Every tune leads to the same gate

This year, the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, which means the shofar will be silent. As the story goes, there is a certain irony to the reason. The rabbis worried that Jews loved the mitzvah so much that they might accidentally break Shabbat trying to get to a shofar. So they took it away. Jewish logic at its finest.

It means the first sound of 5787 will not be the blast of a ram’s horn. It will be whatever melody the person beside you is singing. And if you have spent your life moving between a Sephardi synagogue and Ashkenazi prayers, as I have, you know those melodies are not the same song.

My family are Iraqi Jews. They left Baghdad, moved to India, and landed in Sydney in the 1960s when my mum was just eight years old. I grew up steeped in that journey. The food, the stories, the way my relatives argued. And the prayer tunes.

Every Shabbat and chag, our house was filled with the long, winding, ornate melodies of Sephardi prayer. I only ever heard Ashkenazi tunes at school, and, no offence to anyone out there, they sounded flat to me. Like someone had ironed all the curves out. A bit like a performance.

In our synagogue, the congregation sings together. Not in the background. And definitely not politely. They’re loud. The congregation likes to make itself heard.

The melodies wind through Arabic scales, picking up the colour of every country our community had passed through on its way to Australia.

When I married my Ashkenazi husband, I knew I wanted our children to hear both sides of their heritage. So they go to both synagogues. They heard both tunes. Both ways of praying. For them, it’s normal. But for me, I have had to learn to appreciate the Ashkenazi tunes. And my husband, to his credit, has spent years trying to understand the Arabic drawl of Sephardic ones.

The contrast hits hardest on Yom Kippur. Kol Nidrei is the service I love most, and for a few years when the children were small I had to miss it. For our family, they were too young to sit through an evening service that long. My husband and I took turns, one of us staying home while the other went to shule. It got to the point where I told him I couldn’t miss it any more. Now, finally, we can go as a family. The only question is which synagogue we choose.

And that question matters, because Kol Nidrei sounds completely different depending on which room you are standing in. In the Iraqi tradition I grew up with, Kol Nidrei is a simple congregational chant. Everyone says the words together, alternating with whoever is standing on the bimah leading the service. It is communal. It reminds me almost of a conversation.

In the Ashkenazi tradition, Kol Nidrei is the melody. The chazan sings it three times, each repetition building, and the congregation listens. It is also nothing like the Kol Nidrei I grew up with. Same words of Aramaic legalese. Same promise. But two entirely different emotional languages.

And then there is the close. Ne’ilah, the final service of Yom Kippur, when the gates of heaven are about to shut. It is my other favourite service. The urgency of it, the last chance to get the words right. In Sephardi and Mizrahi congregations, Ne’ilah opens with El Nora Alila, a poem by the 12th-century Spanish poet Moshe ibn Ezra. Every verse ends with the same phrase: in this hour of Ne’ilah. You would expect it to be solemn. It is not. The melody is spirited, almost joyful, sung with gusto by a room full of people who have been fasting for 25 hours and somehow find the energy to raise their voices one more time. It is so beautiful that even some Ashkenazi communities have adopted it.

My children do not carry the disorientation I sometimes feel. They move between the two services like it is the most natural thing in the world. They hear the tunes of their Iraqi great-grandparents one synagogue visit and the melodies of their Ashkenazi grandparents the next, and they ask me why it sounds different.

For me it’s simple and beautiful all wrapped into one answer. Our families carried their prayers through different countries, and the music picked up the melodies of every place along the way.

They love the differences. They do not see them as a contradiction. And watching them, I think they might be onto something. Our differences are not a problem to solve. They are what makes us remarkable.

This Rosh Hashanah, when the shofar stays silent on the first morning, listen to what fills that space. Whether the tune next to you came from Baghdad or Krakow, Morocco or Vilna, it is reaching for the same thing.

The turning of the year, the hope that the coming year will be better than the last. The prayers for safety, peace and kindness. The search for forgiveness. The hope that we get to start again.