[Avodah] Kedusha - Remaining Silent During the Chazzan's Recitation

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Y Levine wrote:
> Interested in knowing the "proper" way to say Kedushah?  Please
> see http://www.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/Ashkenaz/kedusah.pdf
> Why is it that we have deviated so much from our Mesorah?

Halevai it should be only as bad as described there!

By my count, that article mentioned the congregation "joining" the chazan five times. But in my experience, all too often the congregation does not join the chazan, but they *lead* him, or perhaps even worse, they *ignore* him. This pet peeve of mine is manifested several ways:

1) If the shul sings "K'vodo Malay Olam" and "Mimkomo" aloud and together, that seems to be Rav Hamburger's complaint. But too many shuls go further, by reducing "Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh" and "Baruch K'vod" to being recited (in some cases, mumbled) by each individual at the same time, but not what I would call "in unison".

2) I sometimes find that when the shul sings "K'vodo Malay Olam" and "Mimkomo", they do not realize that the tune they're using differs from the one that the chazan is using. This is what I meant above by the shul leading or ignoring the chazan.

3) Often, the shul doesn't even bother to sing the words of the long sections, but they simply go "la la la" to the tune that they think the chazan is using. My practice is to stay quiet and try to hear which words the chazan is up to, but often the shul is too loud. I do my best to follow in the siddur, and match each "la" to the next syllable, but as recently as this past Shabbos, I somehow ended up saying "Yimloch" long before the shul was up to it.

I am not ashamed of longing for the way Musaf Kedusha was said in the Conservative congregation where I grew up, in which "Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh" was sung in beautiful unison by everyone, in a tune where each "Kadosh" was of a progressively higher note than the one before. THAT was a kiyum of, as Rav Hamburger put it in that article, "the manner in which the heavenly angels recite kedusha."

Akiva Miller

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