From Jewish Journal:

(links added to the article are mine)

“Johnny Mathis got up from the mah-jongg table where he was conducting an interview at his Los Angeles home to answer the telephone: “We’re discussing my career as a cantor,” he quipped.

The 74-year-old Mathis — who has recorded more than 130 albums and has cracked the Billboard charts upward of 60 times — is best known as the crooner of iconic back-seat make-out ballads such as “Wonderful, Wonderful” and “It’s Not for Me to Say.” But on Aug. 19 at the Skirball Cultural Center, he will be honored by the New York-based Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation for his surprising contribution to Jewish music: a soaring version of the Yom Kippur prayer, “Kol Nidre,” recorded for his 1958 album of religious music, “Good Night, Dear Lord.”

The founders of the Idelsohn Society — including scholar Josh Kun — discovered Mathis’ “Kol Nidre” courtesy of a 7-inch disc, backed by the Percy Faith Orchestra, that arrived in a battered box of donated albums some years ago. The single, they learned, was a European release from the 1958 “Good Night” album, which featured renditions of “Ave Maria” and black spirituals as well as “Kol Nidre,” the Hebrew-language poem “Eli, Eli” and the Yiddish favorite “Where Can I Go?”

“But it is Mathis’ ‘Kol Nidre’ which blew us away,” the founders wrote in the liner notes of “Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations,” which was inspired by Mathis’ passionate “Kol Nidre.” His rendition also appears on the Idelsohn CD, which will be released Sept. 14. While much has been written about how black music has influenced Jewish artists, “Black Sabbath” is perhaps the first to spotlight African Americans covering Jewish songs — Billie Holiday singing “My Yiddishe Momme,” for example, and The Temptations doing a “Fiddler on the Roof” medley.

So why did the African American Mathis, then 23 and at the zenith of his career, choose to record the Aramaic Jewish prayer so crucial to the Jewish Day of Atonement? Settling back down at the mah-jongg table, Mathis traces the endeavor to his childhood in a tolerant, multiracial neighborhood of San Francisco, where his friends included Jewish buddies from the school track team who occasionally took him to shul. He also heard Jewish music courtesy of his music teacher Connie Cox — who took on the talented 13-year-old in exchange for his completing odd jobs around her house — and who introduced him to the cantors-turned-opera singers Robert Merrill and Richard Tucker.

Prominent American Jews helped shape Mathis’ career once he gave up his chance to participate in Olympic trials as a high jumper to record jazz for Columbia Records at age 20. The young artist was “floundering,” in his words, a year later when he was summoned to the offices of Mitch Miller, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had become one of the most influential forces in American popular music.

“Mitch said, ‘I’ve heard what you do, and I don’t like it,’ ” Mathis recalled of that meeting — his memories flowing all the more since Miller had died, at 99, the day before the interview. “Mitch said, ‘I like your voice, but I don’t like the way you’re singing, and I don’t like what you’re singing. … I’d like to record you, but I want you to sing what I want the way I want it.’ ”

In fact, Miller stood beside Mathis in the recording booth, tapping his shoulder to make sure the young artist didn’t improvise. But even if Miller could be “very strong,” as Mathis puts it, he credits the producer for guiding him to the romantic ditties that would make him a superstar.

Mathis went on to record his first No. 1 hit, the dulcet “Chances Are”; to become one of the most prolific American singers of all time, selling more than 180 million albums worldwide; and to set a number of precedents in the music industry. His 1958 greatest-hits album virtually invented that genre and spent almost a decade on the Billboard top albums chart — a feat recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. Mathis’ 1982 album, “Friends in Love,” featured a title duet with Dionne Warwick that became Mathis’s fourth Top 40 single hit in four decades. More recently, Mathis has sung for Presidents George H. W. Bush and Clinton, performed with top symphony orchestras and next month will release a collection of country standards, “Let It Be Me: Mathis in Nashville,” a tribute to his father, who was born in Texas and taught the young Johnny to sing.

The spiritual music of “Good Night, Dear Lord” was meant as an ode to Mathis’ devout mother; he personally chose the album’s black spirituals from songs he recalled from his childhood African Methodist Episcopal church. But he turned to the prominent bandleader Percy Faith — another son of Jewish immigrants — to advise him on the Jewish selections.

“Kol Nidre” appealed to Mathis, in part, because of the opportunity to showcase the operatic side of his voice, rather than the honeyed tones for which he had become famous. “My interpretation of the song was a mixture of the Muslim call to worship and the [biblical] Jews wandering, lost, in the desert, when their faith was all they had,” he said.

“Recording it was very emotional,” he added. “I lost all of my inhibitions.”

When the Idelsohn Society approached him about his “Kol Nidre,” he said, “I was over the moon.” The album had sold only a moderate number of copies: “Every performer has a little gem, a little pearl they have done that nobody pays much attention to,” he explained. “And then one day, somebody does recognize it, which is so gratifying.”

But don’t expect Mathis to sing the prayer when the society honors him Aug. 19, timed approximately to the 50th anniversary of “Kol Nidre” and the artist’s 75th birthday, on Sept. 30 — part of the society’s concert program, the “Jews on Vinyl” revue.

“My singing now is more limited,” Mathis said; he will no longer sing the rigorous melody in public. Rather, he will perform a song, “One God,” that reflects his attitude about humankind.

“Many are the paths winding their way to one God,” he quotes from that song. “So many children calling to Him by so many different names.”

My Comment:

Johnny Mathis’ rendition of the Kol Nidre has recently come in for a lot of respectful attention for its musical worth. But from a political perspective, as well, his performance has a lot to recommend it. The choice is especially significant. The Kol Nidre is an Aramaic prayer recited by Jews on the evening of the Day of Atonement.

The words run:

“All vows, obligations, oaths, and anathemas, whether called konam, konas, or by any other name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge, or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths.”

(Lila) For some non-Jewish writers these lines are significant in an entirely different way. They provide a textual justification for attributing the machinations of the financial elites to the essence of Jewishness itself, a move that can fairly be described as true anti-Semitism.

[This is different of course from the faux anti-Semitism that attaches automatically to critics of Zionism or Israel or even to garden-variety chauvinists, who are more properly described as nativists].

An article at Slate sets the record right on this:

“The prayer refers only to personal vows—those made by man in relation to his own conscience or to God, not interpersonal ones made by man to his fellow man. Contrary to claims made by perplexed exegetes such as David Duke, Kol Nidre was not invented as a sinister tribal clause to cheat gentiles or one another with impunity.

Judaism goes to great lengths to legislate social behavior, both within and without the community. As Rabbi Gil Student describes it in his primer on the arcana of vow annulment, the Talmud “dedicates one sixth of itself to detailing the Jewish court system which adjudicates based on the sworn testimony of witnesses.” Why expend so much ink on the rules and procedures for dealing with betrayal and injustice if a yearly invocation affords an easy get-out-of-jail-free card? The Talmud says that if a person wishes to free himself from a vow made to a second party, he has to plead his case before a religious court in the presence of that person, who must then consent to the vow’s nullification. It doesn’t matter if the petitioner is beholden to an adult, a child, or a gentile; the same standard applies………

It came in handy on the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition when Marranos—Spanish Jews who pretended to convert to Christianity to escape persecution—were forced to make bogus professions of faith in public and needed the winking dispensation of God to do so.

Jewish authorities have often sought to clarify Kol Nidre‘s intention, while occasionally advocating for its abolition on the grounds that it is theologically worthless. One popular objection to it has been that ignorant Jews would misinterpret the prayer as a license for deceit and treachery—just as anti-Semites have. The prayer was cited as justification for the Oath More Judaico, a humiliating and sadistic legal vow Jews were for centuries forced to swear before testifying in European courts. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19^th century that most of the Continent began revising or removing it in earnest. (Romania’s remained on the books until 1902.) Perhaps in response to this history of vulgar misinterpretation, Jews themselves have had a hard time deciding what to do with the prayer. A rabbinical conference in Brunswick in 1844 ruled unanimously that Kol Nidre was superfluous and should be eliminated from the entire religious tradition. This decision led numerous congregations in Western Europe and many more Reform congregations in the United States to do just that, or to replace the words of the prayer with a Hebrew psalm while retaining its elegiac melody. Orthodox and Conservative congregations still recite the words….”

Slate’s exegesis is a welcome addition to the public debate about religion, where texts are often bandied about selectively and free of context. Would that some anti-Islamic sites would exhibit similar sensitivity in their interpretation of the Koran.

Texts are important, no doubt. But is it lack of knowledge that leads to such selective interpretations? Is it ignorance that leads to fanaticism and hatred? That is the liberal notion.

My experience suggests otherwise. There are misguided texts, ugly teachings, superstition, and senseless tradition in every religion. And there is much more. The problem is our inability to see this “much more,” except in our own faith. This reflects not ignorance, but a will set on enmity.

To those who truly want peace, the diversity of faiths is only an opportunity for the creative transformation of them all.  In this, education and the analytical mind are not in short supply. Character and the creative will are.

Apparently, that’s why it takes a popular singer to teach book-burning pastors and  posturing Imams a  lesson in the practice of religion that trumps any expertise they might have in its theory:

“My interpretation of the song was a mixture of the Muslim call to worship and the [biblical] Jews wandering, lost, in the desert, when their faith was all they had,” he [Mathis] said.