GREENFIELD — Even if you knew nothing about music, there would still have been something familiar about the sounds drifting from Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center on Sunday night.
This was klezmer, a traditional Eastern European Jewish music. The sound is unique and easily recognizable. In its texture of accordion, bowed strings, brass and woodwinds, you can still hear bits and pieces from the places that its people have passed through: strains from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, maybe even hints of jazz.
Sunday’s festivities were part of Hawks & Reed’s yearly Hanukkah party. The music was sure to convey something of what the holiday is about, said Yosl Kurland, the singer of the Wholesale Klezmer Band, who was performing. The key element is an apparent contradiction: the music is melancholy, maybe even gloomy, but also danceable and hummable. It’s dark, but also light.
The music is a big part of the Hawks & Reed party, but equally important are a special menorah-lighting ceremony and the traditional food of the holiday: potato latkes, bean soup and apple sauce. Everything was homemade by the staff of the Stone Soup Cafe, a pay-what-you-can restaurant that is open on Saturdays at All Souls Church.
Lighting the menorah is a ritual re-enactment of a traditional Jewish story. After an episode in the second century BCE involving occupation by a Greek government and a temporary ban on Jewish religion, the Jews attempted to re-dedicate their temple in Jerusalem. The ceremony involved lighting a menorah to burn every night, but they only had enough oil for one night. The story is, somehow it lasted eight nights.
The food, like the music, conveys something of the story of the holiday.
“We’re talking about a richness, a bounty, that was unexpected,” said Kirsten Levitt, the executive chef of Stone Soup Cafe. “That’s why you fry the latkes, that’s why you have golden apple sauce.”
The story is in the book of Maccabees, but that’s not canonical in the Jewish Bible. So Hanukkah is seen as a historical holiday, rather than biblical, said Andrea Cohen-Kiener, rabbi at Temple Israel in Greenfield. There are enough credible sources to indicate at least some historical basis to the story, she said.
After the sun sets, the music pauses, and everyone gathers to light the candles. This is the traditional ritual of Hanukkah: starting with only one candle on the first night, another is added each night for eight nights until, on the last night, the whole row is lit at once.
“Literally, there is more light every day,” Cohen-Kiener said. “It celebrates something that happens in nature and that happens in our lives.”
At the Hawks & Reed party, everyone was encouraged to bring a menorah, and they were all lit at once. Steve Goldsher, whose family owns Hawks & Reed, first saw this at a Hanukkah party that a friend of his in Ashfield has hosted for years. The Ashfield party usually has 40 or 50 menorahs, he said.
For Hawks & Reed, this was the third year of hosting a Hanukkah party. It is always on a Sunday, said Cohen-Kiener. This year, Hanukkah happened to cover two Sundays, its first day and its last day. Organizers chose the second Sunday, the last night of the eight, because it made for a better candle ceremony, Cohen-Kiener said.
“It’s so much more beautiful when they’re all lit up,” she said. “It makes a different impression.”
After the ceremony, the candles were left to burn for about half an hour, noticeably changing the lighting of the room. And the band started back up again. The instruments blended into the same bizarre texture and the lyrics were still in a different language. But more people took to dancing this time.
Kurland, the band’s singer, said that when they started the band in 1982, he barely knew any Yiddish. But he became the singer because the others knew even less. He didn’t really learn the language until after he had already been singing the songs for some time. Now he teaches Yiddish, too.
Originally, klezmer music was probably based on traditional Hebrew prayer music, he said. The foreign elements are probably from wedding songs that the Jews picked up as they moved from place to place. There’s a Yiddish saying, he noted, that might sum up that strange contradictory quality of lightness in darkness. In English, it means “to laugh with tears.”
“I think this is at the heart of the Jewish outlook on life,” Kurland said. “You can’t understand happiness if you don’t have sadness. And you can’t bear the sadness if you don’t allow yourself happiness.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 261.