Growing up in New Hampshire as a kid, Sarah Metzger picked up musical instrument after instrument because there “wasn’t much else to do.”
She has lived in Boston, Florida, New York City and Birmingham, Alabama, and recently settled in northern Virginia. Metzger has continued her love for music as the education director and student cantor at Congregation Beth Emeth while attending the Academy for Jewish Religion for dual ordination — rabbinical and cantorial.
She lives in Herndon with her husband and their dog, Corbin.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
My mom’s a cantor. She started cantorial school when I was two years old. She went to [Hebrew Union College] and was trained for the Reform movement. I grew up in the Reform movement with my brother, who’s four years older than me.
I grew up seeing my mom on the bima and viewed her as this total rock star. I started going to Jewish summer camp — I went to Camp Harlam in Pennsylvania — and that’s really where I fell in love with Jewish music and saw that the cantorate that my mom practiced was very, very different than the song-focused tefillah prayer that happens at summer camp. There was something really special and magical about the services at camp and about the song sessions and all the music. And the song leaders were the coolest. I was like, ‘I want to be that when I grow up.’ And I started playing. I picked up a guitar the summer before eighth grade and I never put it down.
Have you always been interested in music and singing?
Yes. I didn’t actually know that I could sing until high school, but I was a drummer starting in the third grade — that was my first true love. In second grade, a group of African drummers came into our class and did a demonstration, and I was completely enthralled. I went home and I was like, ‘Mom, can I play the drums?’ She’s a musician herself, so she supported any sort of what she called academic pursuits. She said any sort of musical interest you have, we’ll pay for that and we’ll support you. At a certain point, I kept collecting instruments.
What are your responsibilities as education director and student cantor?
Basically 70% of my job is education director stuff and 30% is cantor. I’m responsible for all of the music in Shabbat services, Kabbalat Shabbat in particular. Most of our Saturday morning services are lay-led and I lead the High Holiday services. I do holidays, I teach music in the religious school and I put together family services; I like to try to play around with alternative service options.
I run the religious school, I hire teachers, I put together the schedules and I work on the overall educational vision. We just started a teen educational program, so I teach what’s called Chai School, and we had our first session [recently]. It’s about community building. There’s one class I’m leading where we explore the Jewish wisdom behind Ted Lasso.
One of your goals is to implement an inclusive, welcoming space. How do you do this?
As a person who grew up Jewish and, on paper, I would be what you’d call a “Jewish insider.” I had all of the Jewish experiences that a person would expect a “nice Jewish girl” to have — I went to summer camp, I’m a clergy kid, I spent summers in Israel, I went to Jewish day school — and still, I found myself feeling like I didn’t quite fit into any of the Jewish spaces that I was in. I felt like it could feel really alienating to be in some of these Jewish spaces. Coming from a person who has had all of the ‘right experiences,’ it was very eye-opening to me that if this is how I feel as a Jewish professional, how are people who haven’t had these experiences feeling when they enter our spaces? We’ve got to do better about bringing people in and being kind and warm and welcoming, and helping them along their Jewish journey wherever they’re at. It’s this idea of meeting people where they’re at and taking them a step further.
My dad learned Hebrew with a rabbi over his shoulder with a stopwatch saying, ‘Pray faster.’ There was something that just made me want to change the way we do things in the way we learn and the way we connect to prayer because we learn these prayers basically through rote, and after a certain time, they’ve just lost their meaning. I wanted to help people connect to them on a deeper level and help connect people to each other, so I try to cultivate this environment of connection.
How do you facilitate inclusivity within Beth Emeth?
I think by being a visibly queer-ish person, that helps. I’ve got the asymmetrical haircut; [people] make their assumptions and they’re not wrong. In the religious school, I’m trying to eliminate all the gender boxes that you would normally find on registration forms and making the sharing of pronouns a practice that we commit to regularly.
Outside of work, how do you spend your time?
I used to do open mics a lot; I did comedy and music back in the day. I haven’t explored a whole lot since I moved here because it’s only been four months. My husband and I do trivia and hiking. I call myself deceptively athletic. I like snowboarding and rock climbing and tennis.
