‘Love is in the Air’ at Temple Sinai on Feb. 11

My dear friend Shelley grew up in an Orthodox household where they would never even think of celebrating holidays like Halloween or Valentine’s Day. 

While these two holidays are widely accepted as “secular” in American culture, they have a long history as Christian holidays. For Shelley, and many Jews like her, both holidays retain their Christian identity. 

With regard to Halloween, at least, even the church would agree. It may have begun as a Celtic harvest festival (Samhein), but for many hundreds of years, until the early 20th century, Halloween was exclusively devoted to commemorating the faithful departed.

Not so for Valentine’s Day.  Even Catholics agree: Valentine’s Day is not just for Christians anymore. While Saint Valentine’s Day remains an official feast day in the Anglican, Lutheran, and parts of the Eastern Orthodox churches, each of these celebrations is commemorated for different Saints Valentine and on different days. Because of the difficulty in determining exactly who Valentine was, the Roman Catholic Church has disavowed any official connection to the Valentine’s Day celebrated on Feb. 14.

Today, when most of us think of Valentine’s Day, we don’t think of saints, but of love.  And there is hardly a more rich and memorable expression of love, in all its myriad forms, than in the classic love songs of the 1930s and ’40s – composed mostly by Jews. 

Dissertations have been written about why so many of these song writers – Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Irving Gordon among them – were Jewish.

Topping this list is the greatest composer of them all, George Gershwin. It’s hard to believe that Gershwin died at age 38. In just a few short decades, he wrote much of the music that has since become known as modern American standards: works like “Porgy and Bess” (considered the best American opera of the 20th century), “Rhapsody in Blue” (the most popular of all American concert works), “An American in Paris” (a “rhapsodic ballet”) and the jazz piece “Three Preludes.” 

But Gershwin is perhaps best known for some of the most beloved love songs of all time.  Think of a love song from this period – “Embraceable You”?  “The Man I Love”? “Someone to Watch Over Me”? – and I’ll bet it’s by Gershwin.

Gershwin had the typical upbringing of a Jewish child born to immigrant Russian parents at the beginning of the 20th century. When he arrived here, Gershwin’s father changed his name from Gershowitz to Gershwine, and as his son would later change his name from Jacob Gershwine to George Gershwin. 

Moving from tenement to tenement, first in Brooklyn, New York, and then in Manhattan’s Lower East Side Jewish ghettos, the family was not particularly observant. However, Gershwin adapted Jewish musical motifs throughout his work. Sing the refrain from his “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and follow it up with the opening of the Torah blessing, “Barchu et adonai hamevorach” – it’s the same tune! 

Gershwin met with a tragically misunderstood end. A few years before his death, he began to experience blinding headaches, mood swings, odd behaviors and auditory and olfactory hallucinations to the extent that his family signed him into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with a diagnosis of hysteria. It was only when he later fell into a coma that doctors discovered a malignant brain tumor and called for immediate surgery. He died on the operating table. 

All the while, Gershwin’s music had been bright, beautiful, breezy – and often powerfully poignant.

DEBORAH JOHNSON is the cantor at Temple Sinai, in Cranston.