A symphony of instruction

Paul Saitowitz

It’s been said that there are moments in your life when everything

changes, when your life can be broken up into segments divided by

what happened before and after that moment.

Moshe Cotel was born in Baltimore with a penchant for music. He

had written his first four-movement symphony by the time he was 13,

10 years later he graduated from the Julliard School of Music, and

two years after that he was in Italy playing with the Rome Orchestra.

While in Rome an uncle, on his way back to the United States from

Israel, made a special stop to visit him.

“He was my favorite uncle, and I knew the town pretty well, so I

took him on a tour of the sites,” Cotel said.

“We came to the Arch of Titus, which is a monument that was built

to commemorate the Romans’ destruction of the Jewish state ... it

glorifies Rome’s imperialism.”

As they walked up closer to the monument, they noticed it was

covered in graffiti.

“The words ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’ which means ‘The people of Israel

Live,’ was written on there,” he said. “My uncle said to me, ‘There’s

nothing left of Rome, but Israel is still here,’ ... he convinced me

to go there.”

He spent four years in Israel working as a professor of music at

the Rubin Academy of Music and composing and playing with symphony

orchestras.

He also met his wife and became more in touch with his Jewish

heritage during that time.

“Up until that point, music was my religion,” he said. “Slowly

things began to change.”

When he returned to the United States, he started going to

synagogue regularly, and his creativity was at an all-time high.

He was the chair of the music department at the Peabody

Conservatory in Baltimore and found time to write and conduct

“Dreyfus,” an opera focused around the exploits of Zionism founder

Theodor Herzl and the “Dreyfus Affair.”

Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, came from a Jewish

family that had left its native Alsace for Paris when Germany annexed

that province in 1871. In 1894, papers discovered in a wastebasket in

the office of a German military attache made it appear that a French

military officer was providing secret information to the German

government. Dreyfus came under suspicion because he was a Jew.

The opera was a success in New York, and Cotel was invited to

conduct nine performances in Vienna.

In order to communicate better with the Viennese orchestra, he

felt it was imperative to brush up on his German. He took a class

once a week for three months with an elderly German widow who lived

in his neighborhood.

“She’d make me practice my German by telling her about the opera

and explaining what it was about,” Cotel said.

“Dreyfus” was well received in Vienna, and a few months after he

returned to the U.S., Cotel was walking to synagogue when he heard a

familiar voice from behind mutter the Hebrew saying “Ma shlom-cha?”

which means “How are you?”

He looked back and saw the elderly German woman. It turned out

that she was born Jewish but was sent by her parents to the Catholic

church as a child to avoid being a casualty of the Holocaust.

“She told me that her experience teaching German to me opened her

eyes and made her want to discover her Jewish roots,” Cotel said. “I

knew right then I had to be a rabbi.”

After fulfilling his agreement with the Peabody Conservatory,

Cotel set out to become a rabbi. He spent the next seven years

studying at a rabbinical seminary.

For his senior thesis, instead of writing a paper, he put together

a nine-movement piano recital -- “Chronicles” -- featuring the works

of composers from Bach to Scriabin. Interspersed between the

movements he gave monologues on morals, values and lessons from the

Torah.

“It went over really well, and then word of it spread through the

Internet,” Cotel said. “Eventually I started getting invited to

perform ‘Chronicles’ at different venues all over.”

The only problem was that now he had a congregation of his own --

Temple Beth El in Brooklyn, N.Y. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also

part of a group called Kulanu, which is focused on fostering Judaism

among the lost sects of the religion in Third World countries. He

recently returned from a visit to Uganda.

“I had to make a compromise,” he said. “I made a deal with my

congregation that I’ll only be gone four weeks a year. It’s funny,

‘maestro’ and ‘rabbi’ both mean ‘teacher’ in English,” he said.

A change of lifestyle, but not a change of position.