Hadar empowers Jews to create & sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah, Avodah, and Hesed.
Description
Overview: An intimate concert series, the Rising Song Salon welcomes musical artists whose work sits at the intersection of Jewish text and storytelling into Hadar’s beit midrash for an exploration of song, source material, and creative process. In conversation with Hadar’s R. Deborah Sacks Mintz, each artist will share songs from the heart, inviting the audience into their music’s story. Come ready to listen, sing, and ask questions!
- June 24, 2025: Khumesh Lider with Basya Schechter and Avi Fox-Rosen
Khumesh Lider are tragicomic retellings of Tanakh stories from Eastern European Yiddish poet Itzik Manger’s 20th-century collection of poetry. Characters like Adam and Eve and Abraham and Sarah are plucked out of Canaan and set in interwar Eastern Europe. Hasidim, Turks, Egyptians, and Canaanites collide in the mythical geography that Manger creates. Basya and Avi’s original musical settings of this poetry weave together a singer-songwriter aesthetic with theater, pop, and world music influences, arranged with lush vocal harmonies throughout.
- July 1, 2025: Kedmah with Yoni Avi Battat
Kedmah: The Rising Song Piyyut Project is an ensemble of musicians and prayer leaders excavating their Mizrahi Jewish heritage through poetry and song. Led by Yoni Avi Battat and R. Yosef Goldman, their debut album, Simu Lev, presents melodies from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Morocco, Turkey, and Jerusalem, rendered with deep reverence for tradition and boldly adapted with an ear toward our modern musical world. Through Kedmah, Yoni’s interactive performances, workshops, and recordings invite listeners to travel through history and relish in the spiritual depth that this expressive poetry and music can bring into our lives.
- July 8, 2025: Music as Midrash with Elana Arian
Our teacher of blessed memory, Debbie Friedman, taught that just as the sages engaged in the process of midrash - bridging the gap between reverence for the fixed texts of our tradition and theological creativity - so too, do composers of new Jewish melodies. In transmitting our sacred texts through new musical mediums, creators of contemporary Jewish song continue the midrashic tradition of interpreting and re-interpreting Biblical text, responding to contemporary problems, and reflecting new Jewish realities through their musical interpretations. Elana Arian is a modern-day musical midrashist whose original musical settings shine new light onto our sacred texts, answering ancient questions while asking new ones of our tradition.