Rabbi has 88 keys to Jewish religious life

Cotel performs in Portland May 18

By George Robinson

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Things haven’t gone quite the way he had planned, but at age 65 Rabbi Moshe Cotel is contented.

After all, he has managed to achieve success in one of the most highly competitive endeavors, the world of classical music, abandoned it to explore his faith and discovered to his amusement that  music was the best vehicle for him to communicate his deep and abiding love of the Jewish religion, its thought and practice.

The resulting performance piece, “Chronicles: A Religious Life at the Classical Piano,” will be performed in Portland on May 18.

When asked about his career path from composer and teacher to the rabbinate, and now back on the concert stage, Cotel quotes Torah.

“Many are the thoughts in a man’s heart, but God’s plan will be fulfilled,” he says. “I thought God was sending me to become a rabbi, but it hasn’t worked out quite that way. I have an active life as a musician again.”

The Baltimore-born Cotel was educated at the Talmudical Academy there until his bar mitzvah. Then he left and didn’t look back for a very long time.

He left because at 13 he was doing something that few other bar mitzvah candidates have done: He wrote a full-length symphony. Already a student at the Peabody Conservatory’s prep division, he told his piano teacher what he had done. The teacher didn’t believe it until Cotel pulled the 200-page handwritten score from his school bag.

At 23, he won the American Academy Rome Prize for music composition and studied in Italy for two years. Eventually, Cotel was appointed to the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory and found himself back in Baltimore. When he decided to abandon music for the rabbinate, he was chair of the composition department, the composer of two Jewish-themed operas, “Dreyfus” and “Deronda,” the latter based on George Eliot’s last novel, “Daniel Deronda.”

He had not, however, strayed as far as he thought. He was a student at Juilliard when the school was located at 122nd Street, just across Broadway from the Jewish Theological Seminary. When he decided in his 50s to become a rabbi, he took some courses at JTS.

“It took me all those years to cross Broadway,” he says.

In 2000, Cotel took early retirement from Peabody to pursue his rabbinical studies at the Academy of Jewish Religion. He was ordained in 2003 and currently serves as spiritual leader of Temple Beth El of Manhattan Beach, a Conservative congregation in Brooklyn.

For his rabbinical thesis, he created a performance that combined nine rabbinic “monologues,” brief d’var Torah on subjects ranging from kavanah to the mysteries of the blue threads in the tallit, embroidering them with performances of pieces from the classical repertoire. He followed his discussion of the elusive blue dye used in making a tallit with a performance of “Rhapsody in Blue.” That thesis evolved into “Chronicles.”

Today, Cotel juggles his pulpit and his performances deftly, helped by his wife Aliya who took her own early retirement from her position as director of education at East End Temple to become his producer, road manager, booker, publicist and ardent champion.

“‘Chronicles’ gives me a way to bring together the two sides of my life,” says Cotel. “And that’s why I love doing this program. After a recent performance in Denver, I told a woman that I love teaching Torah through classical music and she replied, ‘I thought you were teaching classical music through Torah.’”

Cotel will perform “Chronicles: A Religious Life at the Classical Piano” on May 18 at 5 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 3228 SW Sunset Blvd. A wide range of Jewish and Christian congregations are sponsoring the performance. For information, phone 503-246-4276. For information on the progress of “Chronicles II,” go to Rabbi Cotel’s Web page, www.moshecotel.com.