Gabriel Lehrman '16
For religion and music double-major Gabriel Lehrman ’16, the past is a tool to help make sense of the present—a skill he sharpened in both classroom and studio alike.
In religion courses at Puget Sound with Stuart Smithers, Lehrman learned how to dig deeply into his own Jewish tradition, putting it in conversation with the world around him. “It blew my mind,” he recalls of a particularly transformative seminar on Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. “It changed the way I understand the world.”
At his senior vocal recital, Lehrman took on music from classical giants past and present, showcasing the vocal techniques he’d developed under Kathryn Lehmann and had exercised many times as a student: singing with Adelphians, Voci D’amici, and Garden Level.
Instead of filling Schneebeck, today his warm tenor voice fills East Coast synagogues. The repertoire is no less daunting: intoning ancient passages from the Torah sung in traditional modes, and leading prayers set to music by modern Jewish composers.
The Bay-area native is on his final placement as a chazzan or cantor in Washington, D.C., as part of his studies at Hebrew Union College. In Lehrman’s liberal Jewish tradition, a cantor not only leads the congregation in song, but is also an ordained spiritual leader, able to perform the same duties with the same authority as a rabbi if needed.
Preparing for this responsibility has also drawn Lehrman outside the synagogue: doing chaplaincy work with unhoused folks in San Francisco and interrogating the intersections of ecology and Judaism on farms across the United States.
As he looks ahead to his May 2025 ordination, he remains acutely aware of a world groaning in pain and conflict: “The most important thing, for me, in living a spiritual life, is in the small acts that you do every day, and understanding that in the context of all that has come before you and all that is to follow.”
