By Rabbi Healy Slakman, excerpted and adapted from the Annual Membership Meeting, May 31, 2026
As we move beyond this year of transition, into the warmer months and toward the Jewish New Year, I want to share some reflections and updates on music and worship at Micah. Many of these developments you may have already noticed or participated in, but I want to take a moment to share some of the visioning and thinking behind them, with the hope that together we can continue building and nurturing momentum, questions, conversation, and new ideas.
While this work contains many moving pieces and goals, three major areas of exploration shaped much of our focus this year: experimenting with different sounds and musical configurations in worship; deepening congregational engagement through music; and considering music as an access point for Jewish learning and intellectual curiosity.
We have been exploring what becomes possible when we approach prayer as a living and evolving art form, and as we draw inspiration from the ever-changing currents of the broader musical world and the endlessly diverse Jewish world. We are discovering what doors these sounds open: how they inspire us, challenge us, uplift us, and sometimes even provoke us as we imagine what is possible in contemporary Jewish worship.
Alongside sounds we know and love—piano, cello, and guitar—Temple Micah’s worship spaces have been enriched by instruments ranging from French horns and accordions to ouds, qanuns, darbukas, ney, and even a 70th-generation West African kora player. Beyond Hebrew and English, we have sung in Yiddish, Arabic, Aramaic, Ladino, and Farsi, collaborating with local and visiting artists and blending ancient and contemporary traditions.
These collaborations have brought not only musical expertise, but artists whose work reflects cultural intersections and dialogue—Jewish and Muslim, East and West, Yiddish and Mizrachi—expanding our imagination and our understanding of Jewish worship.
This work has extended beyond weekly Shabbat services. New sounds and musical partnerships have shaped and enriched a wide range of our programming, from Boker Tov to Storefront.
Our musical experimentation has also allowed us to refresh and reimagine some of our important annual gatherings and rituals. For Selichot this year, for example, nearly one hundred of us gathered in a circle around instruments from across the Jewish world.
And after several years of exploring musical partnerships, we are beginning to build deeper and more established relationships with returning artists. These friends are more than guest performers: they are creative partners.
This is, in part, how we found ourselves welcoming renowned Jerusalem-based musical innovators Nava Tehila in April. Their visit was especially meaningful because they did far more than offer a Havdalah concert and share their melodies. They joined us for Shabbat services—collaborating, reflecting, and imagining alongside us. Temple Micah was the only community on their tour with whom they engaged in this way.
This year included significant visioning, experimentation, and adjustment within some of our long-standing lay music groups.
After several years of transition, the choir has begun building toward its future. Under Philip Mayer’s leadership, we engaged choir participants through listening and visioning sessions. We found a combination of choir professionals who animate and empower our singers, and we found opportunities to learn together, including on a field trip to the Library of Congress to explore Jewish musical artifacts. We have also solidified several thriving musical gatherings—singing circle, middle eastern percussion workshop, and lay ensemble. If you were at Shabbat services in late May, you experienced our fantastic lay ensemble leading the music alongside our worship team. These groups engage congregants who might not otherwise be actively or curiously involved.
Congregational engagement through worship music came into especially sharp focus during moments like Shabbat Shirah, when the choir, youth choir, lay ensemble, and percussion groups all shaped the service. One congregant reflected that three generations of their family were participating in the service, each through a different musical pathway.
We have seen dramatic energy building around youth engagement in music over the past year. Twenty students stayed after class each week leading up to Purim to write and rehearse pop parody songs exploring the themes of the holiday. Under Philip’s leadership, a large group of 3rd–6th graders rehearsed and performed the national anthem at a Wizards game. And we are beginning to see a cohort of teen and young adult leaders emerge through the music program. As we plan for the future, we are figuring out how youth music can feel like a defined space people can enter, grow within, and identify with.
We have become increasingly interested in thinking about music and the arts not only as forms of expression, but as pathways into Jewish learning, identity, and communal imagination.
For example, at our winter Lullaby Concert this year, we examined lullabies as cultural artifacts, considering how different Jewish traditions across time and place have used simple, intimate songs to foster connection and build resilience amidst unprecedented darkness. When Moroccan vocalist Lala Tamar joined us in the sanctuary, she offered a collection of piyyutim—Sephardic liturgical poems—in place of a sermon, inviting us to experience music itself as a kind of midrash: a way of deepening our encounter with text.
In the coming years, we look forward to building on these experiments, creating more opportunities for our community to encounter Jewish ideas, history, and identity through music and art.
Finally: We understand that what we are building at Temple Micah is part of a larger story—one that becomes richer and more meaningful through exchange. As our music program grows, it feels essential that what we are building here enters into the wider world—interacting with it, contributing to it, and being shaped by it in return. With that in mind, an important goal for the coming years is to begin recording and sharing some of our music as a way of placing Temple Micah into a broader Jewish conversation.
As we look ahead, we remain excited by the possibilities that emerge when we approach worship as a living, evolving art form. Thank you for helping make Temple Micah a community that sings, learns, thinks, prays, experiments, and grows together.
This article was originally featured in the June/July/August 2026 issue of the Vine.