Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

A few weeks back, in one of our first forays into on-line Torah study, Petra Joseph spoke about the centrality of animal sacrifice in our tradition and wondered how one could pray for the reestablishment of Temple and the Sacrificial Cult. I recall that we had a good conversation, but for me it felt unfinished: I had not been able to convey effectively the notion that in prayer, the specific words we utter might not matter nearly as much as the intention and emotion we place on them. This slippage between the literal and the emotional is among the reasons I tend towards singing rather than declamation when I lead services.

At around the same time, a friend and colleague, Rabbi Lior Nevo, who is the Chaplain at the Jack Satter House in Revere, texted me to ask if I would like to meet her, her family, and some other families in the courtyard of the Cohen Residences (112 Centre Street) in Brookline, one of the buildings where I serve as Chaplain. Lior lives nearby and had the idea of putting on an outdoor concert for the residents of the building. I would play my guitar and lead the group in a couple of songs. I suggested “This Land is Your Land” and “Down by the Riverside.” She suggested “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Lior’s daughter brought her ukulele. A crowd of about 15 people, all standing 6 or more feet apart, serenaded first one and then the other side of the building. The response was overwhelming. Residents opened their windows despite the chill, danced, and sang along. One woman made signs: “Thank You” and “God Bless You”; through her open window she yelled, “You’ve saved my life!” Somehow, in that brief singalong, the coronavirus spell that had kept us all so separate evaporated and we were together again. 

Soon we were making plans for more concerts (so far I have participated in 4, although there have been many more, as well as dance parties with a dj, without me). The next one was at Jack Satter House in Revere, which was among the hot spots for COVID cases in Eastern Massachusetts. Residents were quarantined in their rooms; staff and volunteers were (and still are) making daily phone calls to check on people’s health and, in a few cases, to let them vent their frustrations with sheltering at home; and in general morale was low. The songs were largely the same, although I brought one of the favorites from my in-person sing-alongs at Cohen: “Bye Bye Love.” As it was in Brookline, the response in Revere was ecstatic. This time, staff came out to sing and dance along and to yell greetings to the residents they had not seen for what felt like a long while (note that it was a month ago). Again residents made signs and stuck them in their windows, so staff responded by making signs of their own. Lior described the effect of this concert as the transformational--the mood in the building shifted from shock and horror to determined solidarity. The worst had not yet come--in all, 11 JSH residents would die among the 23 who contracted the illness--but there was a new sense that the community would survive even if too many of its members would not. 

Amid all of this joy there was an odd moment. After we had played a rollicking version of  “Bye Bye Love” one, Lior and another of my colleagues balked at repeating it. Why? Is it not just an anodyne rock’n roll song? On the contrary, they declared it morbid; “why are we singing about loneliness and saying ‘I feel like I could die’?” I deferred to them and we broke into “You Are My Sunshine.” Or I should say that they broke into it, because I could not grasp the strain to play it on the guitar. Standing aside for a moment allowed me to ponder the words: “If you leave me and love another, You’ll regret it all someday”; and later: “I always loved you and made you happy, and nothing else could come between, but now you’ve left me to love another, you have shattered all my dreams.” “How is this any better?” I thought. And how odd that this song is a favorite lullaby of American parents everywhere--as though they want to signal to their children early on that any attempt at independence will lead to regret and heartbreak. 

In both cases, the objections are reasonable. They are also beside the point. “Bye Bye Love” is a glorious break-up song: we’re singing about emptiness and loss, but we’re doing so to a beat that makes it clear that life is far from over: we’re going out dancing! And although “You Are My Sunshine” is an anthem to passive-aggression, we sing it with a tenderness that transforms the weirdly twisted words into a paean to familial love. Both of these emotions--joyous determination to carry on in the face of death and deep love between the generations--were central to the power of these concerts, so really we couldn’t do without either of the songs. 

That said, Lior, who grew up in Israel and is not familiar with American “oldies,” has a hard time with the strangeness of “Bye Bye Love.” And although I can’t count the number of times I sang “You Are My Sunshine” to my children and later to older people in my care, I can’t quite shake the incongruence of the words and music. This incongruence, I think, lies at the heart of much of the strangeness of prayer, especially with texts whose explicit content--like those concerning animal sacrifice--seems incompatible with what we would really like to say. But if we focus on the fact that so much of what we say is in how and why we are saying it (or, preferably, singing it while dancing), we might find our way into those texts and, eventually perhaps, figure out what we mean when we sing them.

The Todah Offering in a Dark Time

The Todah Offering in a Dark Time - Parashat Tzav

This piece was published in Hebrew College's blog "70 Faces of Torah" on April 1, 2020

For someone in my field of geriatric chaplaincy, this difficult moment of social distancing is fraught with a painful irony. A significant portion of my job involves reducing the social isolation of the older people in my communities by engaging them not only with one another but also with the general public, to foster face-to-face relationships between residents and younger people in the context of shared meals, religious services, and learning opportunities. 

Now, of course, we are encouraging people to stay apart, to remain isolated in their apartments. My institution in Boston, Hebrew SeniorLife, like most other senior housing and care facilities, has closed its doors to visitors and volunteers, including family members of patients and residents. This guidance cuts so squarely against the grain of our usual instincts, but it also can represent the difference between life and death.

Death now seems so prevalent, so present in our lives, lurking ever more palpably in the spaces I inhabit, just as the season turns us towards life, towards the rebirth of Spring and the joy of Passover. The fear is real, and the prospect of thousands of deaths resonates, as many commentators have suggested, with the plagues in the land of Egypt during the Exodus. Somehow we seem to be playing the role of the Egyptians this year in addition to our usual role as Israelites. The verse “...there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was no house where there was not a corpse” (Exodus 20:30) carries particular force in a community struggling with this pandemic.

On this Shabbat HaGadol (the Shabbat before Passover) we will read Parashat Tzav, which includes the procedure for the Todah (Thanksgiving or Acknowledgement) offering, a particular form of Zevah Sh’lamim (Offering of Well-being or of Peace). This Todah offering is voluntary rather than obligatory, and like the Pesach offering (but unlike all other sacrifices), it needs to be eaten immediately--no leftovers can remain until the next day (See Leviticus 7:11-15; cf Leviticus 22:29-30). According to the Talmud, Rav Yehuda said that Rav said that there are four categories of people who need to offer Todah: seafarers who have made land, travellers in the wilderness who have reached their destinations, people who have recovered from illness, and prisoners released from captivity (b. Berakhot 54b). In this Talmudic context, we learn that in addition to an offering, such a person must also recite birkat gomel--the blessing that expresses our gratitude for God’s deliverance--before a minyan, as it says: “Let them exalt God before the congregation of the people” (Psalm 107:32). Today people bench gomel (the Yiddish expression is more common than the Hebrew) in the context of an Aliyah to the Torah.

These days, however, we as a society find ourselves deep in the wilderness; many are sick; even more are captives of a sort, isolated in their homes. The irony of celebrating Passover in a season of death is compounded by the recognition that for so many of us, there is apparently no cause for a Todah offering--as I write, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has extended the closure of non-essential businesses until the beginning of May and the death toll keeps rising. There is no end in sight quite yet. 

But even amid this darkness, two details of the Todah stand out. First, it must be eaten and enjoyed on the day that it is offered. In his comment to Leviticus 7:15, Haamek Davar says the reason is that the Todah should be celebrated with a single party with a lot of people--to make sure that the person making the offering has an ample audience to hear their story of God’s saving power. We can extrapolate from this explanation that the rule on Passover is similar: we do not leave any leftovers to make sure we invite as many people as we can accommodate: “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” says the Haggadah. 

Second, it is a voluntary rather than an obligatory offering, and in pointing that out in his comment on Leviticus 22:29, Haamek Davar continues by saying that “A person can bring [a Todah] any day.” It’s not limited to a holiday, so in theory one could bring it every day. Indeed, according to the Chidushei haRim (as cited in Etz Hayim), each day brings its own miracle, so we should celebrate each day’s miracles on the day they happen.

Amidst the darkness of this plague shine the myriad daily miracles contained in the actions of my colleagues here at Hebrew SeniorLife and of other essential workers across the country and the world. HSL’s Director of Culinary & Nutrition glowed with pride as he spoke about his team stepping up in this crisis: “They want to be here; they want to support our patients.” In response to the first deaths from COVID-19 at one of our facilities, the Jack Satter House in the hard-hit town of Revere, MA, employees from across the organization have teamed up to make a daily phone call to every resident, all in quarantine, to check to see if they have begun to exhibit symptoms and to make sure they have everything they need. As a Russian speaker, I was asked to call the handful of residents at Satter from the former Soviet Union. One of these people is on a very limited diet and thus couldn’t eat the limited selection of groceries currently available for delivery. When I alerted the team to this need, the chef at Satter arranged to special order and deliver appropriate products, including walnuts and sweet potatoes because, as he wrote in an email to me, “she prefers them.” When I spoke to the resident yesterday, her relief was as palpable through the phone as her distress was a few days before: “Ya tak blagodarna,” she kept repeating, “I am so grateful.”

Stories like this abound, and we must recount them and celebrate them even as we mourn our dead and continue to care for the living. Although it’s much too early to bench gomel (to give thanks for having survived a crisis), there is already so much for which we need to offer our gratitude.

Rock and Roll at the Deathbed - February 2020

At Izzy’s deathbed, I began with “Elecho,” I cry out to you, words from Psalm 30 calling from the depths, hoping for God’s renewed presence. The melody is haunting, pleading as it rises and falls on “Adonai be a help for me.” It hooks the heart, even as it cracks my voice. 

Izzy, it was clear to me, was dying, although it was also clear that Evie, his wife, was still hoping that he would hang on. The signs were there--the wasting limbs, the faded voice, the shallow breath--but she had remarked that he looked so much better than he had at the rehab earlier in the week.

The phone rang. It was a granddaughter, one of the beautiful young women whose portraits crowded the table next to the hospital bed. Evie said, “Our rabbi is here--one of our rabbis, the singing one. He’s brought his guitar and is praying with us. Rabbi, say hello to Ayelet.” Obediently, I took the phone and greeted her., asking where she was studying and letting her know how fond I was of  her grandfather. When I handed the phone back, Evie told her she would call her back when I had left.

What to sing next? My hand turned pages and found “Hard Times,” the Stephen Foster classic I had learned from a Bob Dylan record. A kind of secular prayer, it acknowledges that hard times are indeed upon us, and orders that “Hard times come again no more” and that they should stop “hanging around my cabin door.” But we know that it’s hopeless to insist, that hard times have arrived and are unlikely to pass in this 72-year-long marriage--a marriage that only death could do part. It was a magical love in which Izzy’s only substantive complaint on his deathbed was that the couple had married only in September when the wedding could have been in July: they had wasted two whole months of conjugal bliss. 

Imagine--from my perspective as a person who couldn’t make his marriage last past its twentieth year--that after 72 years of marriage, they wanted more. And given that likely there wouldn’t be more in the future, they were content to imagine that they could have had more even before they did get married. This overwhelming desire for her husband troubled Evie. Her son had admonished her: it’s not fair to ask him to stay any longer, because he can’t. But it was still so hard for her to acknowledge that the end was finally here. She could not accept it. 

“Well, what if both are true?” I suggested. “Perhaps you can tell him that you want him to stay but that you know that it’s impossible.” People so often struggle to hold such contradictory truths in their minds at one time, but Evie’s heart seemed to take over and she knew that both were true. But that was a day later, when he was no longer talking, just breathing, presumably hearing, his mouth open into a jagged rectangle, his unshaven chin bristling in a way I had never seen, even in rehab. The day before, the day with the guitar, he was still communicating. To my chaplain’s eye, he was already actively dying, but the nurse had not yet been there to make that determination. And to communicate it to Evie. Neither of those things falls into my purview.

So after “Hard Times”--”tis the song, the sigh of the weary,” what would I play next? Clearly, the time had come for a prayer--a formal Jewish prayer rather than a secular one. The obvious choice was the vidui, a prayer that offers the dying person an opportunity to acknowledge that they’ve made mistakes--or, in the common parlance of received religion, that they’ve sinned--in their life and that this is a final opportunity to pray for atonement. I sensed that even if Izzy was ready for this prayer, Evie was not, so I hesitated, which allowed her to suggest that I sing the Mi Shebeirakh, the blessing for healing that we so often offer at a sick person’s bedside. Evie, still recovering from a fall that fractured her hip and left her in terrible pain, very much needed a Mi Shebeirakh. She loved in particular the beautiful version by Debbie Friedman that we had sung the week before, when she still hoped that Izzy would bounce back. 

But today Izzy shook his head--did he also wave his arms?--not clear in my memory, but he made amply clear with whispered words and physical gesture that there would be no Mi Shebeirakh. So what to do? I plunged precipitously, perhaps recklessly, “Izzy, would you like the Vidui.” I asked in a pointed way I almost never do, perhaps (as I look back on the moment) because I felt that this might be the last opportunity for him to say the Vidui himself, rather than having a rabbi read it on his behalf, or perhaps because I sensed that this was what his refusal of the Mi Shebeirakh meant. Before he could respond, however, Evie exclaimed, nearly as vociferously as Izzy but louder, “NO!”--the pain of acknowledging that Izzy’s life was now wholly in God’s hands, that he would die within days if not hours, was simply too  much for her to process. 

So an impasse--of my own making? Perhaps, but by offering the vidui, I did lay the blockage out in the open. Evie, with the help of the nurse, of her kids, and of Izzy himself as he became quieter and weaker and eventually stopped talking all together, gradually got there. But that would be tomorrow--what about today, as Evie sat by Izzy’s side, protecting him, guarding him for now from the inevitable conclusion? As we remained in silence, I recalled, in a moment of grace, how often I had seen Evie and Izzy holding hands like the friends and lovers they had been for more than 72 years. And I also recalled how wistful I would become in those moments, as I was reminded that my own estranged wife and I would not be holding hands after 70 years of marriage. And as I write this I also recall how much I loved holding hands with my sons, their paws growing bigger and bigger until they became the size of my own and no longer sought the warmth and safety of my grip. 

So it was The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”--“When I touch you I feel happy inside.” That reality had not changed for Evie and Izzy in 72 years, and those words resonated in Izzy’s face as he mouthed them and feebly squeezed his wife’s hand for the two minutes or so the song lasted. As I sang, Evie’s face glowed with love and suffering.  Time, in that odd way it occasionally does, slowed down, even stopped as the image of the two lovers became fixed in my memory, holding hands in the face of immense loss. And somehow I knew that for this unity to emerge from the disjunctive impasse between his need to die and her need for him to keep living, God--grace, the universe, my own unconscious--had sent me something for them to agree on: when in doubt, hold hands.