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Covenant & Conversation 5772: Beshalach – Music, Language of the Soul

5772, Covenant & Conversation, Shemot No Responses »

Feb 042012

For the first time since their departure from Egypt the Israelites do something together. They sing. “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel.” Rashi, explaining the view of R. Nehemiah in the Talmud (Sotah 30b) that they spontaneously sang the song together, says that the holy spirit rested on them and miraculously the same words came into their minds at the same time. In recollection of that moment, tradition has named this week Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song. What is the place of song in Judaism?

There is an inner connection between music and the spirit. When language aspires to the transcendent and the soul longs to break free of the gravitational pull of the earth, it modulates into song. Music, said Arnold Bennett is “a language which the soul alone understands but which the soul can never translate.” It is, in Richter’s words “the poetry of the air.” Tolstoy called it “the shorthand of emotion.” Goethe said, “Religious worship cannot do without music. It is one of the foremost means to work upon man with an effect of marvel.” Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul.

So when we seek to express or evoke emotion we turn to melody. Deborah sang after Israel’s victory over the forces of Siserah (Judges 5). Hannah sang when she had a child (1 Sam. 2). When Saul was depressed, David would play for him and his spirit would be restored (1 Sam. 16). David himself was known as the “sweet singer of Israel” (2 Sam. 23: 1). Elisha called for a harpist to play so that the prophetic spirit could rest upon him (2 Kings 3: 15). The Levites sang in the Temple. Every day, in Judaism, we preface our morning prayers with Pesukei de-Zimra, the ‘Verses of Song’ with their magnificent crescendo, Psalm 150, in which instruments and the human voice combine to sing God’s praises.

Mystics go further and speak of the song of the universe, what Pythagoras called ‘the music of the spheres’. This is what Psalm 19 means when it says, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands . . . There is no speech, there are no words, where their voice is not heard. Their music[1] carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world.’ Beneath the silence, audible only to the inner ear, creation sings to its Creator.

So, when we pray, we do not read: we sing. When we engage with sacred texts, we do not recite: we chant. Every text and every time has, in Judaism, its own specific melody. There are different tunes for shacharit, mincha and maariv, the morning, afternoon and evening prayers. There are different melodies and moods for the prayers for a weekday, Shabbat, the three pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot (which have much musically in common but also tunes distinctive to each), and for the Yamim Noraim, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

There are different tunes for different texts. There is one kind of cantillation for Torah, another for the haftorah from the prophetic books, and yet another for Ketuvim, the Writings, especially the five Megillot. There is a particular chant for studying the texts of the written Torah, for studying Mishnah and Gemarah. So by music alone we can tell what kind of day it is and what kind of text is being used. There is a map of holy words and it is written in melodies and songs.

Music has extraordinary power to evoke emotion. The Kol Nidrei prayer with which Yom Kippur begins is not really a prayer at all. It is a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. There can be little doubt that it is its ancient, haunting melody that has given it its hold over the Jewish imagination. It is hard to hear those notes and not feel that you are in the presence of God on the Day of Judgment, standing in the company of Jews of all places and times as they pleaded with heaven for forgiveness. It is the holy of holies of the Jewish soul. (Lehavdil, Beethoven came close to it in the opening notes of the sixth movement of the C Sharp Minor Quartet op. 131, his most sublime and spiritual work).

Nor can you sit on Tisha B’av reading Eichah, the book of Lamentations, with its own unique cantillation, and not feel the tears of Jews through the ages as they suffered for their faith and wept as they remembered what they had lost, the pain as fresh as it was the day the Temple was destroyed. Words without music are like a body without a soul.

Each year for the past ten years I have been privileged to be part of a mission of song (together with the Shabbaton Choir and singers Rabbi Lionel Rosenfeld and Chazanim Shimon Craimer and Jonny Turgel) to Israel to sing to victims of terror, as well as to people in hospitals, community centres and food kitchens. We sing for and with the injured, the bereaved, the sick and the broken hearted. We dance with people in wheelchairs. One boy who had lost half of his family, as well as being blinded, in a suicide bombing, sang a duet with the youngest member of the choir, reducing the nurses and his fellow patients to tears. Such moments are epiphanies, redeeming a fragment of humanity and hope from the random cruelties of fate.

Beethoven wrote over the manuscript of the third movement of his A Minor Quartet the words Neue Kraft fühlend, “Feeling new strength.” That is what you sense in those hospital wards. You understand what King David meant when he sang to God the words: “You turned my grief into dance; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to You and not be silent.” You feel the strength of the human spirit no terror can destroy.

In his book, Musicophilia, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (no relative, alas) tells the poignant story of Clive Wearing, an eminent musicologist who was struck by a devastating brain infection. The result was acute amnesia. He was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds. As his wife Deborah put it, ‘It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.’

Unable to thread experiences together, he was caught in an endless present that had no connection with anything that had gone before. One day his wife found him holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand, saying each time, ‘Look, it’s new.’ ‘It’s the same chocolate’, she said. ‘No’, he replied, ‘look. It’s changed.’ He had no past at all. In a moment of awareness he said about himself, ‘I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It’s like being dead.’

Two things broke through his isolation. One was his love for his wife. The other was music. He could still sing, play the organ and conduct a choir with all his old skill and verve. What was it about music, Sacks asked, that enabled him, while playing or conducting, to overcome his amnesia? He suggests that when we ‘remember’ a melody, we recall one note at a time, yet each note relates to the whole. He quotes the philosopher of music, Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote, ‘Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.’ Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.

Faith is more like music than like science. Science analyzes, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God’s song. Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise.

So music is a signal of transcendence. The philosopher and musician Roger Scruton writes that it is “an encounter with the pure subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in obedience to the laws of freedom alone.” He quotes Rilke: “Words still go softly out towards the unsayable / And music, always new, from palpitating stones / builds in useless space its godly home.” The history of the Jewish spirit is written in its songs. The words do not change, but each generation needs its own melodies.

Our generation needs new songs so that we too can sing joyously to God as our ancestors did at that moment of transfiguration when they crossed the Red Sea and emerged, the other side, free at last. When the soul sings, the spirit soars.

[1] Kavam, literally “their line,” possibly meaning the reverberating string of a musical instrument.

Credo: It’s good to talk – perhaps even holy too

Articles, Credo, Writings & Speeches 1 Response »

Jun 252011

It’s good, they used to say in the advertisement, to talk. According to Judaism it’s more than good: it’s essential. Without speech there is no relationship, and without relationship there is no peace. We see this in three biblical passages.

The first is a line in the Bible that is never correctly translated. It occurs in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain resents the fact that Abel’s offering is accepted while his is not. God senses his rising anger and warns him to control it, but Cain isn’t listening. Then comes the fateful sentence.

Literally translated it says, “Cain said to his brother Abel, and while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.” This does not make sense. It is not syntactically well-formed. It says, “Cain said,” but it doesn’t tell us what he said. So most Christian translations follow the Samaritan, Septuagint, Vulgate and Syriac versions that add a phrase telling us that Cain said, “Let’s go into the field.”

But the original Hebrew says what it does for a reason. It says, “Cain said to his brother Abel,” and then lapses into silence before telling us that Cain attacked his brother. The fractured syntax conveys more powerfully than any well-formed sentence could, that conversation between the brothers broke down. They stopped speaking. Words failed. Cain was too angry to verbalise his feelings. The next phrase tells us the result. When words fail, violence begins.

The second passage occurs near the beginning of the story of Joseph and his brothers. The brothers resent Joseph. He is their father’s favourite, and it hurts. The relevant phrase is usually translated as, “they hated him and couldn’t speak peaceably to him”. In fact, though, the Hebrew original uses an unusual construction. Literally it says, “they could not speak him to peace.”

What this means, says Rabbi Jonathan Eybeshutz (18^th century, Prague), is that had the brothers spoken, they could have told Joseph of their resentments. Joseph would have been aware of their feelings and might have moderated his behaviour in some way. Once real communication took place, the brothers might have spoken their way to peace. As it was, the brothers’ inability to speak allowed hatred to fester until they plotted to kill him, eventually deciding to sell him as a slave, fracturing the family and causing their father inconsolable grief. Again, a failure of words begat tragedy.

The third, a classic example of silence leading to violence, is the story of King David’s son Absalom. In a shocking act, Amnon, David’s son from another marriage, rapes Absalom’s sister Tamar. Tamar tells her brother the story. We then read, “Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad; he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar.” Two years later he takes a terrible revenge. Yet again, where words failed, violence followed.

Judaism is a religion of language, a sustained meditation on the power of words to build or destroy, heal or harm. In words, God created the universe. In words, he reveals himself to us. The first thing he gave Adam was the gift of naming the animals, using words to categorise and thus begin to understand the world around us. In Jewish tradition Homo sapiens is described as “the speaking being.”

Jewish law sees “evil speech” as akin to murder. There is a trace of this in the English phrase “character assassination.” Words can wound, injure, afflict. They can also lead to understanding and reconciliation. Honest, open conversation is the best way, sometimes the only way, to resolve conflict.

The great irony of the twenty-first century is that , having created technologies of instant global communication, we find ourselves talking less and less with those with whom we disagree.

The Internet allows us to choose the news we hear and the voices to which we listen. What were once mixed communities that read the same papers and watched the same television news have become massive sects of the like-minded. At every stage our prejudices are reinforced and our views become more extreme.

There is a danger that a generation is emerging unable to giving a respectful hearing to the other side. When that happens, warns the Bible, violence is waiting in the wings.

There is a lovely rabbinic phrase: Conversation is a form of prayer. Openness to the Divine Other helps us be open to the human other. It’s good to talk – perhaps even holy too.

Covenant & Conversation 5770: Ki Tavo – Covenant & Conversation

5770, Covenant & Conversation, Devarim No Responses »

Aug 282010

In two sentences in this week’s sedra, the Torah summarizes the entire relationship between G-d and the people of Israel:

You have affirmed [he-emarta] this day that the Lord is your, G-d, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. And the Lord has affirmed [he-emirkha] this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments. (Deut. 26: 17-18)

Here, set out with disarming simplicity, is the dual relationship, the reciprocity, at the heart of the covenant. It is an idea made famous in the form of two jingles –:

the first, that of William Norman Ewer

How odd

Of G-d

To choose

The Jews

and the second, the Jewish riposte:

Not quite

So odd –

The Jews

Chose G-d

Between G-d and the people is a mutual bond of love. The Israelites pledge themselves to be faithful to G-d and His commands. G-d pledges Himself to cherish the people as His treasure – for though He is the G-d of all humanity, He holds a special place in His affection (to speak anthropomorphically) for the descendants of those who first heard and heeded His call. This is the whole of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. The rest is commentary.

The English translation, above, is that of the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh. Any translation, however, tends to conceal the difficulty in the key verb in both sentences: le-ha’amir. What is strange is that, on the one hand, it is a form of one the most common of all biblical verbs, leimor, “to say”. On the other, the specific form used here – the hiphil, or causative form – is unique. Nowhere else does it appear in this form in the Bible, and its meaning is, as a result, obscure.

The JPS translation reads it as “affirmed”. Aryeh Kaplan, in The Living Torah, reads it as “declared allegiance to”. Robert Alter renders it: “proclaimed”. Other interpretations include “separated to yourself” (Rashi), “chosen” (Septuagint), “recognized” (Saadia Gaon), “raised” (Radak, Sforno), “betrothed” (Malbim), “given fame to” (Ibn Janach), “exchanged everything else for” (Chizkuni), “accepted the uniqueness of” (Rashi to Chagigah 3a), or “caused G-d to declare” (Judah Halevi, cited by Ibn Ezra.

Among Christian translations, the King James Version has, “Thou hast avouched the Lord this day to be thy G-d”. The New International Version reads: “You have declared this day that the Lord is your G-d”. The Contemporary English Version has: “In response, you have agreed that the Lord will be your G-d”.

What is the significance of this unique form of the verb “to say”? Why is it used here? The use of language in the Torah is not vague, accidental, approximate, imprecise. In general, in the Mosaic books, style mirrors substance. The way something is said is often connected to what is being said. So it is here. What we have before us is a proposition of far-reaching consequence for the most fundamental question humanity can ask itself: What is the nature of the bond between human beings and G-d – or between human beings and one another – such that we can endow our lives with the charisma of grace? The answer given by the Torah, so profound that we need to stop and meditate on it, lies in language, speech, words. Hence the singling out, in this definitive statement of Jewish faith, of the verb meaning “to say”.

We owe to the later work of Wittgenstein, developed further by J. L. Austin (How to do things with words) and J. R. Searle (Speech Acts), the realisation that language has many functions. Since the days of Socrates, philosophers have tended to concentrate on just one function: the use of language to describe, or state facts. Hence the key questions of philosophy and later science: Is this statement true? Does it correspond to the facts? It is consistent with other facts? Can I be sure? What evidence do I have? What warrant do I have for believing what I believe? Language is the medium we use to describe what is.

But that is only one use of language, and there are many others. We use it to classify, to divide the world up into particular slices of reality. We also use it to evaluate. “Patriotism” and “jingoism” both denote the same phenomenon – loyalty to one’s country – but with opposite evaluations:

patriotism = good, jingoism = bad.

We use language to express emotion. Sometimes we use it simply to establish a relationship. Malinowsky called this phatic communion, where what matters is not what we say but the mere fact that we are talking to one another (Robin Dunbar has recently argued that speech for humans is like “grooming behaviour” among primates). We can also use language to question, command, hypothesize and imagine. There are literary genres like fiction and poetry which use language in complex ways to extend our imaginative engagement with reality. The philosophical-scientific mindset that sees the sole significant function of language as descriptive – taken to an extreme in the philosophical movement known as “logical positivism” – is a form of tone-deafness to the rich variety of speech.The Mosaic books contain a deep set of reflections on the nature and power of language. This has much to do with the fact that the Israelites of Moses’ day were in the place where, and the time when, the first alphabet appeared, the proto-semitic script from which all subsequent alphabets are directly or indirectly derived. Judaism marks the world’s first transition on a national scale from an oral to a literate culture. Hence the unique significance it attaches to the spoken and written word. We discover this at the very beginning of the Torah. It takes the form of the radical abandonment of myth. G-d spoke and the world came into being. There is no contest, no struggle, no use of force to subdue rival powers – as there is in every myth without exception. Instead, the key verb in Genesis 1 is simply leimor, “G-d said [vayomer], Let there be . . . and there was.” Language creates worlds.

That, of course, is Divine — not human – speech. However, J. L. Austin pointed out that there is a human counterpart. There are certain things we can create with words when we use them in a special way. Austin called this use of speech performative utterance (more technically, illocutionary acts). So, for example, when a judge says, “This court is now in session”, he is notdescribing something but doing something. When a groom says to his bride under the wedding canopy, “Behold you are betrothed to me by this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel”, he is not stating a fact but creating a fact.

The most basic type of performative utterance is making a promise. This is the use of language to create an obligation. Some promises are unilateral (X commits himself to do something for Y), but others are mutual (X and Y make a commitment to one another). Some are highly specific (“I promise to pay you £1,000”), but others are open-ended (“I promise to look after you, come what may”). The supreme example of an open-ended mutual pledge between human beings is marriage. The supreme example of an open-ended mutual pledge between human beings and G-d is a covenant. That is what our two verses state: that G-d and the people of Israel pledge themselves to one another by making a covenant, a relationship brought into existence by words, and sustained by honouring those words.

This is the single most radical proposition in the Hebrew Bible. It has no real counterpart in any other religion. What is supremely holy is language, when used to create a moral bond between two parties. This means that the supreme form of relationship is one that does not depend on power, superior force, or dominant-submissive hierarchy. In a covenantal relationship both parties respect the dignity of the other. A covenant exists only in virtue of freely given consent. It also means that between Infinite G-d and infinitesimal humanity there can be relationship – because, through language, they can communicate with one another. The key facts of the Torah are that [a] G-d speaks and [b] G-d listens. The use of language to create a mutually binding relationship is what links G-d and humankind. Thus the two verses mean: “Today, by an act of speech, you have made G-d your G-d, and G-d has made you His eople”. Words, language, an act of saying, have created an open-ended, eternally binding relationship.

Hence the name I have given this four-year series of Torah commentary: Covenant and conversation. Judaism is a covenant, a marriage between G-d and a people. The Torah is the written record of that covenant. It is Israel’s marriage-contract as G-d’s bride. Conversation – speaking and listening – is what makes covenant possible. Hence the dual form of Torah: the written Torah, through which G-d speaks to us and the Oral Torah through which we speak to G-d by way of interpreting His word.Judaism is the open-ended, mutually binding, conversation between Heaven and earth.

Despite the deep influence of Judaism on two later faiths, Christianity and Islam, neither adopted this idea (to be sure, some Christian theologians speak of covenant, but a different kind of covenant, more unilateral than reciprocal). There are no conversations between G-d and human beings in either the New Testament or the Koran – none that echo the dialogues in Tanakh between G-d and Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk and Job. Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the religion of sacred dialogue, the religion of salvation and the religion of submission – are three different things. The use of language to create a moral bond of love between the Infinite and the finite – through covenant on the one hand, conversation on the other – is what makes Judaism different. That is what is set out simply in these two verses: Speaking a relationship into being, le-ha’amir, is what makes G-d our G-d, and us, His people.

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