The Valley of the Broken Piano Hammers
By Rabbi Arnold Saltzman
Traditionally, on Yom Kippur we speak about Jonah, the prophet. The image of Jonah swallowed up by a great fish inspires our imagination. He cries out from the belly of the fish ‘God Help Me!’ and that is what we are doing in some of our greatest moments of spiritual depth – we cry out!
The other very important message in the Book of Jonah is that just as the ruler of Nineveh afflicts himself along with his people in order to change the outcome, so we are taught that we can change judgement from G-d by appealing to God for mercy and forgiveness. God is a God of mercy, compassion, and forgiving. Surely if Nineveh can fast and pray, Israel can do it. What the prophet sees as the future does not have to become reality. In our tradition Repentance, Prayer, and Acts of Charity can change the outcome.
I was shocked by an article in the paper. There is a lot of competition for shocking news. This was something different. I read that people were throwing out pianos, and that there was a special lot where they were brought and junked. Imagine, a garbage lot with dozens of pianos, uprights, spinets, grand pianos, and name pianos which were being thrown away.
On a walk one morning near our home in DC, I saw a grand piano near a dumpster, sitting on its side awaiting a truck to be hauled away to a similar lot. I took out my phone and left a message for my piano tuner with the location. I don’t know if he made there to save some portion of the treasure.
Why this bothered me so much, why it was so disturbing I cannot explain entirely. It represents an ideal lost. Who and what is valued in our world? During the period of time when I was attending college, for the cost of moving a piano which was $100, I was able to acquire an upright piano for my college apartment. People give pianos or sell them for very little or for thousands of dollars. Throw them away? Where in the history of civilization have we seen anything like this?
Would it happen in France or Spain? China or Japan? In Israel certainly not, and not even in Egypt. So why is this happening here?
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is a day which is increasingly foreign to our way of living, and where we are surrounded by endless gratifications in games, more games, online entertainment, cell phones, computer games, board games, olympic games…Life as a game?
Games teach us skills and certainly sound more appealing than going to services. Can you imagine saying “hey, lets go to services they are so much fun?” Services are generally not fun unless it is Purim, and I’m sure there are some people who think it should be Purim every week.
We expect something about our services to be serious. Finally, we arrive at this moment to be serious, reflect, meditate, to petition God for health, success, for love, for life, for life without disgrace or humiliation, for life to be filled with the color and the beauty of existence, the depth of being human, and for life to be bearable when we are suffering.
We consider Yom Kippur as a day which connects us to our community, to the community of Jews around the world, and to humanity.
Yom Kippur is a day of asking ‘Why?’
Why do we exist in a world of difficulty and tragedy? Why are we here? Why do the words and melodies make a difference in our lives?
It is a day we ask ‘How can we change for the better?’
How can we pursue the repairing of the world, the repairing of our world, the release of the captive, the healing the sick, the comforting of the bereaved?
Today we afflict ourselves with questions – what do we value? What is being tossed aside? Like the Washingtonian Magazine – What is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’? As we contemplate this we are horrified.
An article in the New York TImes highlighted a shocking story. In New York there is a graveyard for pianos. People are throwing away entire pianos that no one wants, and they don’t even want to sell them. No one plays them, instead they call a service to take the piano away to the special city lot for pianos, a veritable piano graveyard.
Piano tuners scavenge the lot for usable parts: hammers, strings, a bench, hinges, pedals, a piano music stand. One wonders whether there should be an ethical will for pianos so the parts will be donated wherever they are needed. I know that sounds a bit funny, yet pianos have a life of their own.
In New York City near Carnegie Hall there was a music store, Patelsons, and down the block there was a piano warehouse which was either owned by Patelsons or Carnegie Hall. Inside there was a vast loft of used pianos which were still in use, some of them from the 19th century. Many were Steinways the favorite piano of Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubenstein. One of these might be moved from the warehouse when Alica De La Rocha was in town or Daniel Barenboim, or Leonard Bernstein.
Some of these pianos had been played by Stravinsky, Copland, and Benjamin Britten, or used to accompany Jussi Bjorling, the great tenor, or sopranos Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi or even the great Caruso. Perhaps Dvorak had played one, or Bob Dylan or James Taylor.
Trusted pianos.
The piano was a center of focus in our living room in my home in Brooklyn. My mother, Anne, had played piano as a child, even participating in a Town Hall recital at the age of twelve. Her parents, like many other parents had to sell their piano during the not so great depression years. Those years were so difficult that my mother wept at the memory of foraging for food with her mother in order to feed seven brothers and sisters, her parents, and grandparents. I was horrified yesterday to see such a picture of young people foraging for food in dumpsters in Spain where the youth of the country have a 50% unemployment rate.
Marrying in 1942, and purchasing a house, one of the first items to buy was a piano. My parents loved to sing, and my mother would play songs, and was the type of pianist who would draw people to the piano, as she read music or played by ear, getting everyone to sing. We would sing everything ever written in a single night until we could not sing anymore.
She gave me my first piano lesson – learning by ear the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, without knowing how to read and without ever having a lesson. The piano represented a discipline in a positive sense, a focus of energy and a place of discovery.
My college roommates were taken aback that during music at the keyboard, they knew -’No Interruptions, Please!’ I would not speak to them.
Contrast that with the world we live in now which is designed to interrupt you with unwanted phone calls, texts, alarms, gongs, and not only on your phone, but everywhere.
On my wedding day, my father asked me what I would like as a wedding gift. I said without hesitation, the piano. He said no. It meant something to him as well. Eventually he changed his mind, and we were so happy to have this instrument with its warm tone and family history.
My grandfather would play by ear, my mother would find many wrong notes while playing, my sister took lessons on the piano as I did. In Washington, the music of NowThisImprovisational Theater has poured forth for over twenty years, as well as the music of Michael and Josh, along with the beautiful singing of Carol Nissenson, and more recently, literally a foot-note by my granddaughter, Keren.
My piano has lived through four symphonies, an opera, two ballets, religious music and songs. It brings with it the sense that I have old friends in Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Debussy.
For me, the piano has depth which no electronic device can have. When you touch it, it resounds with life!
So my question is do we need atonement for a piano graveyard? Will the vision of the valley of the pianos be that the hammers and strings, Ivory’s and sound boards fuse together to create a great cacophony of sound playing the Moonlight Sonata as the clouds pass by the full moon, and the Sunken Cathedral of Debussy rises from the waters?
Will Bach’s Inventions and Fugues continue to awaken the brilliance of the human mind while Schubert’s songs capture the music of the streams and trout, while romantically praising the beauty of human form and life?
We ask for atonement for treating what is noble in life as if it should be cast aside like used paper or wasted food. Find a Russian child and you’ll find a new master of the keyboard. Find a child in South West DC and you’ll find new mistress of the Ivories.
If only we can find a way to preserve and hand down these instruments perhaps we will begin to find the music which is life itself: the music of joy or anger, the music of comfort or love, the music to dance to or to laugh with.
A piano, like a set of beliefs, a religion, gives more to you if you take the time to practice it, cherish it, and to make it resound! The treasures of our world deserve an honored place in our homes, not on lots filled with abandoned pianos.
Teach us in the New Year how to regenerate, to recycle, to renew our use of precious objects, and the gift of ideas and beliefs which define us as human. Forgive us for not recognizing these gifts and help us to cherish our religious and human heritage.
Jonah cried out from the whale – from the tight place he was in, and God heard his cries and saved him. May God hear our prayers today.
G’mar Chatima Tova – May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life, Health, Prosperity, and Peace. Amen.