Chava Mirel

Just to get a little. Um, break in the test, and, um, I'll ask you just, like, 3 or 4 questions and just make sure I watch the time. Okay, great. So this is Ruth Kodish-Eskind, and it's May 7th. Can you state your name, please?

I'm Chava Mirel.

And may I have your consent to record this conversation?

Yes.

Thanks. So we're here today to talk about the importance of preserving Jewish history. Can you remember being taught about Jewish history when you were growing up, and how were you taught?

Um, I was taught about Jewish history from before I can remember. It's been a part of my life from, you know, the first day. I can't really separate my understanding of Jewish history from my understanding of Jewish present, because it seems like it's always been kind of combined-that the history and the present are happening at the same time, in a way. So that's been my experience.

I love that. Do you want to talk about that more?

I think a lot of it has to do with celebrating holidays and the way that holidays, you know, as an early childhood person, my first contacts with Judaism were through holiday celebration, I think Shabbat.

Okay.

All right.

Beginning again.

Okay.

Um, I think we captured the bit about Jewish holidays growing up, but you were going to talk about history and presence and how you saw kind of the present being wrapped up in history, and maybe vice versa.

Mhm. Well, now, as a teacher, this is something that I can verbalize. You know, as a, you know, someone who works with kids in classrooms. But at the time, as a younger kid, I couldn't probably have said this in these words. But when we celebrate Jewish holidays, it's happening right now. But it's about something that happened a long time ago, and even we're supposed to sometimes pretend that it happened to us like it was actually happening right now, and that we're experiencing it in this moment. So, it's almost like method acting or something. but it was like experiencing the past, relating to the past as if it were the future or the present. You know, both-all three at the same time. So, that was really how I experienced Judaism as a kid. I don't think I really...not that I didn't know that it happened a long time ago, but it felt like it was still happening and that I was part of it. Yes.

Um, I'm going to ask you to just drop your hands from the mic.

Oh, sorry.

No. You're great. Um, I'm curious about, like, I love the-the holidays as, like, a form of historical teaching and preservation. And I'm curious if, well, I'll ask about your family and ask if there's, like, certain holidays or certain stories that were, like, important to your family. And if there was any family history that got kind of tied into that.

That's interesting about my family. So, my dad's a rabbi and we did like Jewish things all the time. That was our whole life. And I also went to Jewish day school, too, so parallel to my home life and my synagogue life was also like the Jewish day life. So, everything was Jewish all the time. But I, I, we were serving the community in all of those contexts, not that we didn't celebrate at home, but like it all was in the context of the larger community in so many ways. And we didn't really celebrate holidays with our extended family because they were all on the East Coast. We were the only family-part of our family in Seattle. And so our community, wherever my dad was serving and the nursing home and all of the other aspects of the community were the way that I experienced Jewish life. So, it was like it wasn't personal to me, exactly. It was like about this larger thing, and we didn't have our own little things. It was funny to think about it, but I definitely got to experience it through the eyes of like, elderly people and like all the different aspects of the community. It was really cool. I got to perform for, you know, the Kline Galland home, and there were other communities of seniors and, you know, people gathering all over the place in the '80s. They don't do it as much anymore, but they were always having luncheons and, you know, people gathering and they wanted music at it. And I got to sing for the people, but it was always in service of this other thing. It was never about like me performing or anything like that. So, I feel like I was in some ways just witnessing these gatherings. It was really pretty cool.

Yes, really interesting perspective. Yes. Do you want to talk a little bit about your musical training and the relationship to learning music and Jewish history or Jewish tradition?

So, when I think about when I was two years old, basically my life consisted of my dad was a rabbi and my mom was an opera singer, and they and my dad played the guitar and the bass. So, they were always singing, like all the services and the prayers and everything was all singing. They were they conducted the choir at the temple. So, they were like singing with these young people, and they were always singing, and then they had me singing too. When I was two years old, I was singing these concerts. It just felt like the normal thing to do. And they also had me studying Hebrew with a Hebrew tutor that I was learning to read Hebrew, because I was just really into letters when I was a little kid. So, that was like my early life was just-I was singing in front of audiences, but the audience was like the Hadassah luncheon, okay, so it was not like a paying audience. It was an audience of bubbes. And they were really loving. And it was a very uplifting experience. You know, it was a no fail, no failure possible situation. So, actually, it was a perfect way to get experience as a musician because it was like just being loved constantly, you know?

I can imagine that the bubbes would be really happy to see a singing two year old.

They're still happy to see me. I'm 49 and I'm still cute to them, you know. So, it's like you can always find someone who can appreciate what you're bringing. And it really does keep me feeling young to sing for elderly people, I have to say.

Um, is there anything-I'm curious about, like the history and music connection, like, your singing songs that have been sung for many, many generations? Like, how have they changed? Are you engaged in that kind of thinking about music?

Constantly engaged in that. I am lucky enough to be on faculty for some Jewish music like conferences and other, like, studying situations. So, I'm always trying to think about this and put it into context. And I do work with, um, people who worked with Debbie Friedman, for instance, who is a very prominent Jewish composer in the '70s, '80s and '90s and really influenced me as a woman doing liturgical music in progressive Judaism, which did not really exist before her, you know. So, I'm really I've taken that on as something that I really care about and I really think a lot about. And when I was a little kid, it was the '70s and there was a big revival of Jewish music in Israel at the time. There was like these Israeli music festivals, rock festivals, Hasidic rock festivals. And I had-we had these records, and that was the music that my parents were really into. And so it was like new music that was like ancient texts. It was these like young Israeli people which like this brand new culture that had never existed before, but it was all ancient. It was based in ancient. It was this whole mix up of now and then and so that-and now that was 50 years ago. So, that's now pretty distant past. And so those are like the old throwback songs to the kids today. And, you know, I'm constantly thinking about the connection there because for instance, one of those records had this song on it by this young, young woman from 1967, and it is the most famous Jewish song. It's called "Oseh Shalom Bimromav." Okay, people, sing it all over the world. Now there's other tunes to those words, but this is the one that everyone sings. And people, you know, Hasidic Jews sing it. They may not know that this woman wrote it. She's still alive. Her name is Nurit Hirsh, and she's in Israel. I know about her through this song, but also, I worked with her kid in New York, and he's my age. So, she wrote the song ten years before I was born. She was probably a teenager. So, like that to me-I tell that story everywhere I go. It like so, impacts me to know how much of an impact you can have on your community without realizing it. I'm sure she probably wrote it in her kitchen. She didn't know that was going to happen. And it gets beyond you at that point. Like it goes out and it's not even about you anymore. It's about, you know, the people needed that song and I could even continue talking about it because people didn't even sing Oseh Shalom, really, before that, it was not a moment. Now you have to sing Oseh Shalom. You cannot do a service without it. It was like it's the end of the Kaddish. So, it wasn't like a big musical number or anything, you know? But now there's a million Oseh Shaloms. It was like a cultural shift, you know. So, I'm always thinking about, like, what are those little moments that a person like this, there's a midrash about a person named Nahshon who, like, was the first person to put their foot in the Red Sea, and then it parted, but they were brave enough to step out. There was like an unknown person. It wasn't Moses. It was someone you know. So, thinking about how we all could be that in our community, and it's not about, you know, ego or status or anything like that. It's-it's bigger than the individual.

It's an interesting note in relation to history because like, you think of history as being this progressive linear story of, like, what happened because that happened because that happened. But sometimes someone just is brave and steps into the Red sea or makes a song or whatever (Totally.) kind of like other leaps.

Yes. And, I mean, they don't even maybe they don't even know they're doing something brave at the time. And maybe the brave thing is the next thing, like, maybe it was the person who advocated for it to be on the record. Or, you know, maybe it was some unknown step in the process that we'll never know about. And that's actually something I'm really interested in, is like being that, you know, so right now I'm looking for like, who are the next people who are going to come that need to be uplifted right now and need to like, have advocacy basically.

Do you want to talk about that more? What do you what kind of work is that?

Um, well, I'm lucky enough to be part of like some official mentorship programs where they assign high school and college Jewish musicians to, you know, touring artists or whatever...composers. And I'm part of a program like that. And then also I just, like, put the signal out to the universe that I want to mentor, especially young women or people of marginalized genders. So, I'm just like, people come to me for mentorship and I'm always looking for more. Yes, it's pretty cool.

Cool. Yes. Do you want to talk about, like, what mentorship means to you? And then maybe specifically in relationship to Jewish history and Jewish history preservation?

Yes, absolutely. You know, what I'm always telling the young people that I mentor is like, this field of music, especially in leadership, is different from the other kinds of music and leadership that you'll learn about in the world, because there's no commercial element to it. And so, like, you have to do it because you care about it. Otherwise there's no incentive, you know? And so it's a kind of an act of service. And that just puts a totally different spin on it. And I think, like, maybe that might be a thread through Jewish history of, you know, how Jewish art manifests, how Jewish wisdom gets passed around. It's never for profit, really, you know. And so, like, it's a totally different approach than we would have in our culture. And it takes it-takes a lot of cultivating of like caring, you know, about other people and looking around to see who needs help. And usually, like, I'm mentoring these kids or young people or young adults so that they can mentor other people, because they're usually getting hired to teach in a religious school or to be a songleader for camp, so, like, I'm basically uplifting them to know that they can uplift someone else and how that whole thing works.

I'm going to bring us back to WSJHS we're kind of hoping to gather a little bit of content and stories about this institution as a Jewish history institution. So, I'm curious if you could share, like, your connection to the Jewish Historical Society?

I didn't actually know how connected I was to the Jewish Historical Society until I started this process of planning this interview. Like, I didn't have a full consciousness of it. But I'm so involved in it in so many ways. I think, like, I hold a lot of memories in Seattle, in Washington State, as someone who has lived here my whole life and who has been part of so many different aspects of the community. And so I'm kind of a connector, and I feel like that's what this organization is about, like connecting between the past and the present and the future and connecting between all of our different histories and making a shared history. And so that's something that I just want to be in service of. And I'm really, really grateful to be called in to participate.

Yes. I feel like you've spoken to the purpose of the organization, which is kind of the next question I had. But I'm curious if you've-I mean, you've been a part of a lot, of a lot of things, it sounds like. But if there-have there been any other Jewish heritage institutions that you've kind of connected with or worked with?

The way that I'm involved in Jewish heritage is by-hrough- Kaddish lists and Yahrzeit lists. Okay. And so I have witnessed a lot of people come into this world, and a lot of people leave this world and how their memories are preserved by their families and loved ones. So, that's kind of like my window into preservation of history, and I have had a lot of maybe more painful moments of seeing, like a new rabbi come in who doesn't know how to pronounce the names of the people who have died, and that that's been painful for me to witness. And so, on a personal level, I've seen how important it is to preserve history and how that that's kind of a theme of Jewish life, and how preserving history is one of the keys to our survival and to our vibrance. Our aliveness is to be a witness to the past and what's come before us.

How did you come to be holding the the name pronunciations or a part of the Kaddish list? Or I mean just part of your general life trajectory?

I think it's specific to me and my family because my dad has officiated funerals for a lot of families in Seattle and Washington State in general over the many years. And people associate him with their loved one, not just their funeral, but he-I'm just going to hype my dad. He really did this. He would visit every single person in the hospital. He was there with their family when the person that they loved died. Like, he really knows how to shepherd people through that process. And so people associate me through him with their loved ones who are no longer with us. And so, like, I take that really seriously. It has nothing to do with me, actually. You know, I'm just an heir to this memory system. But, like, I know how important it is, you know? So that's how I'm part of it.

Thank you so much.

Yes

Um, do you want to just name your dad for the record?

My dad is Rabbi Jim Mirel. He has been a rabbi here in this area for over 50 years.

Yes. Is there anything else you want to share before we close out the interview?

I think the other thing I just want to share is that I just feel lucky to be born into a time in Jewish history when women and people of marginalized genders are part of things, you know, if I think about Jewish history overall, that was not the case. [Excuse me.] So just the fact that I'm able to lend my voice to the story, it's it's kind of a miracle.

Do you have any, like, I'm curious about? You know, there's always been Jewish women and Jewish people being a part of Jewish life and Jewish culture. And do you have any like, I'm curious if there's any projects or work that's like connecting that kind of history or bringing it along, even though it wasn't as recorded or wasn't as passed along? I don't know?

You know, just like in every culture, everything that's not on the surface is under the surface. And it's always been there. But something that I'm really excited about right now that I think is carrying forward voices that have been silenced is this project called Svara, which is a queer Talmud study project that's really, really prestigious. And they're doing a pilot program, through synagogues, and my synagogue was chosen as their pilot synagogue. So I'm really excited about being part of, like, bringing the the voice of queer Torah forward into the light. I feel like those are like stories and wisdom that has not been shared as widely as it could be and needs to be.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing about that project.

Yes.

Okay, let me turn it off.