PRESENTING CARL HOWARD SAYRES AS CANTOR AND TEACHER IN ISRAEL
Presented by Rabbi David Evan Markus, JD
What happens when a soul knows its song? Ask Carl.
Carl’ s youth launched him toward spiritual service: Jewish day school, kashrut by choice, USY, Brandeis, Hillel leader, gabbai, ba’ al korei.
But while Jewishly observant and enthusiastic, Carl was the last to imagine himself spiritual. Search, by all means – but find? To Carl, spiritual experience was rare, maybe even an accident.
Life would teach Carl that the purpose of spiritual life is to become accident prone.
Carl became a physicist – first an undergraduate degree, then a masters, then well into a PhD. While leading services and making a Jewish family, Carl immersed in the strange elegance of relativity and quantum mechanics. Entanglement, probabilities, and synchronicities hinted at a grand unified theory of something – to Carl,“ something larger than the universe itself.”
Carl surprised himself how deeply he believed, how logical rigors of science and instrumental pragmatism of entrepreneurship suddenly fade into elemental knowing that souls are bound in the bonds of Singularity. Who was this doppelgänger of Carl kneeling with a young child answering her wide-eyed question about God? Why did tunes in Ukrainian Dorian rock his socks? How did he end up in a thriving synagogue with a surfeit of rabbis but no cantor?
The word serendipity, in its original form, evokes a life“ making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things one was not in quest of” – at least, not consciously. Like Zohar’ s hevraya, Carl’ s soul knew what he yet did not; the physics of an unknown quest steered him all along.
It took the 2018 Tree of Life shooting before Carl knew in real time. At Limmud Toronto days later, Carl was asked to chant El Malei Rahamim for the dead. Suddenly he knew what he had to do. Exactly 20 minutes later, an AJR flyer appeared in his line of sight.
The soul knew its song – a clarion call to become who Carl already was becoming. Years of questing later, some with me among his hevraya, Carl has become accident prone in the best ways. Carl is living testament that not only nusah but also life is a spiritual practice.
Said the Alter Rebbe, Schneur Zalman of Liadi:“ Speech is the quill of the heart, but niggun is the quill of the soul.” If you want proof, ask Carl.
BEIT DIN
Cantor Michael Kasper- Somekh Cantor Sol Zim Cantor Lisa Klinger-Kantor
14 AJR 2025