Climbing Jacob’s Ladder
Group to feature Jewish, bluegrass, and other American music at Summit shul
To be Jewish is to have a complicated identity. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi? Jew by birth, Jew by choice, Jew by patrilineal descent, Jew according to halachic definition? Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, unaffiliated? Believer, agnostic, atheist? That’s for starters.
To be American is to have a complicated identity. Native-born or immigrant? How many generations from immigration? What’s your ethnic background? New Englander, Southerner, Westerner, Midwesterner? Coastal or flyover? Urban, surburban, or rural? Native English-speaker? Rich, poor, middle class, upper middle class, working class? Republican, Democrat, Independent, unaffiliated, disengaged, nihilist? Again, for starters.
So if you’re an American Jew? You’re either drowning or glorying in possibilities.
Jacob’s Ladder, the three-person group that’ll be artists in residence at Congregation Ohr Shalom in Summit from January 31 through February 2, takes some of the complications of American Jewish identity and joins them — klezmer with bluegrass, niggum with folk — in music.
It stems from the group’s willingness to combine parts of tradition in new ways, all in service of both the music and Jewish life. “We care about traditional Judaism, and we enliven it with spirit while maintaining aspects of the liturgy,” its co-creator and leader, Ariel Wyner, said. “The most important part is making people feel connected to their Judaism.”
Mr. Wyner, 28, grew up feeling that connection. He’s from suburban Philadelphia; his mother, Rabbi Dr. Lisa Malik, is a Conservative rabbi, and his father, Dr. Adi Wyner, is a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Dr. Wyner also is a classically trained singer and chazan, his son said; he used to be a full-time cantor in San Francisco. He worked with Rabbi Alan Lew, a pioneer in Jewish meditation and the author of “This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.” “Rabbi Lew married my parents,” Mr. Wyner said; in many parts of the Jewish world, that is serious yichus.
So Ariel has heard synagogue music throughout his life. “I care a lot about my Judaism, and whenever I walk into a synagogue, I feel like I’m at home,” he said. He was a camper and then a staffer at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. “When I was in Gesher” — that’s the oldest camper division — “and then when I was on staff, the director of the camp and I would walk around with a fiddle and a mandolin” to play and sing campers to bed at night.
Camp is a major source of Jewish music, Mr. Wyner said; many young Jews go to summer camp, and the music is imprinted in their ears and their hearts there. It’s also a place where you’d likely hear folk music.
Mr. Wyner, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music, is both a serious musician and a serious Jew.
“My mom comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, and I have a very deep yearning for the Old World and how Jewish music has manifested there, especially when it comes to chasidic niggumin,” he said.
His colleagues in Jacob’s Ladder are his wife, Sofía Chiarandini, and G (no period!) Rockwell. They’re both Jewish, but neither had been as connected to Jewishness in general, or Jewish music in particular, as they were to bluegrass. Both grew up in Connecticut, both were homeschooled, at least through elementary school, and both discovered bluegrass early in their lives. “Just as I always felt comfortable in a synagogue, that’s how they’ve felt in bluegrass venues,” he said. “We’ve built our identity on top of each other,” he said.
Mr. Rockwell trained at the New England Conservatory of Music; Ms. Chiarandini went to Berklee. That’s where the two met. “We were in a harmony class together,” Mr. Wyner said. “I was just starting in bluegrass, and she already was a wonderful bluegrass violinist. She was the only person who agreed to play with me, because I was such a beginner.” But he learned quickly, and soon the two of them joined a secular bluegrass band.
Jewish music traditionally has incorporated the music of the cultures around it; klezmer alone has Romanian, Greek, Roma, Slavic, and then later jazz and rock elements quite evident in it. And Jacob’s Ladder’s not the first group to combine traditional Jewish music with bluegrass, Mr. Wyner said. They’re proudly in the tradition of Montclair-based Nefesh Mountain, as well as David Grisman, Andy Statman, Shlomo Carlebach, and the Moshav Band, among others.
They’ve also been influenced deeply by Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, he added.
Like many kinds of music in this vast country, even now, when physical distance generally matters far less than it used to, bluegrass has regional divisions. Ms. Chiarandini and Mr. Rockwell — remember they’re from Connecticut — in northeastern bluegrass. (Who knew, right?)
“There’s something about northeastern bluegrass culture that’s very competitive,” Mr. Wyner said. “There’s a lot of technique in it. It’s technically very challenging. You can play it your whole life and think, ‘well, I’m just getting there.’”
Other strands of bluegrass are far more communal, he added; “it’s often Scottish or Irish or Celtic music.
“That’s also a draw to Judaism, which constantly balances between presentational and communal. Judaism alternates between personal and virtuosic,” Mr. Wyner said. “Bluegrass has the same conversation.”
“So I think that’s why I felt so at home.”
That might not be unique to Jewish music and bluegrass, he added, but that’s irrelevant. What does matter is how present it in those two forms, the balance between the competitive and the communal, the performance for others and the sharing with the group.
Jacob’s Ladder started n 2020, “one month before the world shut down,” Mr. Wyner said. “We didn’t get to perform in public until late 2022, and then we took off. We went from being a covid band, and not very active on social media, because I hate social media, to gigging all the time. We do weddings and residencies and we travel all over. In 2023, we played 60 shows.”
The group’s slowing down a bit now, though, because “now we have a kid.”
Mr. Wyner also has a day job.
He’s the director of spiritual engagement at a Conservative shul, Congregation Kehillath Israel, in Brookline, Massachusetts. That means that he’s in charge of the music; the shul doesn’t have a cantor. He’s often the shaliach tzibur — he leads the davening — but he doesn’t do that all the time. “Part of my job is to harness our lay leaders to be slichai tzibur,” he said. “I call this job being the spiritual and music director,” he said. “It’s kind of like a modern-day cantor.” It was created during covid, which turns out of have been a kind of incubator for new ideas.
“We put a serious emphasis on spirituality,” Mr. Wyner said. “That’s a big part of what we do” — of what he does as director of spiritualty, and what Jacob’s Ladder does when it plays. “I want people to be spiritually moved. I want to use spirituality to find our similarities, as opposed to focus on our differences.
“In the different denominations, we pray differently, but when we come together for this kind of music, all of a sudden a Reform Jew can feel connected to an Orthodox Jew, to a Conservative Jew, to everyone in between. We play music for all of those people.”
Most of Jacob’s Ladder’s music is sung in Hebrew, “because that’s the language that we’ve been singing in for thousands of years, no matter where we were, spread out across the world. Hebrew was our common language.”
The group also sings in English; there’s a video online of them singing “Don’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan,” a haunting gospel song. “We want to make ourselves more relatable to other religious communities. If we can make people feel more and more like each other, that’s good.”
All three members of Jacob’s Ladder also feel a deep connection to Israel. Mr. Wyner grew up with that feeling. “Sofía and G went there, and it was a defining moment for them,” he said. “And then they got more into Jewish spiritualty.” Some of that came from the feeling for the land; they hadn’t expected it, but realized that “Israel is so much a part of who we are,” Mr. Wyner said.
They also feel deeply, proudly American.
Musician Gene Lowinger, “who is definitely the first and I think the only Jewish person to have played with Bill Monroe,” will join the group for one of their performances in Summit. Mr. Lowinger, who is a photographer as well as a musician, lives in Maplewood; he’s written a book about his work with Bill Monroe, and his photography includes breathtaking images of chasidic life, as well as of musicians and the secular world.
“We are evolving constantly,” Mr. Wynder said. “We are always editing, changing our sound.” Refining it. “We are working on two records now. We’re going into more reggae and rock spaces, and to try to incorporate more of Pete Seeger and folk.
“The most important thing we do is helping people feel connected,” he concluded.
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