Gay Cantorial Soloist Visits Rehoboth for High Holy Days

Instead, she got a nice Jewish boy.

Steve and his partner, Larry Kaplan, live in Minneapolis but visited Rehoboth recently to assist with Seaside Jewish Community’s High Holy Days services.

Geenberg, a cantorial soloist, was imported to assist visiting Rabbi Martin Siegel with Sussex County’s first-ever Rosh Hashanah service. He stayed for 10 days to provide musical leadership and solos for the services and traditions that mark the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur services.

Greenberg, who has been singing at Synagogue since he was 10, came to Rehoboth at the request of Rabbi Siegel who had gotten his name from a cantor in Baltimore. At home in Minnesota, Steve is part of a group of lay music leaders and cantorial soloists who rotate the responsibility for assisting with the services at their own and other synagogues around the country. While Steve belongs to a mainstream synagogue at home, the rabbi for his congregation happens to be gay.

“When I was asked to come here, I had no idea that Rehoboth had such a large gay community,” Steve says. “People in the Midwest don’t know anything about it!” After talking with the rabbi and hearing about the community’s outreach through Letters, Steve knew he was about to mix a vacation with a job. “I’d never been to Maryland or Delaware, so this was going to be a wonderful new experience.”

Steve’s Mom, however, was not so sure. Not knowing about Rehoboth’s large gay community, she was worried when Steve announced that he and Larry would be coming East for the holy days. “Do they know you’re gay?” she asked. “I don’t want them to find out and then send you home!”

Mom needn’t have worried. Steve and Larry arrived here September 5th and were welcomed by the growing Seaside community. “Rabbi Siegel is really open, and everyone has been so friendly and supportive,” says Steve. At the Rosh Hashanah service, there were plenty of gay people, a truly diverse experience.

While much of the service was sung in Hebrew, when Steve sang the sections in English it was clear that he brought a contemporary sensibility to the proceedings. Gender pronouns were changed to be non-specific, for instance, changing “father” to “parent.”

In the original text for some services there is a passage that actually says, “Thank you God for not making me a woman,” says Steve. Finding that unacceptable, he replaces it with “Thank you God for making me in your image.”

Steve has also always encouraged maximum participation from the congregation at any services where he is the soloist. He makes impassioned pleas for people to sing along, asking them to just hum if they don’t know the words, or advocating singing a tune of their own. “I mean it,” he says from the head of the room, “just so long as you sing.”

At all of the services, Steve was delighted to find the crowd of 100 or so people doing their best to accompany him. “We really had a great response,” he says.

In the 10-day period of reflection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Steve stayed in town with a host family and was able to find some time to explore downtown Rehoboth and check out some of the restaurants and shops. “What a wonderful town,” Steve says, hoping he’ll be able to return for more working vacations like this one.

Because the holidays happened to fall during the week of September 11, Steve says the atmosphere here was appropriately somber, and he was especially moved by the service at the bandstand on the 11th.

Questions about spirituality and services aside, exactly how did Steve meet the nice Jewish guy who met most of Mom’s criteria?

“We met in synagogue! Larry was living in Iowa and searching for a community with more of a Jewish population. He went to the web site for the World Congress of GLBT Jews, and talked to some folks online who recommended he come to Minneapolis. Those friends called me and said they knew “a single Jewish man coming to town and wanted to introduce me.”

Having enjoyed his introduction to Rehoboth, Steve is looking forward to more visits here in the future.