Yemeni Crickets

Last Shabbat I got a chance to go to a Yemenite shul. I stayed with a lovely Yemenite family (the mother's parents came in the early 1900s) who put me up for Shabbat. The mother was a kindergarten teacher, and the father a retired middle school teacher in a religious public school.

The sephardim really know how to live a relaxed, Jewish lifestyle. They daven 3 times a day, but they wear shorts, they watch television and movies, and integrate with modern society. Actually, the Yemeni are not sephardim, as I was told; they're their own branch, just like ashkenaz and sephardim.

During pesukei d'zimrei, the introductory blessings, the entire male congregation chants the prayers together, unlike in an ashkenaz synagogue where only the prayer leader chants. The effect is unlike anything i've experienced in any sephardic shul, though, where they also do group chanting; the chanting ranged in sound from a staccato monotone that sounded like a buddhist monastary to melodic tunes that sounded gregorian, to a philip-glass-like atonal chorus. There were 20 or 30 men there, and the effect of the combined voices was hypnotic.

The torah reading was unique as well; two readers alternate in the reading: one reads a verse from the scroll in hebrew, then the other, a teenager, reads the aramaic translation from the onkelos. The tunes were different between the hebrew and aramaic readers; the hebrew reader sang quavers and microtones in a very middle-eastern style, while the aramaic was much plainer. The entire torah reading took an incredibly long time--about an hour and a half--because of this dual reading. They swapped readers three or four times because it took so long. The last reader was extremely slow, but incredibly rich, with very elaborate chanting.

One of the congregants, a 22 year old man in jeans and a white button-up shirt with a cowboy print on the back, was getting married, and was pelted with hard candy from the women in the upper section when he went up for an aliyah--a standard practice. After his aliyah the woman ululated like arabs--surprising, and a little eery.

It was hard to follow the hebrew, because the pronunciation is very different from either ashkenaz or sephardic pronunciation; for example, the gimmel has two sounds rather than one (jell and gill), and most of the vowels are different. They even pronounce the ayin, which none of the other jewish groups pronounce.