Thursday, July 15, 2004

Take Notes

Growing up, religion was a very rational prospect.  Dad saw to it that I understood the basics of religious observation: sabbath prayers, havdala, festivals, monthly services and weekly sunday school at the synagogue; I knew obscure bible facts, the relationship between Mishna and halacha, the actual number of positive commandments in the pentatuch.  While some of the explications and epistomologies were ultimately grounded in concepts that did not readily admit to logical conceptualization, I was satisfied both that it would all make sense in time, and that the real point was in the theological facts and observational protocols I either knew or knew that I would eventually know.

But the essence, as it so often does with children, escaped me.  I truly thought that religion was about knowing answers, a game of holy trivial pursuit.  But every so often I tasted a different experience, one that seemed to contradict the formalism of the indoctrination I’d received.  On Saturday nights when we’d gather in a dark room for havdalah, I knew the prayers by heart and how to hold my hand to see the sabbath spirit take her leave of me, but my pride in these shreds of knowledge was consistently eclipsed by the sheer emotional power of the extinguishment of our only light, a braided three-wick candle, in a dish of sacramental wine.  To see that flame sputter and die in the carmine nectar, with the smell of alcohol and sugar and carbon all together in the sudden blackness of the room, filled my heart with something that had no logical explanation for me, that was not amenable to rational analysis.  I felt a response of the spirit, mine and more than mine, and while it felt true and right, it felt different than the rest.

Mostly, anyway.  Some of the rest also felt big inside - numinous, as I would later learn.  Just before Pesach when dad would pull out a special book - bigger, richly illuminated - from which he would conduct the ceremony of destruction of leaven, burning in our fireplace the crusts of bread we’d found hidden around the house during a candlelight search - that was moving, that was powerful; unknown to me, Dad intentionally conducted the rites incorrectly so as to heighten the impact of the experience on my sister and myself.  Those nights affected me in a way unrelated to my knowing a particular answer or a particular prayer.  That fireplace became a door between whose jambs one might pass into a different realm altogether.

There was one place I knew I could always get a good taste of the big feeling: from Cantor Brown.  I will admit, here and now in this public forum, that I grew up listening to crappy music.  When a 10-year-old boy doesn’t know any of the top ten favorite songs of his classmates but memorizes the score to Brigadoon, that 10-year-old boy is going to get beaten up - and he will deserve it.  But whenever I went out for services at ol’ Temple Beth Hillel, a place I generally associated with the minutae of legend and observance, Sam Brown reminded me of the other side of music and, through it, reality and what lay beyond it.  He would chant… well, anything, really; he could chant the phone book; but much more typically it would be an ancient prayer or blessing or invocation; he’d lean back with his eyes closed, a tall bald man with a silver goatee under the broad white shallow synagogue dome, and the passion would fill him: you could see it happen, and from deep in the earth beneath his feet a voice would arc upwards, passing through his flesh and lifting into his chest, his throat; the hollow of his mouth became a conduit for it and the sound poured out of him and filled the sanctuary with vibrations and heartwrenching tones, tropes thousands of years old echoing through all our bodies, filling up the ether with music and spirit, unifying creation in a richly textured tapestry… we’d mumble along with him, the mysterious words familiar, the antedeluvian tune instinctual; but the music - that came from him.  It was where I first learned to distinguish spirituality from religion.  It took me a long time to begin to learn to inculcate it in my own soul - but at least I knew it existed, that it was out there, and that I could get a solid shot of it once a month if I felt dry. 

Cantor Brown retired to New York shortly after I left high school and by now I’d expect him to be well on in years, if still among us at all.  But on the off chance that you encounter these words, Sam, or this sentiment: Thanks for feeling what you so obviously felt, and for sharing it with us.  Some of those notes you sang are carrying still.