva Pedaya (Return of the Exiled Voice) discusses their forced exile in Israel in the past and the renewed thirst to rediscover and integrate this poetry and musical language into Israeli society using terms of redemption and tikkun.

12 Cohen and Leon “New Mizrahi Middle Class”; Leon “Hareidism versus traditionism”, 300.

13 Erez “Bass and Silsulim”; Piyyutim have long formed part of the cluster of genres that comprise musiqa mizrahit (or Mediterranean Israeli music): see Horowitz “Israeli Mediterranean Music”, 59-61.

14 Illman and Czimbalmos, “Knowing, being”, 172.

15 See, for example, Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz’s study of women’s religious practices (Challenge and Conformity); Lea Taragin-Zeller’s discussion of the creative way in which women seek agency within the framework of rabbinic authority (“Rabbi of one’s own”), and the work of Nissim Leon and Yaacov Yadgar on “soft religion” and masortiyut/“traditionist” Judaism cited above.

16 See Mahmood Politics of Piety; Osella and Soares “Religiosity and its Others”. Leon “Secular Origins” explicitly frames Mizrahi traditionalism as a Jewish counterpart to Muslim secularism.

17 Yadgar, “Maintaining Ambivalence”, 40.

18 Yadgar, “Maintaining Ambivalence”.

19 Leon, “Hareidism versus traditionism”.

20 By contrast, Ashkenazi selichot are performed as a personal prayer, led by the prayer leader who sings the first and last sentences out loud so that the community can follow where they are in the prayer. This is affectively praying alone since each congregant recites the selichot to himself using variations of a melodic formula lacking a regular beat, but also together, creating a heterophony texture of communal sound.

21 Seroussi, Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music.

22 Cohen (Musai) Babylonian and Jerusalemite, 5-6. See also, Netanel Cohen (Musai), "Siyur selikhot mevuzar: Hapiyyut "Adon haselikhot" bamuzika hapopularit beyisrael veretorikat hayizug shel beit hakneset hasepharadi" [A Decentralized Slikhot tour: The Poem "Adon haselichot" in popular music in Israel and the Representational Rhetoric of the Sephardic Synagogue] (unpublished article). Local versions of this melody with typical nuances were prevalent in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Bulgaria and more.

23 See Leon, “Changes”, 13–17.

24 Moshe Habusha, Elad Gabay, interviews with the authors, November 2023.

25 Sephardi and Ashkenazi rites of selichot diverge significantly; in the number of days selichot are said (40 in Sephardi communities, 13–19 days in Ashkenazi traditions), in the time of day where selichot are said (from midnight till dawn in Sephardi traditions; early evening services in Ashkenazi traditions) and particularly in the difference in poems and prayer texts. Ashkenazi Jews say different piyyutim every night, while Sephardi Jews repeat the same piyyutim and prayer formulas every night.

26 Interview with the authors, November 05, 2023.

27 Davar, 1.9.37, 5.

28 The first Ashkenazi selichot service each year was broadcast live from the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv from the 1940s onwards.

29 Interview with the authors, November 05, 2023.

30 Interview with the authors, November 08, 2023.

31 https://www.inn.co.il/news/502550 (accessed December 04, 2023).

32 Wood, “Sonic Collectivity at the Kotel ha-Ma'aravi”.

33 https://www.jerusalem.muni.il/he/experience/events/selichot/ (accessed March 28, 2024).

34 Cohen (Musai), Babylonian and Jerusalemite, 33, 36.

35 The latter section is not exclusive to the selichot prayers.

36 Comparing view counts for these recordings on YouTube with play counts on Spotify suggests that the former platform is far more significant in listenership.

37 View counts were recorded in January 2024.

38 https://youtu.be/y7HwF8ZS2oE?si=WSNRzwhzNTpAkD9A (accessed January 28, 2024).

39 https://youtu.be/6YLdgIheebs?si=_58yn2OnGowb4MKB (accessed January 28, 2024).

40 https://youtu.be/rqPAmBM9DUo?si=DJcIH3AEF-cvNnRS (accessed January 28, 2024).

41 https://youtu.be/A6CHmuNnDxg?si=grxfQ-1IM6k_oNZ4 (accessed January 28, 2024).

42 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzZ_9kGTbSQ (accessed January 28, 2024).

43 https://youtu.be/EiO9Op7OgNA?si=1Ver1dT2fwnNM7Ur (accessed January 28, 2024).

44 In some cases the piyyutim share melodies for example “Elecha H’” and “Et shaarei ratzon.”

45 Elad Gabbay, interview with the authors, 05 November 2023.

46 Interview with the authors, 08 November 2023.

47 Hacohen, “Birth and Demise”.

48 Racy, Making Music.

49 Hirschkind Ethical Soundscape, 51.

50 https://youtu.be/Bm6lFWA72V0?si=sQsz0ishpE7rXhMi (accessed December 10, 2023).

51 Two of the three backing musicians wear kippot.

52 The Talmudic statement kol b’ishah ervah (BT Brachot 24a) is widely interpreted in religious Jewish circles as prohibiting a man from hearing the singing voice of a woman who is not a close family member, particularly in live performance.

53 Both Sephardi selichot services led by women (in all-female contexts) and recordings of selichot by women are a very recent phenomenon. For a selection of recordings of women singing selichot, see https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2XKWKV22rl0SaKGpnMQoHH?si=a2952375e6e24651

54 While the exclusive use of male backing musicians is not rare in the world of rock music, D’Or’s musicians include a string quartet in which it might be more common to find female performers.

55 https://youtu.be/J9xkFLWse4c?si=99MSJRrtSNH06KDN (accessed December 11, 2023).

56 Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community”, 67.

57 Abutbul-Selinger, “Subordinate by Choice?”.

58 The full concert is available at https://youtu.be/j9ZRexq1rKs?si=tFp746bY2rabxG5E (accessed March 28, 2024).

59 Elad Gabbay comments on the municipal funding in Jerusalem for women’s events as consensual, supported both by the [general] culture factions of the municipality and by the ultra Orthodox ones.

60 Privately funded events for women only featuring selichot and High Holiday music abound. Odeleya Berlin’s concert “Ochila” is the first and most successful of these.

61 See Erez, “Regime of Style”.

62 Leon, “Secular Origins”, 25.

63 Erez, “Bass and Silsulim”, 477.

64 Deshen, “Secular Israelis”; Don-Yehiya “Hanukkah and the Myth”; Shoham Israel Celebrates; Zerubavel Recovered Roots.

65 Yadgar, “Maintaining Ambivalence”, 399.