The cultural anthropology professor, who came here in 1973 to teach at the University of Utah, is also the part-time cantor for Utah's largest synagogue, a job he's held for 27 years. This means that when he isn't doing research, lecturing college students or grappling with papers, he's singing liturgical songs, training adolescents to chant Torah and leading congregants in prayer at Salt Lake City's Congregation Kol Ami. Oh, and maybe he's conducting a wedding or funeral in between.

He never really planned it to work out this way. But now that it has, and despite the challenges of dual careers, he wouldn't change a thing.

"I've had two wonderful lives," he said. "Two shared experiences."

The double life will become even sweeter on Thursday, when Loeb, 63, receives an honorary doctorate from The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Such a distinction would flatter anyone. For Loeb, though, it's even better.

He's no stranger to the halls of JTS. It was there he says he became the youngest cantor to come out of its diploma program. That was back when he was, at the same time, earning a bachelor's degree from City College of New York. And later, while working on his doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University, he pursued a full courseload in ethnomusicology at JTS.

But he never did get a graduate degree from the seminary, so there's a certain amount of justice - he called it "a kind of making peace" - in returning for one all these years later.

"It's very exciting," said Loeb, who also will be the featured speaker at the convocation. "It's nice to get recognition for my contributions."

Growing up in New York City, music and vocal work were far from his mind. He was into the sciences - always saw himself following that path. But at 14 or 15, he was asked to lead services at a United Synagogue Youth retreat. He'd gone to synagogue regularly with his father for years, so reciting the service wasn't what daunted him. It was the singing part that made him gulp.

He pulled it off, though. So well, in fact, that the cantorial student supervising the service leaned on him to pursue the work as a career. Soon after, Loeb's mother got in on the game.

"You know, your voice is a gift from God," he remembers her telling him. "You need to think about this seriously."

With no music or voice training behind him, he decided to appease her and filled out an application for the then-Cantor's Institute at JTS. He never expected that he'd actually get in.

"I couldn't read music," he laughed. "I was shocked to hear I was accepted."

Five years later, Loeb walked out of JTS a bona fide cantor. Besides being trained to sing publicly, he was well-versed in the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Jewish and secular music. His role in synagogue services, he explained, is to be "a conduit for congregational worship - not at the expense of individual worship, but to inspire and uplift."

"You get up there, and you lead prayer. But there are those moments in which you're connected, not just with the spiritual world, but with the congregation," he continued. "I really have this sense that I'm connecting them and conveying in their hearts what they can't do on their own."

His mentor at JTS was Johanna Spector, a gifted pianist from Latvia who had survived the Holocaust by performing for guards in concentration camps. She never played piano again after World War II ended, and instead became a scholar. She was the one who pushed him toward anthropology - a discipline that later took him to Iran, where he spent a year and a half studying the country's Jewish community. He, in turn, helped Spector establish JTS' department of ethnomusicology, in which he later devoured the coursework but never got the doctorate degree.

That'll change come Thursday.

Funny how things worked out. For Loeb, the path - or paths - he took created a life unlike any he could have imagined.

"What I ended up doing was very different from my colleagues," he said, referring to the academics and the cantors. "And I don't regret a minute of it."

jravitz@sltrib.com