Digital Technology, Chanting Torah, and the Sustainability of Tradition

Abstract

This chapter examines strategies where individual Jews employ digital technology to sustain and transmit musical traditions of Torah and haftarah trope, a core element of contemporary Jewish worship. While these examples focus more on personal agency than institutional sustainability, they underscore new approaches to integrating meaningful ritual into the lives of these liberal Jews. Even as certain contemporary Jews have moved away from traditional structures of learning and authority–synagogues, religious schools, rabbis, and cantors–they have developed and supported innovative means to transmit the music performance of biblical chant used in bar/bat mitzvah celebrations in a way that sustains traditional rituals while empowering their personal style of Jewish expression and identity.