As those of you who know me may sometimes notice, I will periodically become flagrantly hermit-like, cloistering myself within my four-walled cubicle for protracted lengths of time, stewing haughtily in a sort of misanthropic, procrastinative funk, shunning conversation and social interaction in favor of reading comic books, listening to my extraordinarily archaic and played-out cassette collection, and gazing at nothing in particular. What am I putting-off, you may ask? No, not my application to the International Association of Pseudo-Intellectual Thesaurus-Fondlers, Local 242. I'm putting off the very real avodah of dealing-with everyone's favorite Top Five Baal Teshuva-Brand Existential Dilemmas: 1)How is it at all possible that my finite little nothingness-of-a-being can relate in any substantial or significant manner to the infinite, eternal Creator of everything? 2)How can I possibly draw any sort of continuum between my past life, polkadotted as it may be with so many quick, reckless half-decisions and their sadly immutable consequences, and the life of mindfulness, holiness and uprightness that I now want to create? 3)Which sparklings of sweet goodness can I extract and preserve from my aforesaid life to carry with me and celebrate now, and which must I leave behind? 4)Is there any room at all for spontaneity and chance encounters in a life mediated by a strong commitment to a religious framework? 5)Whaddya mean, "World to Come?"
Now, did any of us make these cheshbonos (accountings) when we were monkey-bar-swingin' kids? We used to love everyone and everything, without reservation or boundary, remember? "Children," the Pietczesner Rebbe tells us in Conscious Community, "behave with a total absence of artifice and pretense. The child's very soul is expressed in each of his activities. He is transparent. His soul shines through in everything he does." Our souls are merely concealed deep inside the neat little shrink-wrapped package of our chesbonos. One way to access this inner innocence, the pristine purity of our own souls, says the Pietczesner, is through music and song. He suggests that we can sing to G-d as a son sings lovingly to his father without any provocation or purpose other than to communicate the love of his soul; "Music is the key to the soul. In the whole area of expressing the soul, we have much to learn from children, including this rapproachment we described, this flowing of soul from father to son. Sometimes, when you sing, you will have this experience. There are no words, there is nothing to say; there is nothing that you need. Still, the soul is overcome with joy; she softly chants, O G-d, O my G-d."
I had been humming The Commodores' "Lady" to myself for the last few months while washing my lunch dishes, pausing between chevrusas, brushing my teeth, when I would lie down and when I would rise up. I was 6 years old when it was originally released on American radio. Back then, I would sit belted-in to the slick, polyvinyl passenger seat of my mother's mammoth Oldsmobile as we cruised the expressway to my day-care center, plastic lunchbox in one hand, die-cast action figure in the other, BJ105 on the FM dial all the way, singing to her, along with her, at her… yay! What could be better?!? I remember many of the songs I would sing, and, more specifically, the way I would sing them to her: parroting the radio's fuzzy, half-enunciated chatter, not comprehending its messages or lyrics, and not caring - I just wanted her to hear me, to feel and see the shining ball of energy and light that was glowing inside and around me, permeating my surroundings, bouncing and twisting to get out and be free.
Recently, I purchased The Very Best of The Commodores. Despite the alarming number of friends and colleagues who may have already written-off my affinity for the aesthetic of the early 1980's as nothing more than hairbrained nostalgia, I must say, regardless, that the moment that song burst onto the hi-fi here at Daff Headquarters, Ltd, I felt transported to the passenger seat of that Oldsmobile again, and I as I fervently sang and pantomimed along with Lionel and Co. out into open space of the office, I felt infused and permeated with that energy and light moving inside and around me again; Hashem had tugged loose the shrink-wrap around my soul, and my arms raised themselves with the exultant praise that they had been waiting since 1981 to sincerely offer. And I sang my thanks to G-d for rekindling that light, for reawakening that innocence, for permeating me once again with the inexplicable buoyancy of childhood, and for giving me a glimpse of Olam Haba. Like the song goes, "You bring me up when I'm a-down…"
But how does Jewish Law approach these sorts of experiences? Do the lyrics or attitude of "Lady" represent a tzanuah (modest) model of relating to G-d, or are they midlessly glorifying the excitement of meeting of a new girlfriend? Does its free-love ideology subconsciously rub-off on me through the impulsiveness of its funky beats and swanky arrangements? If so, how could I possibly do teshuva through listening to it? Answers to these questions AND MORE in next week's titillating conclusion, entitled "Rebbe's Got A Brand New Bag," or "Nightime is the Righttime… for Gemara."
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |