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Joey Weisenberg
Joey Weisenberg performs at a 2018 Hadar
ensemble concert.

SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
Photos by Jonathan Heisler
T here are a lot of similarities between blues music and Jewish
music, at least according to Joey Weisenberg.

Th ey both have limited scales and notes used in songs, mak-
ing them prime genres for variations and improvisations. Th ey both
“speak from the heart.”
“Blues and nigunim (Jewish wordless melody) share a sense of longing
and a sense of depth and connection to the emotion of being alive,”
Weisenberg said.

For Weisenberg, tapping into that is what drives his creation of music.

He’s the founder and director of the Rising Song Institute, a Philadelphia-
based community of musicians and prayer leaders in pursuit of innova-
tive reimaginings of traditional Jewish music as a spiritual practice.

On May 26, Weisenberg, 40, performed his February album “L’eila” at
the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, his fi rst
time performing songs from the album with a band and live audience.

But for someone who’s spent the last decade building community
through the Rising Song Institute, an off shoot of the Hadar Institute,
a New York-based egalitarian yeshiva, and its predecessor, the Hadar
Center for Communal Jewish Music, Weisenberg’s experience creating
his most recent project was marked by solitude.

“In COVID, there was no chance to sing with big groups of people, and
so this project took on a little bit more of a quality of introspection and
of solitude and self-refl ection, and it’s a bit more meditative, and it’s also
a bit more sad,” Weisenberg said.

Weisenberg’s past seven projects have been a collection of nigunim,
intended to create singalong experi-
ences in live performances. On “L’eila,”
Weisenberg puts music to psalms, wailing
words of Hebrew in the Ashkenazes dia-
lect, oft en accompanied by only a guitar.

Weisenberg, a Mount Airy resident,
recorded the album last summer but
composed it in his weekly online open
studio sessions, the virtual audience a
balm for pandemic-induced isolation.

“It was really encouraging to be able to
compose in real time,” he said.

Balancing an album produced in sol-
itude with playing it for his community
coincided with the themes about which
Weisenberg sang. Many psalms have
themes of balancing mourning and joy.

“Th ere’s a line [in “Odekha (Psalm
118)”] that says, ‘Th is is the greatest day
that was ever created! Let’s be happy
and joyous!’ And then literally the next
sentence within the same breath, you
say, ‘God save us now!’” Weisenberg said.

“You get this roller coaster ride of emo-
tion and feeling in every song, and it just
goes up and down. And that’s kind of
what life is like these days.”
Embracing opposites and confl icting
ideas is at the core of Jewish thought,
Weisenberg said. It’s also at the core of
his musical genesis.

Growing up in Milwaukee in a musical
family, Weisenberg spent some of his
evenings at a blues bar on one side of
town, playing electric guitar semi-pro-
fessionally; on the other nights, he would
join his grandfather and a community
of Twerski Hasidim on the other side of
town for rousing nigunim.

Aft er taking a pre-med track at
Columbia University, Weisenberg
decided against attending medical school
and instead became a session musician
by age 22, acting as a musical chameleon
and playing various instruments to help
out bands recording albums.

Fift een years of “musical tourism”
left Weisenberg wanting to see what
kind of music he could produce aft er
being fi lled with music from diff erent
genres and bands from all over the
world. On the brink of creative overfl ow,
Weisenberg attended a Hadar retreat
over Shavuot one year. He took a 5 a.m.

shift , playing music for sleepy students
studying Torah to keep them awake and
to keep morale high.

“I would just start making up nigunim,
almost like they were being revealed like
at Mount Sinai,” he said.

Weisenberg attributes the beginning
of his songwriting to his young family.

When his fi rst of four children was born,
Weisenberg’s infant would not stop cry-
ing. Weisenberg would sing nigunim to
his baby, sometimes all night long.

“I wrote hundreds of nigunim that
year,” he said.

Even aft er more than a decade of creat-
ing melodies, Weisenberg still describes
himself as having music always running
through his head.

“For better or worse,” Weisenberg said,
“these years, I cannot stop the river of
song that’s fl owing out of me.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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