Sermon by Rabbi Arnold Saltzman
Recently, visiting our granddaughter, Keren, in Forest Hills, Queens, New York we were delighted to see her progress walking around very steady, pushing a stroller with her stuffed animal baby sloth, and using her toy kitchen. Eventually we would get a request for Carol to sing to her, Carol being known as Doo-Dah, from the song “Camp Down Races, Sing this song, Doo Dah…”
Later we heard her father, Josh, sing to her while playing the guitar, a transformation for the former Rock drummer, now a daddy singing to his 23 month old daughter as she changed the words to the folk melodies he sang while strumming on his unplugged electric guitar.
Music delights us, yet sometimes we say ‘what good is it?’ We are taught to look at everything in a practical sense. What good is music?
For twenty-five years I directed a Youth Choir which sang at public venues and important events: The Inauguration of President Clinton, the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. They sang in symphonies and operas, services, on recordings and broadcasts. What good is music?
I must have thought that it did some good or I would not have invested so much time and energy into singing, studying the art of singing, and the customs of singing in the Synagogue and the Temple.
Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant movement, was revolutionary who sought to transform Christian religious faith into an accessible religious practice. Catholicism seemed too controlled by clergy, and the use of the native language was not permitted. He revolutionized that, and the Church has never been the same since then. He also wrote music and saw the importance of congregational melody and participation. The Lutheran Hymn became the model going forward, inspiring many composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach to incorporate Hymns at the conclusion of his creative cantatas. These Hymns were so popular that in good times, the Jewish community incorporated the idea and even some of the melodies.
Idelsohn says of Eyn Keloheinu “its first part resembles” a German melody, the Lutheran hymn “Grosser Gott wir loben Dich.”
This is an example of a Sacred Bridge in traditions, when communities borrow or incorporate songs into their own texts, as a compliment to the beauty and purpose of these melodies.
This past year, a Maryland High School choir made its way to South Africa and sang for Nelson Mandela while he was still hospitalized. On the fourth day of their choir trip they visited Soweto where they gave the children the met all of their water. They realized how lucky they were watching the children fight over the water. Many of the students in the choir come from poor families, yet, they had never seen poverty like this.
They had wanted to be part of a choir festival, but couldn’t make it, since they were not able to raise the funds for all the travel. A Washington Post article helped them raise the money they needed and enough additional funds to get them tuxedos and the young ladies got strands of faux pearls.
This was their first flight anywhere, yet it was across the waters of the Atlantic. They took pictures of counters, the food, the seats. They were staying near the hospital where Mandela was and when they saw the wall of flowers, cards, and people pray they were moved. They sang.
On another day they visited the prison on Robin Island where Mandela had been held, and learned about the system known as Apartheid, they understood what Mandela had accomplished, and why it was important to sing for him.
Northwestern High Choir members were surprised that when they sang in the competition that people joined in singing and dancing with great spirit and heart. In Tuxedos and Navy blue gowns, they sang “We want to blow the stage off.” Their performance was memorable and they discovered what standing ovations and adoration is, and a world which is very different.
They saw wild animals roaming, learned dances and drumming, sang at city hall, and visited shantytowns. They heard about skin color, more than they had heard in Maryland, and experienced poverty. They gave away everything they had to the children there. There was great poverty, yet, everyone was friendly and decent to them. They said they would never forget it.
“It not about clothes or shoes or phones. We have clothes on our backs, homes,” one of the students remarked.
They learned to sing with heart, they learned how to be alive. What good it is singing?
At our greatest moments, we sing – reaching our innermost feeling, expressing our greatest joy, comforting us in our greatest sorrow, and capturing life in all its depth and glory. And if we cannot sing? Then in silence we can experience music or prayer in a different way.
In song we can praise the gifts of life, a grandchild singing and renewing our sense of wonder, and we can praise God for giving us this life.