rabbi ari lev: Why Sing!?
Let My People Sing!
March 17, 2018
Here we are at Let My People Sing!, on Rosh Hodesh Nissan. In a mere two weeks, many of us will gather around our Passover tables and sing the words that Moses famously said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”
From Dayenu to Take me out to the seder, song is such a core part of our passover rituals. Even more so, song is at the heart of how we understand our liberation story.
Last year, at this same beautiful shabbaton, I shared very personally about my own struggles with singing and the sound of my own voice. In preparation this year, I have been reflecting on our collective struggles with prayer and song. More specifically, I have been asking myself, Why Sing? Why, Let my People Sing!?
A few weeks ago I got an email from a congregant. She expressed that while she has been coming to KT services relatively regularly, by which she means about once a month, yet she still finds the service largely inaccessible. I know there are dozens of us who currently or have felt in the past something of this sentiment. Myself included. The melodies aren’t familiar, the language is foreign, the transliteration isn’t consistent, the choreography is unexpected. Not to mention when we know the Hebrew, it it is often spiritually incongruous with our own belief systems. The entire experience of going to synagogue for services has the potential to be utterly alienating. And so much of that is rooted in a practice dependent on singing and chanting words from a book or memorized after years of practice. So why sing? Why not sit in silence, which has the potentially to be equally uncomfortable but appears at least more universally accessible? Why not make art or study a text or do yoga? Why not dance? All of which are established expressions of religious experience. Why is song one of our primary modes of spiritual expression?
For a few years I led a weekly Jewish spirituality class at a medium security men’s prison outside of Boston. In truth the class was as much about mindfulness as it was about Judaism. We met weekly, a modest group of us, usually ranging between 5-15 people. We always gathered midday in a small classroom that shared a wall with the main chapel space. Simultaneously one of the pentecostal pastors would lead a noon-time worship service, equipped with piano and microphones. The walls were thin and sound was clear. Our hour of mindful reflection, Jewish learning and ritual was set against the backdrop of a very loud fire-and-brimstone preacher, including his vivid descriptions of judgment and eternal damnation which he hoped would encourage repentance. Which is to say that paying attention to our breath, discussing the parsha and singing a nigun, was punctuated, repeatedly, by the threat of hell. Here I am trying to preach the gospel of Teshuva - that transformation is always possible; that we are essentially called to return to wholeness in every moment; that forgiveness is a path to healing. And I keep being interrupted by songs about the Devil coming for our sins. At first it was distracting. But when it interrupted our refrains of Dayenu during our Passover seder, it grew from aggravating to infuriating. We had gone through so much effort to make this ritual possible. Clearances for grape juice, hard-boiled eggs and matzah. I brought in charoset I had made from my family recipe. As the seder began, we started to sing “Avadim Hayyinu” Then we were slaves, but today, today we are free. We struggled to reconcile what those words meant behind bars. We were repeatedly interrupted by the refrains of these crucifying hymns. We did our best to tune it out. We even laughed about it a little. We tried to sing louder when we could.
As I drove home, questions ran through my head about Christian hegemony, and why it was that he had the primary worship space, not too mention amplification. Not only was I utterly opposed to his theology in general. But I could not imagine how these one hundred men, hungry for connection, cut off from their children, dehumanized by the prison system, targeted by racism, living in poverty, and mired in shame could possibly benefit from singing for an hour about God’s judgement of them.
The following week I went to speak with my supervisor. My supervisor was the full time staff chaplain at this prison. He is a radical catholic who spent several years living in Columbia as a human shield. He is a person of tremendous integrity and I trust him immensely. Our conversation went something like this: “Peter, I have some serious concerns about Pastor Rich’s worship. Not only does it interfere with my class, but last week it interrupted my seder. In addition, I find his words very offensive and spiritually violating. I wonder how you reconcile it?” “Ari Lev, while in many ways I agree with you, Pastor Rich is an employee of the prison and I am not his supervisor. There is not much I can do structurally. Would you like to know how I reconcile his service spiritually?” Oh yes, please! Peter continues, “What I know about trauma in the brain is that it largely can’t be healed by talking. Which is why we need different modalities, like movement, meditation and singing. Every one of those men in there has experienced severe trauma in their life. Just being in this facility is traumatic. And the fact that they are spending 30-40 minutes a day singing, regardless of the words, is actually healing to their brains. And I take comfort in knowing that Pastor Rich is giving these men a chance to sing at full volume.”
This confirmed that Peter was the most compassionate human I knew. And really, I should not have needed Peter’s compassionate insight to realize this truth. It is embedded throughout Jewish tradition. Across time and place, the rabbis understood the importance of singing. They created structured times to sing. They canonized the book of psalms, and quote from it in liturgy. Shiru l’Adonai - Sing to God! And they embedded within the psalms essential truths about song itself. Hazorim b’dimah, b’rina yiktzoru - Those who sow in tears, will reap in rinah, in joyful song. Song is our saving grace.
The Tikkunei Zohar teaches, “There is a palace of tears to which no one can gain entrance except through crying, and there is a palace of song that can only be entered through singing.” Which is to say, there is a place, a palace, a potential for feeling and healing within us, that can only be reached through song.
In the words of Joey Weisenberg, “Crying and singing are the twin processes by which we cultivate an open state of being. When tears and songs flow out of us, they encourage vulnerability, signaling that we’re open for personal growth, that we may yet develop into new and more sensitive versions of ourselves” (95).
And modern science is beginning to confirm the insights of these ancient mystics. In the field of trauma therapy, research is revealing the limits of language to heal the brain and body. Traumatic experiences overwhelm and break down our sense of safety, connection and dignity. From my own experience of trauma, it is terrifying to feel deeply. We grow afraid of our own inner experience, and as a result, we protect ourselves, from ourselves. Art, music and dance have the capacity to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with this terror. And for this reason, they have been used as trauma treatments around the world.
Even more specifically, there is tremendous power in collective singing. Collective music creates a larger context for our lives. Music binds people together who might individually be terrified but who collectively become powerful advocates for themselves and others. Singing cultivates hope and courage. This undermines every judgement I held of Pastor Rich’s fire and brimstone worship services; which to my own intellectual shock, might actually be a source of tremendous resilience for the men who attended. Men who undeniably have experienced a lifetime of trauma and were trying to become more sensitive, whole versions of themselves.
This morning, beneath the new moon of Nissan, we began a new book of the Torah, the book of Vayikra, known in English as Leviticus, and known to the rabbis as Torat Kohanim, or Priestly Wisdom. On the surface, the heart of the book of Leviticus is procedural descriptions for temple sacrifices. And for this reason, it is often unappreciated in contemporary liberal circles. However what appears to be a story about blood and guts (quite literally!), is in fact a story about our longing for intimacy.
The Hebrew word Korban קורבן, often translated as sacrifice or offering, in fact comes from the root קרב (kuf resh bet), and the verb לקרב (L'Karev) - meaning to bring near. While it might appear that the chapters of Leviticus are an interruption in the flow of biblical narrative, we are called to look closer at the priestly traditions because within them is revealed a value system that knows we humans crave closeness. We crave connection and community. We crave intimacy, in its many forms - even as we are scared, hurt and healing from it.
Recently, Rabbi Michael Adam Latz posted on Facebook:
"So entangled is our liberation and our quest for holiness, that the stories are never, in fact, separated: We read the Haggadah, the Pesach story, in the midst of reading the book of Vayikra. These moments, these holy pursuits, collapse into one another and erupt into Judaism's purpose: To cry out for a life of liberation and holiness, that to be a free people is to reach for heaven and earth in the same instant and try with all our strength and all our compassion and all our spiritual resolve to bring them together in one unified and holy embrace."
The book of Vayikra is the story of our human imperfection, our capacity to forgive and the closeness, the intimacy that comes from real teshuva - transformative healing. When God instructs Moses to cry out unto Pharaoh, "Let my people go..." God specifies, "...that they may be of service." Our freedom is not a means to an end. It is a call to come closer to each other, to our fragility and our longings, and to know that holiness lies in the space between us if we only have the courage to take a step in. Or, as the case may be, the courage to sing!
And we know that song is central not only in the story of Exodus which we read on Passover, but across time and place, song has sustained movements for liberation. In Estonia in the late 80’s, 300,000 people caused a singing revolution using songfests to successfully bring about the restoration of the independent state of Estonia from the Soviet Union. Music was the backbone of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., lines of marchers, arms linked, singing “We shall overcome” as they walked steadily toward the police. We saw it in Standing Rock and in the streets of Ferguson. And we sang of it this morning in Hallel, Min HaMetzar Karati Yah - I will cry out, in song, from this narrow place. “Ozi v’zimrat Yah, My strength is bound up in song.” Music is a fighting force and a healing salve. In the words of the rabbis, Music is a hut shel hesed, a thread of mercy, a chord of compassion that allows us to see beyond the stories we have always told ourselves. Including the story I was telling myself about Pastor Rich!
Like the korban, Let My People Sing! is a shared collective experience. One that draws on the power of Jewish song to cultivate resilience. And the research shows, that shared collective experiences and song do precisely that. They make us more resilient. They are healing and freeing and sustaining. In the words of the LMPS core team, “Singing is a place of refuge and a practice of communal interdependence...We sing to remind one another: we are alive, we are strong, we are together, we will survive.”
So sing! My people. It doesn’t matter if you know the words or not. Just like it kinda didn’t matter that preacher was singing about hell and damnation.
Just sing!
Sing when you know the words.
And sing when you don’t.
Sing quietly and sing loudly.
Together we will sing our way to freedom!
Shabbat Shalom.
March 17, 2018
Here we are at Let My People Sing!, on Rosh Hodesh Nissan. In a mere two weeks, many of us will gather around our Passover tables and sing the words that Moses famously said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”
From Dayenu to Take me out to the seder, song is such a core part of our passover rituals. Even more so, song is at the heart of how we understand our liberation story.
Last year, at this same beautiful shabbaton, I shared very personally about my own struggles with singing and the sound of my own voice. In preparation this year, I have been reflecting on our collective struggles with prayer and song. More specifically, I have been asking myself, Why Sing? Why, Let my People Sing!?
A few weeks ago I got an email from a congregant. She expressed that while she has been coming to KT services relatively regularly, by which she means about once a month, yet she still finds the service largely inaccessible. I know there are dozens of us who currently or have felt in the past something of this sentiment. Myself included. The melodies aren’t familiar, the language is foreign, the transliteration isn’t consistent, the choreography is unexpected. Not to mention when we know the Hebrew, it it is often spiritually incongruous with our own belief systems. The entire experience of going to synagogue for services has the potential to be utterly alienating. And so much of that is rooted in a practice dependent on singing and chanting words from a book or memorized after years of practice. So why sing? Why not sit in silence, which has the potentially to be equally uncomfortable but appears at least more universally accessible? Why not make art or study a text or do yoga? Why not dance? All of which are established expressions of religious experience. Why is song one of our primary modes of spiritual expression?
For a few years I led a weekly Jewish spirituality class at a medium security men’s prison outside of Boston. In truth the class was as much about mindfulness as it was about Judaism. We met weekly, a modest group of us, usually ranging between 5-15 people. We always gathered midday in a small classroom that shared a wall with the main chapel space. Simultaneously one of the pentecostal pastors would lead a noon-time worship service, equipped with piano and microphones. The walls were thin and sound was clear. Our hour of mindful reflection, Jewish learning and ritual was set against the backdrop of a very loud fire-and-brimstone preacher, including his vivid descriptions of judgment and eternal damnation which he hoped would encourage repentance. Which is to say that paying attention to our breath, discussing the parsha and singing a nigun, was punctuated, repeatedly, by the threat of hell. Here I am trying to preach the gospel of Teshuva - that transformation is always possible; that we are essentially called to return to wholeness in every moment; that forgiveness is a path to healing. And I keep being interrupted by songs about the Devil coming for our sins. At first it was distracting. But when it interrupted our refrains of Dayenu during our Passover seder, it grew from aggravating to infuriating. We had gone through so much effort to make this ritual possible. Clearances for grape juice, hard-boiled eggs and matzah. I brought in charoset I had made from my family recipe. As the seder began, we started to sing “Avadim Hayyinu” Then we were slaves, but today, today we are free. We struggled to reconcile what those words meant behind bars. We were repeatedly interrupted by the refrains of these crucifying hymns. We did our best to tune it out. We even laughed about it a little. We tried to sing louder when we could.
As I drove home, questions ran through my head about Christian hegemony, and why it was that he had the primary worship space, not too mention amplification. Not only was I utterly opposed to his theology in general. But I could not imagine how these one hundred men, hungry for connection, cut off from their children, dehumanized by the prison system, targeted by racism, living in poverty, and mired in shame could possibly benefit from singing for an hour about God’s judgement of them.
The following week I went to speak with my supervisor. My supervisor was the full time staff chaplain at this prison. He is a radical catholic who spent several years living in Columbia as a human shield. He is a person of tremendous integrity and I trust him immensely. Our conversation went something like this: “Peter, I have some serious concerns about Pastor Rich’s worship. Not only does it interfere with my class, but last week it interrupted my seder. In addition, I find his words very offensive and spiritually violating. I wonder how you reconcile it?” “Ari Lev, while in many ways I agree with you, Pastor Rich is an employee of the prison and I am not his supervisor. There is not much I can do structurally. Would you like to know how I reconcile his service spiritually?” Oh yes, please! Peter continues, “What I know about trauma in the brain is that it largely can’t be healed by talking. Which is why we need different modalities, like movement, meditation and singing. Every one of those men in there has experienced severe trauma in their life. Just being in this facility is traumatic. And the fact that they are spending 30-40 minutes a day singing, regardless of the words, is actually healing to their brains. And I take comfort in knowing that Pastor Rich is giving these men a chance to sing at full volume.”
This confirmed that Peter was the most compassionate human I knew. And really, I should not have needed Peter’s compassionate insight to realize this truth. It is embedded throughout Jewish tradition. Across time and place, the rabbis understood the importance of singing. They created structured times to sing. They canonized the book of psalms, and quote from it in liturgy. Shiru l’Adonai - Sing to God! And they embedded within the psalms essential truths about song itself. Hazorim b’dimah, b’rina yiktzoru - Those who sow in tears, will reap in rinah, in joyful song. Song is our saving grace.
The Tikkunei Zohar teaches, “There is a palace of tears to which no one can gain entrance except through crying, and there is a palace of song that can only be entered through singing.” Which is to say, there is a place, a palace, a potential for feeling and healing within us, that can only be reached through song.
In the words of Joey Weisenberg, “Crying and singing are the twin processes by which we cultivate an open state of being. When tears and songs flow out of us, they encourage vulnerability, signaling that we’re open for personal growth, that we may yet develop into new and more sensitive versions of ourselves” (95).
And modern science is beginning to confirm the insights of these ancient mystics. In the field of trauma therapy, research is revealing the limits of language to heal the brain and body. Traumatic experiences overwhelm and break down our sense of safety, connection and dignity. From my own experience of trauma, it is terrifying to feel deeply. We grow afraid of our own inner experience, and as a result, we protect ourselves, from ourselves. Art, music and dance have the capacity to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with this terror. And for this reason, they have been used as trauma treatments around the world.
Even more specifically, there is tremendous power in collective singing. Collective music creates a larger context for our lives. Music binds people together who might individually be terrified but who collectively become powerful advocates for themselves and others. Singing cultivates hope and courage. This undermines every judgement I held of Pastor Rich’s fire and brimstone worship services; which to my own intellectual shock, might actually be a source of tremendous resilience for the men who attended. Men who undeniably have experienced a lifetime of trauma and were trying to become more sensitive, whole versions of themselves.
This morning, beneath the new moon of Nissan, we began a new book of the Torah, the book of Vayikra, known in English as Leviticus, and known to the rabbis as Torat Kohanim, or Priestly Wisdom. On the surface, the heart of the book of Leviticus is procedural descriptions for temple sacrifices. And for this reason, it is often unappreciated in contemporary liberal circles. However what appears to be a story about blood and guts (quite literally!), is in fact a story about our longing for intimacy.
The Hebrew word Korban קורבן, often translated as sacrifice or offering, in fact comes from the root קרב (kuf resh bet), and the verb לקרב (L'Karev) - meaning to bring near. While it might appear that the chapters of Leviticus are an interruption in the flow of biblical narrative, we are called to look closer at the priestly traditions because within them is revealed a value system that knows we humans crave closeness. We crave connection and community. We crave intimacy, in its many forms - even as we are scared, hurt and healing from it.
Recently, Rabbi Michael Adam Latz posted on Facebook:
"So entangled is our liberation and our quest for holiness, that the stories are never, in fact, separated: We read the Haggadah, the Pesach story, in the midst of reading the book of Vayikra. These moments, these holy pursuits, collapse into one another and erupt into Judaism's purpose: To cry out for a life of liberation and holiness, that to be a free people is to reach for heaven and earth in the same instant and try with all our strength and all our compassion and all our spiritual resolve to bring them together in one unified and holy embrace."
The book of Vayikra is the story of our human imperfection, our capacity to forgive and the closeness, the intimacy that comes from real teshuva - transformative healing. When God instructs Moses to cry out unto Pharaoh, "Let my people go..." God specifies, "...that they may be of service." Our freedom is not a means to an end. It is a call to come closer to each other, to our fragility and our longings, and to know that holiness lies in the space between us if we only have the courage to take a step in. Or, as the case may be, the courage to sing!
And we know that song is central not only in the story of Exodus which we read on Passover, but across time and place, song has sustained movements for liberation. In Estonia in the late 80’s, 300,000 people caused a singing revolution using songfests to successfully bring about the restoration of the independent state of Estonia from the Soviet Union. Music was the backbone of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., lines of marchers, arms linked, singing “We shall overcome” as they walked steadily toward the police. We saw it in Standing Rock and in the streets of Ferguson. And we sang of it this morning in Hallel, Min HaMetzar Karati Yah - I will cry out, in song, from this narrow place. “Ozi v’zimrat Yah, My strength is bound up in song.” Music is a fighting force and a healing salve. In the words of the rabbis, Music is a hut shel hesed, a thread of mercy, a chord of compassion that allows us to see beyond the stories we have always told ourselves. Including the story I was telling myself about Pastor Rich!
Like the korban, Let My People Sing! is a shared collective experience. One that draws on the power of Jewish song to cultivate resilience. And the research shows, that shared collective experiences and song do precisely that. They make us more resilient. They are healing and freeing and sustaining. In the words of the LMPS core team, “Singing is a place of refuge and a practice of communal interdependence...We sing to remind one another: we are alive, we are strong, we are together, we will survive.”
So sing! My people. It doesn’t matter if you know the words or not. Just like it kinda didn’t matter that preacher was singing about hell and damnation.
Just sing!
Sing when you know the words.
And sing when you don’t.
Sing quietly and sing loudly.
Together we will sing our way to freedom!
Shabbat Shalom.