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.
