For Israeli rocker Korin Allal, a time to go acoustic

It was a modern-day fulfillment of ushpizin, the holiday tradition of welcoming guests into one’s sukkah.

Korin Allal, one of Israel’s veteran rockers, sat down with her acoustic guitar in the sukkah of Jerusalem synagogue Shira Hadasha, a congregation known for introducing the concepts of liberal Orthodox Judaism to the global Jewish world.

She was there to sing portions of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible believed to have been written by King Solomon, the son of King David, as a somewhat mournful autobiography toward the end of his life. It’s read in synagogoue during the holiday of Sukkot, perhaps as a reminder that the rest of the calendar isn’t as joyous as Sukkot.

Allal first studied Ecclesiastes when she was asked to sing it for Jerusalem’s annual Oud Festival in 2014. The festival organizers had initially asked her to sing Tunisian music, given her family roots — Allal was born in Tunisia and moved to Israel when she was eight — but “I didn’t connect to it,” she told the Shira Hadasha audience.

Then the festival organizers offered the Ecclesiastes challenge, which Allal accepted, first copying the words of the book eight times over in order to connect to the language and cadence of the work.

She performed it that first time as the opening concert of the Oud Festival, backed by an oud, saxophone, drums, piano, bass and a DJ. She eventually released it in 2015 as an album called simply “Ecclesiastes,” or Kohelet in Hebrew.

On this night, however, it was just Allal with her guitar and a microphone, surrounded by the cloth walls of the sukkah and with synagogue member Lior Natan by her side, the two having met in New York during a gathering run by Gesher, an organization strives to close the gap between secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel.

“That meeting was six months ago, and I dreamed that we would hear your Ecclesiastes in our synagogue sukkah,” said Natan to Allal.

They went through it together, with Allal singing some parts in her raspy, smoker’s voice, while Natan handed out some photocopied interpretations to the audience of about 60, during the middle of the concert.

https://youtu.be/xbpYkZ30FqQ

“I thought it would be dark and painful texts,” said Allal, “but it made sense. I gave vowels to the letters when I was copying it over, to give light to it.”

She credited Ecclesiastes, in which King Solomon appears to embrace the complicated, temporary nature of life, with her decision two years ago to finally marry her longtime partner, Ruti Allal.

During the informal Saturday night concert, she skipped around a bit in the Ecclesiastes text — “that makes the text make sense,” she said — tapping hard on the lower bout of the guitar at times, alternating the cadence of her music and offering a wholly different meaning to the words and concepts.

“I’m so used to hearing it sung with cantillation,” said one of the audience members. “It’s fun, rather than the usual heaviness.”

And then as a kind of counterpoint for the weightiness of the material, she treated the crowd to some Allal favorites, including “Zan Adir,” “Flower,” and finally, “I Don’t Have Another Country,” written by Ehud Manor.

In the middle of that final ode, Allal interrupted herself, remarking that when she was working on “Ecclesiastes,” it wasn’t clear if she and her family would remain in Israel.

Yet the project, in so many ways, made her think about things differently. And like the Book of Ecclesiastes, which was written by the king of Jerusalem, it tied Allal again to Israel and to her life here.