Hazzan Steve Margolin
Who I Am
Some Randomish Factoids
• I was born in Manhattan (the one in New York). I got my Medicare card earlier this year.
• I attended public schools on Long Island, where I learned to play saxophone and clarinet. I made my professional musical debut playing E flat contrabass sarrusophone (you can google it) with the New Haven Symphony in 1973.
• I was graduated from Yale College with a bachelor’s degree in biology, and then received a J.D. from the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. I practiced trusts and estates law for more than 40 years.
• I have been married to Renee for 41 years.
• I have loved birds since I was a small child. I was president of the Golden Gate Audubon Society in the early 1990s and have led birding trips in Northern California, Panamá, Kenya and Tanzania. My lifelist is 2,744 species. My favorite place for birds is Panamá. Or the gravel road I walk on most mornings from home out to the west branch of Clear Creek while doing my morning davvenen.
• If I had a spirit animal it would be the Spangled Cotinga. Or maybe the Screaming Piha.
• I know what it is like to play music in heaven - I played a concert in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1976.
• On the Origin of Species might be my favorite book. Or A Sand County Almanac.
• While pursuing my cantorial studies, I served as Student Cantor at Congregation Beth Israel (CBI) in Chico, California, and then as Interim Spiritual Leader, and since July, 2019, I have served as CBI’s cantor.
• Before I put on my wellies to go out to the garden, I have to check the insides for Pacific tree frogs.
How Did I Get Here?
Have you ever stopped to consider how you got to be at whatever place in your life you found yourself when that question popped into your head, and then realized what a string of contingencies your path has been? So much seems like coincidence. Maybe some of it is.
I could begin most anywhere. Let us jump in in 1977. For reasons still not entirely clear to me I had decided to attend law school, Boalt Hall in Berkeley accepted me, and Berkeley seemed like a good change after four years in New Haven. I moved into the graduate student dorm attached to the law school. A few weeks into that first year of law school, some undergraduate students filled the vacant dorm rooms, I met Renee, and we have been together ever since.
Taking a few hops and skips through Connecticut and Berkeley after I was graduated from law school (and Renee was graduated from Cal), in 1996 we decided to get out of the increasingly unlivable Bay Area. We moved to semi-rural Butte Valley, where we have lived for the last 24 years on eleven acres of blue oak savanna, which not coincidentally is acorn woodpecker habitat. We are fifteen miles from Oroville, where Renee was born and grew up. Soon after moving to Butte Valley, Renee and I joined the Oroville Community Concert Band, and we got back the musical lives we had given up when we left Berkeley (the first time) in 1980.
I started attending Congregation Beth Israel (CBI) in Chico for the High Holidays, otherwise still absent without leave from the Jewish community as I had been for a quarter century or so. Then my story takes a turn that I have learned is quite common. In 2004, my father died, and I felt the need to say kaddish for this man who had been intensely Jewish and also completely unreligious. I went to CBI. Something completely unexpected happened – the people at CBI were nice to me, drawing me in. Because of that year of saying kaddish I became a regular member of the Saturday morning minyan, then learned to chant Torah and Haftarah and served occasionally as gabbai. I began playing clarinet with the house band for Simchat Torah and Chanukah parties and community simchas. I joined the klezmer band.
In 2012, Rabbi Julie Danan urged me to travel to Ashland, Oregon, to attend a Shabbaton with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement. This encounter with Reb Zalman, and another in 2014, were life-changing, although this was not really apparent to me at the time. In the summer of 2014, I was walking on a beach in Maine with two friends since our college days. They asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, and out of my mouth, with no conscious forethought, came “I think I need to be a cantor”. I knew instantly that the words I had just said out loud were real and important. In my application interview with Hazzan Jack Kessler to become a cantorial student, I told Jack that the first thing he needed to know was that I did not know how to sing. Jack replied “You have a nice speaking voice, so I am not worried about that”. My answer was completely out of character for me: “If you are not worried about that, then neither am I”.
So here I am, Steve Margolin already working as CBI’s cantor, and perhaps by the time you read this I will be Hazzan Steve Margolin. Break any link in this chain of events, and it would seem that the whole thing would fall apart. My friend and fellow musmach Irwin Keller (perhaps by the time you read this he will be Rabbi Irwin Keller) has written about this, and Rabbi Irwin notes that what seems so fragile a history of contingencies might look rather different, even in some ways inevitable, if dissected from the end perspective. My story, and your story, are simultaneously highly improbable and inevitable, jumping from one state to the other and back again. Wow.
I believe that we are closer to God and to our true selves when we sing, and particularly when we sing together in holy community. Come and sing – new songs, old songs and sometimes really old songs – and feel the blessings flow.
I Am Grateful
I am grateful to so many who have been instrumental in bringing me to the day of my ordination as hazzan (cantor). Above all I am grateful to my wife, Renee, who has believed in me for more than 40 years. The community of Congregation Beth Israel of Chico (CBI), where I rediscovered a missing piece of myself over the last 16 years, have been accepting, patient and kind. David Frankel and the other CBI musicians drew me in. Rabbi Julie Danan encouraged me and sent me to Ashland to encounter her teacher and rebbe, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. I have had the pleasure of working with AOP rabbinic student Lisa Rappaport, CBI’s Spiritual Leader since July, 2019; like synagogue leaders all across America we have reinvented the modern synagogue in the Time of Covid, and I cannot imagine a better clergy partner for that challenging endeavor.
My teachers and mentors are too many to name all, but include Keren Carter, John Taylor, my voice teacher Daun Weiss, Hazzan Jack Kessler, Hazzan Abbe Lyons, Hazzan Diana Brewer, Hazzan Marlena Fuerstman, Rabbi Julie Danan, Rabbi David Zaslow, Rabbi Sara Abrams, Hazzan Dr. Saul Wachs, Rabbi Vivie Mayer, the faculty and all the members of DLTI 9 (the ninth cohort of the Davvenen Leadership Training Institute), and all of the ALEPH Ordination Program cantorial, rabbinic and rabbinic pastor students who since I entered the program in 2015 have taught me so much. And I remember Benedetto DiDia z”l, who first taught me to play music, and Rabbi Sanford Saperstein z”l, who when I was a teenager told me that I have a yiddishe neshama.
Congregation Beth Israel
It is my privilege to serve as cantor of Congregation Beth Israel, in Chico, California.
Congregation Beth Israel is an open and welcoming Jewish community dedicated to the principle of Klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people. True to that spirit, the historically rooted congregation (there have been Jews living in this mostly rural part of Northern California since the Gold Rush) embraces a diverse membership of Jews from all backgrounds as well as interfaith couples and those exploring Judaism.
The ideal to which CBI strives is Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s concept of the “synagogue center,” in which a congregation serves as both a house of worship and a community center for Jewish life. CBI seeks to engage the “head, heart, and hand”: the head through learning, the heart through meaningful spiritual and cultural experiences, and the hand through service. CBI is a place to find community, raise kids to love Judaism, and call a spiritual home.
You can learn more about CBI at www.cbichico.org .
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