Stephen Wise Temple’s Cantor Emma Lutz Promoted to Senior Cantor

Call it geographical justice that Cantor Emma Lutz gained the most important promotion of her career while standing atop one of the loftiest Los Angeles hilltops at Stephen Wise Temple, overlooking her adopted hometown.

Her life has been on an uninterrupted skyward trajectory since she debuted as a performer when she was only three years old. Later, as a high school senior, she chose to commit to the cantorate.

At 34, Lutz became one of the youngest senior cantors in the United States on March 25 when she was formally installed in an outdoor Shabbat service at Stephen Wise Temple.

“Cantor Emma is such an amazing talent,” said Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback, who hired her six years ago. “With her background in musical theater and her beautiful voice, she also is a great writer and teacher with a wonderful neshama.”

Destined to sing and dance, Lutz was mentored by Stephen Richards, a former Broadway conductor and accompanist who was the cantor of Congregation B’nai Tikvah in Walnut Creek, Calif., her hometown.

The dual influences of show business and synagogue “gave me a sense of myself on stage and on the bimah,” she said. “This really happened at the same time.”

Does Lutz’s stage training ever spill into her cantorial duties?

“There is a difference,” she said, “because when you are performing in a theatrical production, you are tied to a script.

There also is a level of play… and I don’t want to sound negative, but there is a lack of authenticity. You are playing a character.”

Then there is the real life of Judaism.

“Something that pulled me away from the theatre and drew me to the cantorate was being able to really step in and ask who am I as a Jew, as a woman, as a human being?”

“Something that pulled me away from the theatre and drew me to the cantorate was being able to really step in and ask who am I, as a Jew, as a woman, as a human being?” – Cantor Emma Lutz

Lutz’s career decision “was an amalgamation of a lot of different things,” she said.

Her teacher, Cantor Richards, was not surprised.

“He said he knew when I was seven or eight,” Lutz said. “But he didn’t really push me. He would take me to Jewish youth choir festivals, he would give me solos on the bimah and he would come to my musical productions.”

Eventually, a connection to Israel emerged. Taking advanced Hebrew classes in high school, she grew increasingly curious about Israel.

“I wanted to understand why people didn’t like Jews,” Lutz said, “when everything that I had felt up to that point had been so beautiful and musical.”

She made her career choices, the cantorate and teaching, sound so natural.

“My calling reached out to me,” she said. “I started thinking: ‘I wonder if I put together all my interests, I think I could be a cantor.’”

How did she reach her conclusions?

“You know, we always stand on the shoulders of the people who come before us,” Lutz said. “My mom is a Jew by choice. She converted when she was pregnant with me. I always feel as if I got to choose Judaism with her. She is very religious and devoted, probably more than my Dad, who grew up a Conservative Jew in Long Beach. He was our temple president when I became bat mitzvah. I saw a model of leadership in him.”

Lutz’s grandmother, Miriam Levich Goldin, was the first woman to have a bat mitzvah on the West Coast in 1939, at Temple Israel in Long Beach. “She is my inspiration for so many things I do, both as a mother and as a Jew,” said the cantor.

Lutz’s yearning to experience Israel finally was fulfilled in 2011. First-year students at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion spend it in the Jewish homeland.

As fulfilling as that was, the main event was yet to come.

“The best part of the year, besides my learning, was that I met my husband, now Rabbi Adam Lutz of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills. “We just fell in love right away, and we had the best year of our lives.” 

A self-anointed nerd, she did not permit love to slow her thirst for deepening her knowledge.

“I always have taken great pride in my studies,” she said. “I liked being a straight-A student. [I] never missed a class in college.”

Her classroom was about to become more fascinating and ironic.

In 2009, Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback was named director of HUC’s Year in Israel program. When Lutz arrived, he became her favorite teacher.

Five years after that, Zweiback, by then the head of school at Stephen Wise, hired Lutz.

“Since he was the head of my program at HUC, I would sort of, kind of, go above and beyond in his classes,” Lutz said. “He was my liturgy teacher. As a cantorial student, I was like, this is my craft. I have to learn the liturgy. I am going to go above and beyond in this class.”

The year Lutz was about to be ordained, Zweiback reached out to the Lutzes. “I would love to Zoom with you guys,” he told them.

Turning to the cantor, the rabbi said, “I think I have a job for you, Emma.”

“I wanted to come home to California,” she said. “And Adam wanted to do one more year at HUC, to get his Master’s of Jewish education, which makes rabbis more hirable. Being a nerd like me, he wanted that extra learning with his third Master’s.”

Together, Emma and Adam Lutz have established lofty goals for their daughter, Ruby Mira.

“I started dancing ballet when I was three, and it’s interesting that my daughter is coming up to be two-and-a-half,” Lutz said. “With COVID sort of relaxing, we are looking into classes for her. This feels like a shechiyanu moment.”