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Yizkor
5768, Yom Kippur, September 22, 2007 Making
Music Out of What’s Left
It was the day after Yom Kippur last year. I actually had gone in to Temple that morning—a rabbi’s work is never done, at least in his own mind—and finally made it home by mid-afternoon, exhausted from the fast of the day before and all the elaborate work of the whole of the High Holy Days. Wendy and I were relaxing for the first time in what seemed like months when I got a call that sounded urgent.
Now, when someone has the guts to call the rabbi at home on the day
after Yom Kippur, something is probably wrong… very wrong.
And so it was. A young
man who grew up in our congregation, whom I had the privilege of bar
mitzvahing on our bimah, who was present at our Yom Kippur services last
year, at this Yizkor service, had passed away suddenly at the age of 19.
There is nothing so shocking as the death of a child, nothing so
stunning and disheartening. One
moment they are here, young, healthy and vibrant, and the next they are just
gone. It is the worst thing most
of us can conceive of: losing a child. Here
it was a reality.
There was an array of complex problems associated with that death:
meeting with the authorities, talking to friends, coroners, funeral
arrangements, triage counseling. A
traumatic death is different, of course, from a death at the end of a full
life. There often seems to be
nothing to say—and yet, we need to say, and hear, something.
The funeral is held, words are said, many tears are shed.
The process of shiva works its way through the system, and some equilibrium is
achieved.
And then we need to find a way to go on.
That’s the hard part.
First, we think about ways to make the death take on meaning in our
community and society. This
death was not a suicide, but perhaps we can take a lesson for everyone here:
we may not be aware of the danger of suicide among young adults, but it is a
great problem indeed. There are
warning signs. We can, and
should learn about them, and seek to intervene whenever we sense the
potential from trouble. But even after we take the proper steps to try to prevent future
deaths, to gain a lesson and address an issue, we still have a problem.
That problem is how do we maintain, how do we keep on going in the
face of tragic loss? Of course,
it is not only in situations of great trauma that we face this. It is with
every death, every real loss.
What can we learn about continuing?
And who can teach us?
Sometimes we can learn from a musician—especially a Jewish one.
Yitzchak Perlman, the superb violinist, will be here in concert in
Tucson this January. He is a magnificent musician, of course, but there is
much more to his story; and it is best illustrated in an incident that took
place nearly twelve years ago. [This incident was described in the Houston
Chronicle in an article by Jack Riemer.]
On November 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage
to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City.
If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage
is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and
so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see
him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an
awesome sight.
He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair.
Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps
on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward.
Only then does he bend down and pick up the violin, put it under
his chin, nod to the conductor and proceed to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while
he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently
silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready
to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first
few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it
snap—it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what
that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. It figured that
he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and
limp his way off stage—either to find another violin or else find another
string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his
eyes and signaled to the conductor to begin again.
The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And
he played with such passion and power and purity as the audience had never
heard before.
Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic
violin work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but
that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in
his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get
new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished,
there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner
of the auditorium. They were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing
everything they could to show how much they appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet
the crowd, and then he said—not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive,
reverent tone--"You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out
how much music you can still make with what you have left."
What a powerful line that is. And
who knows? Perhaps that is the definition of life—not just for artists,
but for all of us. Here is a man who has prepared all his life to make music
on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle of a
concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes music with three
strings, and the music he made that night with just three strings was more
beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he had ever made
before, when he had four strings.
So, perhaps our task in this world is to make music, at first with
all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music
with what we have left.
It’s a wonderful message. When life takes away an essential part of what you have, you find a way to make music with what you have left. As we enter this Yizkor service, may we each find a way to make music with all that we have left. |
