Hadar’s Rising Song Institute cultivates Jewish spiritual life through song. It is a meeting place and incubator for creative musicians and prayer leaders who hope to reinvent the future of music as a communal Jewish spiritual practice. Based in Philadelphia, we engage people throughout North America and around the world through communal singing, immersive study, and experimental music-making.
The Rising Song Institute is part of the Hadar Institute. Hadar empowers Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah, Avodah, and Hesed.
Listen and learn! A track-by-track exploration of the music and lyrics contained in Joey Weisenberg's album Nigunim, Vol. VII: Songs of Ascent. Each song is accompanied by original source texts and related teachings/commentaries, and select tracks include sheet music so you can play along at home!
The new year of the trees, Tu Bishvat, typically occurs around the same time as Shabbat Shirah, when we read the Torah portion of Beshalach recounting the Israelites jubilant song after crossing the sea to freedom from Egyptian slavery. There is an old tradition to feed birds before Shabbat Shirah in acknowledgement of their song, which is said to have inspired this spontaneous singing on the shores of the Reed Sea. In this source sheet, we look at sources describing the songs of both trees and birds, searching for new ways to inspire our own music and prayer.