Fear and Joy in Sepharad and Ashkenaz

Since then, it has been twelve years that I have merited to minister at my congregation, and when I am asked to describe what it was like for one steeped in the Ashkenazi tradition to take on my particular pulpit, as I regularly am, it is to this moment that I turn. While the tunes at Shearith Israel used for the prayers during the week and Shabbat are different from those with which I was raised, the words are to a great extent the same, as those prayers were established in earlier periods of rabbinic Judaism. Instead, it is the High Holy Days where the liturgical differences make themselves most known—and in a profound, indelible, unforgettable way. It is not only the words and melodies of the piyyutim—the compositions created for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that are recited by Sephardi Jewry—that are different from those of the Ashkenazi world. It is that the very mood they conjure and create is fundamentally different.