When the sun dips behind the ridgetops of north-central West Virginia today, Daniel Hazen will help steer the members of Morgantown’s Tree of Life Congregation through the most important holiday of their Jewish faith.
Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
The day Jews the world over gather to repent and reconcile past sins of the year.
The day that comes on the heels of the ten previous ones of High Holy Days and their soul-plumbing period of reflection.
Hazen will don his shawl to the sing and chant the solemn Kol Nidre prayer, which is simply an accounting of the above.
In that moment, members of the tiny synagogue on South High Street will be transformed.
And transported: The Western Wall. The Inquisition. Auschwitz.
Generations of struggle, persecution and personal accountability, even.
“You just need to always work to do the right thing,” said Hazen, a compact 62-year-old man who is an esteemed professor of music at Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico, smiling.
The university is actually a collection of college campuses four hours east of Mexico City and near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Yom Kippur will open to 25 hours of fasting and other denials. It will conclude at sundown Wednesday.
And when it’s done, an undeniable lightness of being will prevail, given that one’s sins are forgiven.
It will help that Hazen, a friend, is ushering the journey.
He’s a long, cherished friend to Tree of Life, in fact.
From Morocco to Morgantown
Hazen, whose family fled their native Morocco for Israel after the 6-Day War in 1967, started driving over to Morgantown 25 years ago to cantor for Yom Kippur services while he was in graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia.
“They keep asking me back,” he said Monday afternoon at Tree of Life, while the rain pelted outside.
The rain is an emotional, spiritual metaphor, he said.
No matter the storms of life, he said, faith is faith. And faith is what made him a citizen of the world.
“Israel was a revelation,” he said.
He was 13 when his family and thousands of other Jews began the exodus from their Arabic homelands after the 6-Day War.
As its name decrees, the conflict pitting Israel against Egypt, Syria and Jordan was over in a week.
It didn’t matter that it wasn’t long, though. It still left deep, lasting scars on the region.
There were some 265,000 Jews in Morocco in 1948.
Fifty years later, in 2018, a little more than 2,000 remained.
Prejudice and persecution are why, Hazen said.
“You had to leave,” he said, “and that was it.”
His new home was where he found his voice, he said. A kid who was singing all the time earned a college degree in music theory in Jerusalem.
After living and working in France for a time, a Fulbright internship brought him to the States, where he learned the art of conducting at the Pierre Monteux School in Maine.
From there, it was to Temple for another degree in choral studies.
He was later awarded a doctorate in orchestral direction from the University of South Carolina.
At Universidad Veracruzana, he teaches post-graduate seminars in choral studies, while getting a charge out of directing the “Mixcoacilli” Interfaces Choir — which is made up students of all majors who mostly don’t have prior musical training.
Matters of faith
In Mexico, he dotes on his students, frets about crime and looks forward to marriage someday to a woman he’s seeing who comes from a large, boisterous family.
He’d rather not discuss, on the record, Donald Trump, the wall at the Southern border or immigration.
Mention human potential, though, and he’ll turn into a professor.
He’ll talk about being fluent in five languages: Arabic, Hebrew, English, Spanish and French (with a smattering of Italian tossed in).
Besides his vocal prowess, Hazen also knows his way around a violin, viola, piano, clarinet and guitar.
There’s a point to all the above, he said, and that point has nothing to do with ego or just plain bragging.
If he can do those things, he said, you can, too — when you go wandering for your one, true voice, as he did.
Just ask any Mixcoacilli kid who ever tried to tell the professor he “can’t” sing.
“Of course you can,” is Hazen’s stock reply.
“Singing is like talking. When you’re singing, you’re transmitting emotions. Your creativity is your adaptability, and your adaptability is your survival.”
Just like religious faith, he said. Just like religious faith.
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