“Gospel Shabbat” Choir Sings Hallelujah For King

On Friday afternoon, the 51-member choir on the bima of Congregation B’nai Jacob had just torn through the gospel song ​“Hallelujah, You’re Worthy” and was now tackling an uptempo version of ​“We Shall Overcome.” Choir members started with singing and clapping.

Something wasn’t quite working. Angela Clemmons, directing the choir, stopped them.

“Let’s try it without the clapping,” she said good-naturedly. A laugh rippled through the choir. They began again, and Clemmons stopped them again.

It sounded good, Clemmons said, but she wanted the choir members to find a way to convey the same energy they had when they were clapping. They could sway from side to side, for instance, move around a bit.

“There are a lot of things you can do,” she said. ​“You can bounce in place. Just clap with your — “

“Face?” a choir member asked.

The choir — a combination of singers from three groups from various faiths: Shoreline Soul, Valley Soul, and B’nai Jacob’s own Sweet Singers — was preparing for the Woodbridge-based congregations’s first-ever gospel Shabbat, which took place later on Friday evening at B’nai Jacob to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King.

The idea grew out of B’nai Jacob’s participation in Congregation Mishkan Israel’s long-running interfaith Shabbat celebration of Dr. King’s life and and recommitment to the values of social justice that he exemplified, often involving the cross-genre musical ensemble the Afro-Semitic Experience and this year featuring a keynote address by Herbert Brockman, who served as Mishkan Israel’s rabbi for over 30 years until his retirement last summer.

Reflecting on her congregation’s visits to Mishkan, B’nai Jacob’s rabbi, Rona Shapiro, thought: ​“We’ve got to do something here.”

Angela Clemmons is a professional singer with a 35-year track record that includes work with Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Cyndi Lauper, Steely Dan, and many others. Her father was a Pentecostal preacher. She grew up singing gospel, and over the years has created two gospel choirs — Shoreline Soul and Valley Soul — based in those respective parts of the state. She is, in the words of Malachi Kanfer, B’nai Jacob’s cantor, a ​“force” and a ​“rock star.”

“She takes people with no experience in gospel choirs and turns them into gospel groups,” Kanfer said. Valley Soul and Shoreline Soul are proof: the members who came to sing at B’nai Jacob came from different faiths and many ethnicities, but none of them grew up in the gospel tradition.

“For a couple of years people have been coming up to us and saying, ​‘You have to meet Angela,’” Kanfer said.

In August, Kanfer made that happen. ​“I asked if we could get coffee,” Kanfer said. Clemmons agreed. At the end of that cup of coffee, they decided, ​“we’ll make a service happen sometime on Martin Luther King weekend.”

With that goal, Clemmons and Kanfer got to work figuring out what to sing. Many gospel songs, of course, are ​“explicitly Christian songs that we can’t do in the synagogue,” Kanfer said. But plenty of gospel songs would work just fine. ​“With gospel you’re trying to communicate your soul and the joy you want to praise to the world.”

The choir, assembled across the state from several faiths and ethnicities, came together for two long rehearsals under Clemmons’s guidance. ​“It’s an amazing thing to gather with people of other faiths and say, ​‘we have our own traditions, but also all these things in common,” Kanfer said.

So on Friday afternoon, the choir was finishing up its final rehearsal within an hour of the service itself. The members ironed out the ending of ​“We Shall Overcome” and clapped and cheered for themselves.

The performance of the three songs happened during the middle of the evening’s service, with choir and backing band taking over the bima and Clemmons taking a position in the center aisle. She encouraged the audience to clap along, which it did.

All that they’d rehearsed fell into place as the choir filled the synagogue with music. They finished with ​“We Shall Overcome”; Clemmons mentioned that it was only right to commemorate King by performing ​“his song.”

The audience responded with thunderous applause at the last note, and, just as that died down, a cry from a congregant of ​“one more time!” that drew laughter from around the room.

On the spot, Adam Dworkin, president of B’nai Jacob, invited Clemmons and the choir to do it again next year.

The services at B’nai Jacob and Mishkan Israel mark only the latest in a string of efforts to bring people of different faiths together, even as too many of them have arisen as the result of violence — the church shooting in Charleston, S.C. in 2017, the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

“It feels incredibly good to have people of other faiths come and sing with us and support us and be with us,” Kanfer said. ​“There’s this effort to return to love, again and again.”

For her part, Rabbi Shapiro emphasized the sense of urgency that remains in King’s message.

“Now more than ever we need to hear the prophetic words of Dr. King, and we need to hear them as Jews, and as Americans,” she said. In the current political climate, she said, ​“it’s easy to doubt that there has been progress.” In such times, ​“we need to be called to our responsibilities” to challenge racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of prejudice wherever we find them.

To do that might require some uncomfortable moments of self-reflection. Shapiro recalled a conversation with congregants after the Pittsburgh shooting in which someone felt that more Christian congregations should be standing with B’nai Jacob, after ​“we’ve been standing with them,” Shapiro recalled.

“And I thought, ​‘Have we?’”