Songs from the Beit Midrash by Deborah Sacks Mintz
(Rising Records)
February 11, 2026
RABBI DEBORAH SACKS MINTZ’S voice is like an acoustic deep-tissue massage. “Lincoln’s Nigun,” for instance, kneads deep into your kishkes, breaks you down, and then lifts you back up again. The eleven new melodies in this album combine the traditional Jewish liturgy with the spiritual fervour and low-grade ecstatic hum of the beit midrash. As usual, the ensemble recordings are supported by a rich chorus of community singers. Sacks Mintz, the Director of Tefillah and Music at the Hadar Institute, is an educator, musician, and facilitator of Jewish communal prayer. She (along with Joey Weisenberg and others in the Rising Song orbit) is part of a cohort of musicians weaving the soundscape of twenty-first century communal worship, and redefining the possibilities for what modern prayer can and should feel like. In recent years her melodies have been picked up by communities across North America and Israel. Zachary Kauffman
