Some people say they’re bored in shul.

The davening is too long. The chazzan is too slow. The melodies are outdated. (No complaints about the rabbi, though!) But here’s the uncomfortable truth: It’s not the music that changed; it’s us.

Actor Timothée Chalamet recently suggested that opera and ballet can feel boring to modern audiences. His comments caused quite a stir – especially with opera singers and ballet dancers. Yet he wasn’t so much dismissing high culture as he was diagnosing a deeper condition.

Perhaps the issue isn’t the art form; it’s our capacity to enter into it.

We are not bored. We are disconnected. And Judaism was never meant to be experienced from a distance. It demands participation, emotional engagement, and, ultimately, intimacy.

There was a time when chazzanut was not something you listened to. It was something you entered. The drawn-out notes and the rising and falling melodies weren’t merely aesthetic flourishes. They were pathways into the heart. A chazzan elongated a note or sand a falsetto, and people would close their eyes. Today, they check their watches.

We have become spectators of experiences we were meant to live. What once stirred the soul can now feel distant – not because it lost its power, but because we lost our fluency in the language it speaks.

In a world starving for feeling, how can we recapture a sense of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)