Music in a Time of Discord

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities.” We seem to be living through one of those periods now. Life is good in so many ways, but there are strong signals that the world is deeply troubled. Anxiety hovers like a raincloud threatening torrential rain at any moment. How does the average person deal with this state of affairs? What’s a person to do when forces beyond his or her control make decisions that involve our fate?

Henry David Thoreau wrote that “in a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language.” Music has a transcendental quality that inspires and moves people like no other medium. Perhaps that is because, as the author Aldous Huxley expressed it: “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible, is music.”

In Jewish writing, music is associated with spirituality. The patriarch Joseph dreams of a ladder that reaches heaven (Genisis 28:12). The Hebrew word “sulam” means “ladder” but it also denotes a musical scale in modern Hebrew. The word choice suggests that a musical scale is like a ladder that gives access to the spiritual realm. The idea is taken up by Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira who wrote that “sometimes, a person must build ladders to climb to the heavens. A nigun (tune, melody) is one of those ladders.”  

Music is also associated with joy and celebration in Jewish sources. When David returned from killing Goliath the Philistine, “the women of all the towns of Israel came out singing and dancing to greet King Saul with timbrels, shouting and sistrums [percussion instruments]” (I Samuel 18:6).

In I Chronicles 15:16, as King David made a place for the Arc of the Covenant in the City of David, he “ordered the officers of the Levites to install their kinsmen, the singers, with musical instruments, harps, lyres and cymbals, joyfully making their voices heard.” 

After crossing the Red Sea and successfully fleeing the Egyptian army, “Miriam the Prophet, Aaron’s sister, picked up a hand-drum, and all the women went out after her in dance with hand-drums” (Exodus 15:20).

Conversely, periods of intense sorrow render the appreciation of music impossible. After the Babylonian exile, when the Jewish kingdom was lost to the Babylonians, “By the rivers of Babylon/ There we sat and wept/ as we thought of Zion/ There on the poplars/ we hung up our lyres … How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?” (Psalm 137). 

The pianist Artur Schnabel discusses his success as a musician in a fascinating insight that reveals much about music and life: “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides.” The notes, Schnabel implies, are what everyone experiences in life: universal traits, relationships, education, jobs and family. The pauses are those personal contributions that only we as individuals can make. Music reflects both our human commonality and our individuality.

In Israel with two cantors and a choir to lift the spirits of Israelis after a period of terrorist attacks, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that there is “a hope, a joy, an affirmation that can be expressed in song that cannot be communicated in any other way. If words are the language of the mind, then music is the language of the soul. In some mysterious way, when rhythm and melody hold you in their embrace, the spirit soars free.” 

“Faith,” Sacks wrote, “is more like music than science. Science analyses, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age, in a timeless melody that breaks into time.”

There is much that individuals can do to heal a world of pain, but for self-preservation, music helps us to step back to hear the harmony of our world, and even a sense of the sublime. It is as necessary as it is comforting.

There is much that individuals can do to heal a world of pain, but for self-preservation, music helps us to step back to hear the harmony of our world, and even a sense of the sublime. It is as necessary as it is comforting.

Since the world has a penchant for global nervous breakdowns, here is the professor of the humanities’ prescription: Symbolically add valium to the global drinking water by listening to classical music; begin with Beethoven’s piano sonatas, “Eternal Echoes” peerformed by Itzhak Perlman and cantor Yitzchak Helfgot, Aaron Bensoussan’s “East and West in Song and Spirit” or any music of your choice.

Experience the world beyond words and be reminded of what still exists: The universal, harmony, beauty and transcendence. 

The prescription may not cure a global nervous breakdown, but at least it will give people something meaningful and uplifting to do while the world takes a break from reason and sanity.

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.