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Fear as a drive for musical and religious interpretation
Fear as a drive for musical and religious interpretation
If one goes through my private library one notices that most of the books that I bought in the last decade belong to two subjects: music and religion. My main academic expertise is focused on performance studies, and I feel that what interests me in the performance of music is very similar to what interests me in religion: the interpretation of texts. I think that the questions and problems that surround the interpretation of musical scores are very similar (although not identical) to those of religious texts. This is exactly why I called the course I give in Mazkeret Batya “Beit Midrash Muzika” (Beit Midrash usually means a place where people study religious texts or matters). In this course we study the issue of musical interpretation in classical music, while here and there I hint to equivalent matters in religion (most of the people who attend the course are interested in both subjects).
During the last two weeks I went through two shocking experiences, one in the realm of music and the other in the realm of religion. I must admit that the musical experience was somewhat less shocking than the religious one, yet both were very significant for me. In this post I wish to speak about the relation of fear in the constitution of a religious or musical interpretation. Fear is a very natural feeling which everyone experiences, yet I feel that one should be aware of it and ask if its existence should influence the way a person acts and performs.
Two ways of interpreting music
During the last two weeks my family visited relatives in the Czech Republic. I decided to take The Glenn Gould Reader (which I have reviewed elsewhere). In this book Gould wrote an interesting essay about the great conductor Leopold Stokowsky. He contrasts Stokowsky with Toscanini, claming that the latter was a “literalist” and the former an “ecstatic”. Toscanini seemed to aim at playing the notes “as they are” and projecting them as “objectively” as possible to the listener. Stokowsky, on the other hand, argued that the notes are merely “black marks on paper”.
Stokowsky claimed that “We write black marks on white paper – the mere facts of frequency; but music is a communication much more subtle than mere facts. The best a composer can do when within him he hears a great melody is to put it on paper. We call it music, but that is not music; that is only paper. Some believe that one should merely mechanically reproduce the marks on the paper, but I do not believe in that. One must go much further than that. We must defend the composer against the mechanical conception of life which if becoming more and more strong today.”’ (p. 264)
The criteria for aesthetic experience
In another place in the book, Gould scorns those who value music merely by its biographical data (who was the composer, who was the performer, when was it performed) and not by its aesthetic affect. Someone once told me that he heard about a psychological experiment where people listened to music with, and sometimes without, knowing who the composers were. The experiment showed that people tend to give higher value to pieces that they think that were composed by famous composers.
Gould was a great advocate of refined editing techniques in recordings. His generation was, by large, against interference in what they saw as an almost religious process: the act of live performance. Gould argued that it is not important when the recording was done or even who was the performer. If the result is convincing when you listen to it, it should be valued higher than otherwise. In other words, one should evaluate to sounds without careing too much about how it was created and by whom.
People are not fully aware of how big is the difference between live performances of classical music and recordings by the same artist (see my review of Amir Ben Ayun which was so different from his recordings). When one plays music in concert, one cannot stop and correct or make another take. During studio recording there is much more freedom for editing and refining the musical result. Gould describes in his book a process of refined editing of a recording which involved hundreds of cuts in order to achieve the result he desired.
Leonard Bernstein describes The Glenn Gould Reader as “one long series of delightful and stimulating shocks”. Indeed, Gould, for me, is one of the important interpreters that ever existed. Yet the “religious” shock that I experienced when I returned to Israel was greater.
The debate on egalitarian prayer in Keshet Mazkeret Bataya
I live in a small town called Mazkeret Bataya which is located more or less between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Our family is part of the Keshet (rainbow) community, which is focused around the education of children towards tolerance and co-existence between religious and secular Israelis. Anyone who knows Israel is immediately aware of the fact the people tend to categorize and differentiate the population according to their relation to religion, to where their grandparents were born (Europe, Arab states or America), financial background, etc. Keshet aims to overcome the alienation between religious and secular Jews by emphasizing their common values, while not ignoring the differences. Our slogan is “To live together”.
During the last few months, some members of the religious part of our community are trying to establish a praying group (Minyan) which is both Orthodox and egalitarian. While I was in Czech, a heated argument started between members of the community regarding a future planned “pilot” where women will read from the Tora. Most people would probably not understand what all the fuss is about, yet for Orthodox people, a women singing in the synagogue is quite uncommon. In Orthodox communities, women usually find themselves as mere observers and relatively very passive participants in the service.
However, paradoxically, the discussion was not really around the Jewish law and texts. Most of the arguments were simply against or for change in religion. When I spoke to someone that is strongly against the idea, he claimed that he would feel very uncomfortable that his father would refuse to pray with him in such a synagogue. Strong voices from the other side argued that the traditional way or praying is “chauvinistic” and not modern (or in other words: primitive).
Although some were strongly for executing this pilot and others were very much against, all of the people (including myself) agreed that it must be conducted with relation to Halacha, which is the Jewish law as formed and developed from the time before Moses and up to the present.
The experience of “Shira Chadash”
While we were in Czech some of the people in our community suggested that we visit existing communities that conduct Orthodox-egalitarian prayers, and see how we feel about the whole idea, as well as speak to the members of such communities in order to learn from their experiences. A decision was made to visit the “Shira Chadash” community in Jerusalem that is one of the pioneers in the Orthodox world with this manner of religious “performance”.
We returned to Israel last Thursday and the next day we were on our way towards the holy city. A very kind and friendly family had hosted us, and it was a chance to learn about their way of life and how they see they whole subject, that stirred our community.
The experience of prayer in “Shira Chadash” was amazing. It seemed that it is a truly egalitarian prayer, and that women had finally found their equal place in Jewish religion, even in Orthodoxy. It seemed to me that one could not be unmoved from how beautifully everyone sang there and how women can finally be active in leading the service and chanting from the Tora.
Yet the shock that I am talking about did not occur while participating in the service, but while attending a meeting with a few members of the “Shira Chadash” community, shortly before the Shabbat ended.
Staying in the boundaries of Orthodoxy
In that meeting, a member of their “Halacha commity” explained to us how they made their decisions. He titled their approach as “Halachic pragmatism” and argued that it meant being egalitarian while taking the most traditional approach to the Jewish law. He pointed out the fact that the parts that women participated are considered either less important (such as the reading of psalms) or, arguably, less controversial (for example, chanting from the Tora). He explained that women do not lead the most important parts of the prayer: Shma Israel (the declaration of faith) and Amida (known as the “standing” or the “Sixteen prayer”).
The person that spoke before us explained that as men they feel completely equal with their wives and daughters in everyday life. They believe that the egalitarian revolution might even be, not a merely historical event, but, something that was directed by God. He scorned the fact the when religious leaders have to make religious verdicts concerning money, they find all the ways in order to go around and contradict the Halacha and Jewish tradition, yet when it come to the relation to women, it is paralyzed.
He explained to us that they are trying to find ways that there will be no contrast between how they feel towards women outside and inside the synagogue. Yet he stressed that they wish to do so within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. In order to do so they find complicated ways to approve certain egalitarian-religious acts. Now, I am no expert in religious law, yet I remember that he said that in some cases he feels sick (he used the Hebrew word “Kvas”) from the ways they find themselves explaining the law. Yet “there was no choice”, he seemed to suggest, if one wants to stay in the boundaries of Orthodoxy.
Is the way Orthodoxy interprets Jewish texts, historically traditional?
I must admit that I was completely shocked from how he spoke. It seemed to me horrible that one finds himself in a position of explaining the Jewish law yet feeling disgusted from the process that he himself undertakes, since it is in great conflict with his own contemporary way of living.
Anyone who examines the history and development of Jewish law sees that it has a history and it experienced great changes. These changes are affected, not only by the Divine presence, but also by great social and cultural changes in the lives of people.
Yet Jewish Orthodoxy seems to ignore these changes or pretend that they are not significant. Instead of finding ways of reconciling what people feel is right morally towards other people (and before God), and what they read and interpret in Holly writings, they prefer to make a “literal” interpretation of these texts, just as Toscanini did. They play the “notes” in the text “as they are”, without trying to interpret them and find what they mean for us today, as Stokowsky did. This creates, what seems to me, as an unbearable gap between how they feel and live today, and how they “perform” when they pray.
Orthodox, Reform and Conservative Judaism
In order to explain why I feel such a big problem with the Halachic interpretation described above, there is need to say a few words about the three biggest contemporary Jewish movements. Orthodoxy clams that the Tora was purely given by God. It is therefore natural that they claim that the Halacha (the oral law) is binding. Anyone who diverges from the written law is a sinner. Reform Judaism sees both the Tora and Jewish law as purely human made. No wonder that they do not find Halacha as binding. If humans change the law as they wish, so should contemporary Jews do, as individuals, if they wish to be faithful to their human consciousness. Conservatives (or Masorti) have a slightly more complicated argument. They accept modern scholarship that demonstrates the human aspect in the construction of religious texts, yet they refuse to claim that God has nothing to do with these texts. They do not see a contradiction in the claim that these texts are both Divine and humanly constructed. Conservative Jews keep the Halacha as communities, for example, in the synagogue, yet do not interfere in what people, as individuals, do at home.
The most important thing, I think, in Conservative Judaism is that their Rabbis tend to interpret Jewish law in a more flexible way and with less contradiction with the contemporary world than Orthodoxy. Since they interpret the sacred in an “ecstatic” manner, just like Stokowsky, than the do not need to pretend that they are ignoring their own subjective self, or that of their communities.
Is fear a bad criteria for interpretation?
During the evening in “Shira Chadasha” I found that the motivation behind what they were doing there, as well as behind what many of the people (both people who are for and against a more egalitarian prayer) in my community are doing, with regards to this issue, is motivated quite substantially by fear. People talked about being afraid of being excommunicated by Orthodox Rabbis or that their parents and friends will refuse to visit their egalitarian synagogue. Some people said, half in humor and half seriously, that they fear from what other children will say in school and if they will be able to find good mates for marriages.
I can understand their fears and I have sympathy to such considerations. However, I cannot ignore two things that make an interpretation motivated by fear, problematic.
One of the members of the community in Jerusalem told me that they ignore what Conservative Rabbis say only because they are Conservative and are regarded with contempt within the Orthodox circles. She admitted, quote openly, that if one would take off the name of the Rabbi from his religious interpretation, than they would agree with it with no problem.
This reminds me of what Gould mentioned in his book: people who do not listen to the content of music, but need to know who wrote it in order to value it. At that moment I felt great sympathy to Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg who once said in an interview: "we accept truth from any source". I think that he meant that one should not judge what people say by first asking who said it.
After all, also Rambam was highly influenced by Muslim Sofi religious texts and Greek Philosophy. Does this mean that Conservative Judaism, at least in its manner of interpreting texts, is much closer to traditional Judaism than Orthodoxy? It seems to me that Orthodoxy’s “literal” interpretation is due to its fear from assimilation. Toscanini and the Neue Sachlichkeit were a reaction to what seemed as exaggerated liberalism in the Romantic interpretation of musical scores, and Orthodoxy is a reaction to similar liberal tendencies of Reform and Conservative ways of interpreting religious texts and laws. The Orthodox way of interpreting is understandable psychologically, yet far from being traditional. This is not the way Jews always interpreted its texts and laws. One needs to think merely about how Rashi interpreted “Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” to see that the Oral law sometimes contradicts what is written in the Tora. The Gaon from Vilna argued that Halacha is like a seal. It sometimes creates an image that is the opposite of what is written in the Tora (see the essay I wrote about Parashat Mishpatim in our community leaflet for further examples and references).
The second thing that disturbs me with how fear affects their quasi egalitarian interpretation is that it marks other interpretations of Halacha as non legitimate. I mentioned that one of the people present in the meeting admitted that if one erases the name of a conservative Rabbi from his interpretation of the law, one could usually easily agree with it. If they themselves agree with much of the content of what Rabbis from the Conservative movement write, then why mark it as illegitimate, as they often do? There are more than two million conservative Jews in the world and hundreds of Conservative Rabbis. Are they all Trefa? I am aware that not all Orthodox members see things radically as I describe them here. There are (very) few of them who call for a dialogue with Conservative Rabbis. Some communities, including Shira Chadash, accept people who have converted via the Conservative movement if they observe Halacha. Why then, do we need all these titles? From what are we afraid of?
Against artificial labels
I feel close to the way Conservative Judaism interprets the Jewish law. Yet since I pray three times a day, for example, I may be considered by some as Orthodox. There are those who would label me as Ortho-conservative. However, this seems to me as an absurd. I feel disgusted from all these labels. I find many positive things in all Jewish movements, and I disagree with parts of the practice and/or the philosophy of all of these groups. I do not think that one must choose either this or that label.
One of the best interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (see the video above), I feel, was done by Toscanini. When I did my B.A. in the Tel Aviv University I could not stop listening to his recording of the piece. His rhythm, his energy, his musical gestures seemed and still seem extremely convincing. Similarly, I love praying in Orthodox synagogues in spite of the fact that I am aware of the potential injustice that is done to women by positioning them in a place that promotes their passivity in the service.
I did not come from a religious background as most of the people present in the meeting that shocked me. This makes it easier for me to be free from the fears that they have, of being excommunicated by Orthodox Rabbis and their families. Nevertheless, I strongly feel that if women and men want an egalitarian prayer, it would be a great pity if they would avoid struggling for it because of fear.
The real revolution, however, will start when young Orthodox people will think about what motivates their religious way of interpreting texts. I hope that in the future Orthodoxy will find a better agenda than "literal" interpretations of text, as well as judging other interpretation according to whom wrote what, and not what was actually argued.
What are we fighting for? The big picture
Perhaps, fear is, after all, a legitimate feeling that may help the process of interpretation. It may balance too radical thoughts and help, what Gould would call, "editing" such thoughts and actions. Yet, fear, I believe, is a less desirable feeling if it prevents people do deal with the issue. Why do we want an Egalitarian prayer? How does an egalitarian prayer change the religious status of men (if someone needs to take care of the little children, who will do it? In traditional thinking the answer is clear since the man is the one who has the obligation to pray)? Is it Orthodox to make changes in Halacha (even if only personally consumed) without the consent of Rabbis?
When I first heard about the idea of making an Egalitarian prayer in Mazkeret-Batya, I was less interested and supportive than today. The reason that I think that it is very important that such a prayer will establish it self within the boundaries of Orthodoxy in Israel, is because I believe that the real important issue is the whole way in which Orthodoxy interprets the Jewish law. Daniel Sperber writes in his book The Path of Halach, that deals with the subject of Women’s reading from the Tora, that Orthodoxy is too strict and uncreative in the way that it deals with Jewish law. He suggests that in fear of making a mistake (and I would add, in fear of being like the liberal movements of Judaism) they only forbid and make “fences” around existing prohibitions. This strict way of constructing religious law creates unbearable situations in numerous other areas: the relation between the state if Israel and religion, the issue of conversion, the relation between the Jews of Israel and those of other countries, the antagonism and non-tolerance towards Reform and Conservative Judaism, etc.
A change that originates from Orthodox members in Israel will lead to a change in the thought of Orthodox Rabbis. The fight for an egalitarian prayer is a start of a healthy change in the way devoted religious people in Israel deal with the challenges, advantages and problems that modernity nad post-modernity brings.
If you have any thoughts on the subject please comment below.
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