By Aaron Leibel and Miriam and Achi Guggenheim

Special to The Jewish State 

Gail Javitt believes her new CD illustrates the rich history of the Jewish people.

“It is remarkable that we can have Havdalah songs in a Middle Eastern style, while at the same time, other songs sound Eastern European or modern and folksy,” says the Silver Spring resident of her album, Like a Braided Candle. “Wherever Jews have lived, they have adapted and made their own the music traditions they heard around them.”

Although there are many CDs of Shabbat songs, she knows of none with a sole focus on the Havdalah ceremony, which separates Shabbat from the rest of the week.

Of the 12 songs on her first CD, she composed two — “Like a Braided Candle” and “A Gute Voch” (A Good Week), based on what her grandmother would say each week to her and her other grandchildren, in person or on the telephone.

Javitt, whose brother, Joel Javitt, lives in Hillside with his wife, Kim, also composed new verses for Hamavdil, and did an “English adaptation” to the traditional “Hakel Avraham/Gott fun Avrohom” (God of Avraham).

The CD also includes works in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino, with the album liner providing translations and transliterations to help meet Javitt’s goal of “making the music accessible to as many people as possible,” she says.

She says she always loved singing, especially Jewish music.

“Singing made me happy and is something that got me praise from my family. It is a visceral, emotional experience,” she explains. “Jewish music is the culture I grew up in.”

Javitt was born in New York City in 1968 and grew up in a modern Orthodox family. Attending Jewish day school through the 12th grade, she received her bachelor’s from Columbia College, a law degree from Harvard University and a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins University. She works for a JHU-affiliated think tank focusing on genetics and policy.

The origins for this CD began with Javitt’s paternal grandmother’s traditional Havdalah greeting to her children and grandchildren, in Yiddish, “a gute voch und a gezunte voch und a mazeldiche voch und a hatzlachadiche voch und a freilediche voch und a parnosodiche voch und a gute voch und a gezunte voch” — a good week, a healthy week, a lucky week, a successful week, a happy week, a profitable week, a good week, a healthy week. Javitt’s desire to set her grandmother’s text to music as a gift to her to her father ultimately blossomed into this beautiful and expansive CD.

While “Like a Braided Candle” is a fascinating piece of cultural anthropology, it is also a musical gem.  Participants in KMS’s Women’s Tefillah Group already know Javitt’s beautiful voice, but even they will be surprised by the virtuosity and versatility Javitt demonstrates in this CD.  Each of the twelve tracks reflects an entirely different style of music, and Javitt remakes her voice for every one.

From the haunting “Hinei Kel Yeshuoti” to the jazzy version of “Hamalach HaGoel,” each piece offers a novel treat and shows a new facet of the singer.  But the greatest surprise is Javitt’s skill as a songwriter.  She composed the words and music for the title track, “Like a Braided Candle” – an instant family favorite complete with a Jewish “gospel” choir, over which Javitt’s voice utterly soars.  And in setting her grandmother’s “a gute voch” to music, Javitt created for herself the most challenging song in the whole CD, a rapid-fire klezmer-type piece that takes her voice in arpeggios over an extensive musical range.

As a modern Orthodox Jew, the kol isha prohibition — that Orthodox men are forbidden to hear a woman sing — “is not an issue for me,” she says, noting that she sang in her day school choir and in the Zamir Chorale of Boston while a student at Harvard.

She says the rules are less stringent for hearing a woman’s voice in a recording, rather than live.

“A nice thing about a recording is that it can be available to a wider audience,” says Javitt, who belongs to the Orthodox Kemp Mill Synagogue in Silver Spring. “To those men who don’t want to listen even to a recording of a woman singing, I hope their wives and daughters enjoy it.”

Most of her public singing has been in the context of choral performances, and solos that she sang in that context, she says. As a Sabbath-observant mother, she has few chances to sing in public, but would love the opportunity to do so.

“The CD was a labor of love, and I hope people enjoy it,” Javitt says. But she enjoys working in law and policy and is “not giving up my day job.”

Aaron Leibel is the arts editor of The Washington Jewish Week, www.washingtonjewishweek.com.

Miriam and Achi Guggenheim write for the newsletter of the Kemp Mill Synagogue, Silver Spring, Md.