Music director Adam Weingarten leads students in a jam session in BU Hillel’s new practice space, the Music Lounge, September 16.

Hillel

Adam Weingarten, BU Hillel’s Pioneering First Music Director, Wants Campus to Sing

A musician and community leader, he is using song to bring students together

Adam Weingarten understands that the only thing better than playing music is playing music with someone.

Weingarten’s fondest memories—from performing with bands in New York City clubs to leading recitations of wordless melodies during Shabbat services— stay with him when his music serves not simply as entertainment but as the connective tissue that binds communities together. 

He has brought that philosophy to Boston University, where he is music director of BU Hillel, a first-of-its-kind role for any chapter of the Jewish campus life organization Hillel International. As a working musician turned Jewish community leader, Weingarten sees music as an essential public good. He wants to give every student at BU the chance to experience it, through open mics, jam nights that combine secular and Jewish music, concerts, or the Music Lounge, a new rehearsal space he built at BU Hillel.

“We’re a Jewish organization, but I really want Hillel to be a cultural hub for everyone to feel like they can come,” says Weingarten, who arrived at BU last fall. “It’s harder for people to connect now. It’s harder for people to see what we have in common. Having a common memory, having a night where you had a good time with someone else, that can bond you for life—or at least for the four years you’re here.”

His role at BU Hillel is novel and was designed as an extension of BU Hillel’s efforts to foster community on campus. Ethan Sobel, executive director of BU Hillel, had an inkling that BU has its fair share of “secret shower singers”—students who might not feel confident enough to perform in front of others. 

“We thought there was a real opening for building community here,” Sobel says. “There is also so much that Judaism has to say about music, and it is part of Jewish culture and tradition. Why not meld the two together? That was the dream.”

Music and Judaism Intertwined

As music director, Weingarten draws on his years spent performing with bands, his experience leading Jewish religious services, and even his sound engineering background, which he put to work when designing the Music Lounge, BU Hillel’s new rehearsal space, on the lower floor of the Bay State Road building. Here, he is a musician, religious leader, student support figure, and an event organizer.

The combination of roles makes perfect sense to Weingarten. 

Music and Judaism are intimately intertwined, he says. During Shabbat services, Weingarten will regularly lead people in nigunim, wordless songs or short Hebrew phrases used in prayer. Melodies first sung more than a millennium ago are still woven into Jewish rites and services, carrying with them generations of cultural memory, pain, and joy. 

As a young musician, he was inspired by singalongs at Jewish summer camp as much as his favorite band, the Beatles. He just knew he wanted to be on stage. 

Weingarten jokes that he was the best drummer in his hometown (Rye Brook, N.Y., population 10,000), but he also quickly took up guitar and piano. By the time he was a high school freshman, he was playing in small New York City clubs with his first band, Sounds of the Attic.

He continued performing while studying audio engineering and Judaic studies at the University of Hartford. Over the years, he’s played a wide variety of musical genres, from rock to traditional Jewish music like klezmer.

When Weingarten started hosting jam nights at BU Hillel last fall, he simply wanted to give students an opportunity to play music together. But he also takes the time to introduce Jewish music to Jewish and non-Jewish students alike as a form of cultural education or exchange. 

No matter what music students are playing, the goal is to use the increasingly rare act of communal, in-person performance to connect them and offer everyone a place to express themselves.

“The goal isn’t to just bring in expert musicians,” Sobel says, “although that’s nice at times. The goal is to create an environment where people can be authors of their own musical journey or be part of music in a way they never thought they could.”

The Music Lounge is at the heart of this philosophy. Any student can book the sound-proofed space to play music with their friends or just have a quiet moment of reflection. 

This semester he is organizing concerts and even considering a small music festival that would feature student musicians from BU and other local universities.

“Your first time performing or even public speaking is really difficult,” Weingarten says. “You have to really experience humility in a way…We can soften that by providing a support system.”

For those who are more intent on pursuing a career in music, Weingarten hopes these events will provide ample opportunity to connect with venue owners and others in the Boston music scene.

All of the work he’s doing comes back to a spiritual, if not religious, understanding of music, at a time when much of life is experienced through screens. Students might just be jamming for an hour at BU Hillel. But to Weingarten, those sessions can help them break the ice with their peers, forge friendships, and, ultimately, learn more about themselves.

“Those little moments actually make the biggest impact,” Weingarten says. “Just like a song has a progression, a beginning, middle, and end and every part of it is equally important, that’s what I want the kids to feel during their college experience—making their story flow like a perfect piece of music.”