I had already named the two parts of my upcoming book Ahava andYir’ah – Love and Fear, when I saw the movie Donnie Darko. Its flim-flam spiritualist preaches that love must conquer fear for a person to succeed. That is not the Jewish way. “Unite our hearts to love and fear You” is our request as we approach Shema, the central prayer of the morning service.
It is appropriate for the ba’al keriyah, the Torah reader, to work towards this same balance. Discipline in grammar and meticulous attention to correct pronunciation are paramount. This need not interfere with the soaring of the spirit in the music of the Torah, with its wondrous storytelling and its eloquence about centrally important human issues. So we balance ardor with reverence and caution, emotion and intuition with reason and intellect.
In suggesting musical interpretations of ancient texts, sometimes with startling and “new” meanings, one should be mindful of traditional readings, and most of all constantly mindful of text. After all, the music changes over the millennia, as any oral tradition must. My “Lithuanian” style trop sounds different from my Yemenite cousins’. So when chant has suggested a particular way of interpreting the Torah, I always return to the text: do the words confirm what my ears seem to hear? And I look into the words of the classic commentators. They were intimately familiar with Scripture, and were wonderful readers of the texts, as many modern scholars acknowledge. I hope to strike the right balance of enthusiasm for my craft with caution in evaluating what I hear as I explore the Song in the Torah.
3 comments:
Do you feel that this balance is unique to Judaism in Western tradition? I was at an Episcopal service yesterday where the reading was Jacob tricking Esau into selling his birthright. They interpreted this as a sign of mistrusting God - that although God had said Jacob would be heir he still felt he had to take action. In my mind, God knew he would take action and thus said he would be heir. In other words, God is all knowing and we have free will. This seemed to be a view where any human action is to mistrust God.
Great!
Thats how a real Talmid Chacham writes. Keep it up
...and that is of course the essential paradox. As Rabbi Akiva said, "all is foreseen and choice is granted. The Genesis stories are rich in psychological complexity and moral ambiguity. Much more on this in the future.
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