Song of Songs, Rav Kook, Rabbe Nachman and Trey: A religious defense of Phish-heads

    After my previous post, i started looking through my library of unfinished or unpublished writing and decided i should put it out in to the world. here is my first such installment, written in the winter of 2010. I think if i were to write this today it would come out differently, but i thought it important to publish it as originally written. hope you enjoy!



   "Yeah, but how can you be metameh your ears like that.  It comes from such an impure place."

 
     I had just returned from 2 1/2 years of study in Israel's picturesque Ayalon Valley, and while my ears did not hear too much Phish while i was there, ever-present as it may have been, when i got back to America, slowly my interest returned to the Fab Four (five if you count Chris on the lights).  At that time i had long curly payos which i wore proudly and played with nervously, was dressed in a black suit for my friend's wedding i was at, and had just finished a discussion with this dude, who had just returned from learning in a yeshiva for boys who need help leaving the modern orthodox community, about some sugya in ksubos, yet as congenial as our discussion had been, it soon took a measure-for-measure turn for the worse.

     
      "I can't believe you are saying this.  What good can possibly come from listening to Phish. Where is the godliness in what they do? It only brings you down. But a good yiddishe niggun? Ah! The soul can soar!" 

It's not that i had never thought in those terms. My experience with Phish had always bordered on the religious, but explaining Phish from my insider's perspective to not only an outsider, but a fervently religious polemicist, was a task that had little to do with whatever musings went on inside my own head.  I began to question my ability to explain myself to this little rebba'le in any sort of constructive way.
       I once heard from Rabbi Moshe Benovitz, explaining what one means when inquiring "Is he normal?" of someone who began intensely learning Torah full time. "Can he explain to people who aren't where he is why what he is doing is so important."  Some other person's conception of what one should spend there time doing need not be what guides you life's path.  But your devotion to what does guide your life should not take away your ability to relate to people who don't necessarily share that same devotion.  I had not yet heard this teaching from RMB, but it was certainly this anxiety that was creeping up on me.

   
    Where is the Godliness in what they do?

        By divine grace, the first thing my mind latched on to was not his question, i did not immediately launch into a monologue describing Trey as some sort of demigod (as i was wont to do at that point in my life... and a little bit now too), rather my first thoughts were echoes of the words i had just heard, Where is the Godliness in what they do. That he knew that the words he uttered were Rabbe Nachman's keys to the ultimate religious potential,  "Ayeh M'kom Kvodo," I was not sure, nevertheless the teaching swept over me like a warm blanket assuring me of my thoughts, calming me as i continued the discussion.  The connection to what we were talking about was not iron-clad, and to explain it to him via this teaching from Rabbe Nachman would probably be a fanciful piece of casuistry, but the fact that his words trying to disprove my position were a  quote from the holiest of teachings, telling us we don't understand the world we see around us and there are layers of depth and holiness that we can not comprehend, at the very least allayed my fears and allowed me to continue the conversation as if laying on a beach in netanya instead of waiting for the bus while freezing in manhattan...

        I reached to the holy words of Rav Kook.  In his collected teachings on the siddur, before friday night prayers, there is an introduction to King Solomon's Song of Songs which i had learned in yeshiva some years before.  Rav Kook begins by quoting the holy sage Rabbi Akiva who stated "The entire existence was not worthy of the day that Song of Songs was written, for all the books of the Torah are holy, but Song of Songs is Holy of Holies." While i don't think it is hard to see the divinity in Shir Hashirim on any level of understanding you would like to apply to it (but most accessibly so in its surface understanding), even the romantic in me has a hard time putting it on a pedestal above mass revelation at Sinai.  Rabbi Akiva, who thought it too much a distraction to cross the threshold of his house to say hello to his wife after twelve years away from her and before another twelve, would i believe agree with me on this point.
So what did he mean then? What made The Song of Songs so great that the world was not worthy of the day it was given?
Everybody knows that we are created in the image of god.  Tzelem Elokim. The name Elokim is the first name of God that we are introduced to in the Torah and it is the name that stays with us for the entire story of creation. ...Barah Elokim...Vayomer Elokim...Vayaar Elokim. The name Elokim is the name of God as The Creator.  The outward manifestation of an inner emotion or desire.  When we are created Btzelem Elokim we are created specifically in the image of  God The Creator. This godly image is every person's little piece of divinity, every person's opportunity and potential  to act, to the best of their ability, as The Creator.  Rav Kook says that it is therefore important to cultivate our ability to express our emotions outwardly. Be it through music, art or writing, when we focus on an inner emotion and bring that emotion in to the world we are staking claim to the godly image within our soul, imitating God in the way he put most close to our hearts.
      It is hard though to squeeze our thoughts and feelings in to the limits of physicality.  Art of any form is always only a small frame of a much broader and more profound emotion that the artist is experiencing.  Watching an artist paint, for instance, you will always see them take a periodic step back in order to see if the picture on the page matches the picture in their head.  They survey the work, and continue to make adjustments in order that the two pictures, one in mind and one on canvas, become a little bit closer.  They will never be exactly the same however.  There is no way that paints on a canvas can completely capture all the complexities of the artist's emotion.  They can come close, and the more talented the artist is the more they will be able to accomplish this goal, but the nature of physicality is such that there will always be some sort of disparity.
      Rav Kook tells us that this is true of all artistic pursuits in this world, except for Song of Songs. King Solomon set out to express in writing the relationship between Hashem and his people, and was 100% successful in doing so.  It is a most perfect expression of his inner emotion, with no hindrance or impedance in its expression.  This is what makes Song of Songs so holy.  True unfettered emotional expression is a hard thing to come by in this world and is a joy as well as benficial to observe no matter the nature of that expression. Here we have a true expression of the love affair between the Jewish People and their God. Such a powerful piece of writing. Hitting the emotional mark so strongly, speaking so truely to the human experience, these are things that are so rare in this world and enrich life so much, they are so outside the limits of our regular abilities, that you might even say that the world was not worthy of their creation.

PHISH

      Ever heard a band described as effusive?  These days i find it hard to describe Phish with a word other than that.  In there most powerful musical moments, the band is pouring fourth with a giddy unbound excitement.  The boisterous, exuberant energy of Phish's sound is compounded by Chris's light show, and the result is a most awe-inspiring musical experience. (I am posting here a link to what i believe is of the best recorded phish i have ever heard.  The whole thing is amazing, but if you don't want to listen to all 15:00, start at 10:00. The clip is dripping with the youthful improvisational exuberance that typifies Phish)
     Trey once said in an interview here that his days of being a metal-head came to an end when he went to his first Grateful Dead concert in Connecticut. He explains that at metal shows there is a one-way flow of energy. The goal is for the band to pump out as much energy as possible, and the goal is for the crowd to absorb as much of that energy as possible.  But at the Dead show that all changed. he saw, for the first time, a conversation between the band and the crowd that came to see them. sometimes the "conversation" got started by the band and the crowd responded, but sometimes the exuberance of the band was spurred by the crowd. Either way, Trey experienced a new archetype that would fuel his own love for Bands like the Dead and the Allman Brothers, as well as the immutable style of Phish.
     I think that the thing that fuels the devotion of the many committed Phish-heads is this the marriage of the two ideas that i have have spoken about in this post. The first idea, drawn from the beautiful words of Rav Kook, is the substance of that devotion.  Trey, Page, Mike and Fish are true creators. If God gave all of us a small spark of His ability to create, if the closest way we can relate to god is through our creation, then it is no wonder that so many correlate their love of Phish with religious experience. In fact it is only in the halls of the yeshiva have i encountered a milieu where the conversation more easily moves to god and religiosity more than at Phish shows, and i am sure my experience is not unique.  so many times, either sitting on the floor during set-break, or on line to get a beer, suddenly, and often not because of my prompting does the conversation switch to God and our relationship with Him.
      The second idea is the conversation that goes on during the show between the band and the crowd. Along with our ability to create comes an inborn desire to create (if i may, i once heard from a friend of mine that the reason people look in a tissue after they blow their nose or look in the toilet after they go to the bathroom is this very same reason).  A Phish show presents an almost unique opportunity for a music fan to be part of the show, to be part of the creative energy, to be part of the godliness...

I"ll see you at the next show!






   

Reb Shalom's Vort on Makkas Choshech (Egyptian Time Dilation)

I have the great fortune to work with a hidden chassid, and most certainly a rosleener, Reb Shalom. he is a mashgiach for the Star-K. something i said clued him in to the fact that i was interested in astrophysics and he told me the following vort about makkas choshech. in my desire to share this interesting insight, as well as my ever-preasent desire to write more, i thought i would start up the old Blogspot engines and put something down in "writing."

In order to share E' Shalom's torah we have to first be makdim with some talk about Einsteins general theory of relativity. I am by no means an expert and it could be i am understanding these things wrong, i could be at best called an enthusiast and at worst woefully ignorant, but here is my attempt at explaining these deep and profound concepts. If anybody who knows these things could comment and let me know how i did it would be great. 

You can't talk about Einstein without talking about Newton. Newton was stuck in quarantine for a long period due to the spread of the black plague and he used his time, some would say productively, creating the worlds of calculus and classical or Newtonian mechanics, the latter being what most pertains to the subject at hand. 

      The famous story of Newton and the apple is probably apocryphal, or so they say, but what the story does get right is that gravity is the key to it all, and gravity, whether exerted on an apple or otherwise, is what got him thinking about how the force worked and so trying to compose equations that could predict the influence of that force on all matter. And so classical mechanics was born. Newton figured out to a very surprising degree of exactitude the force of gravity and how it worked. how far a canon ball will go when launched at a certain angle with a certain degree of propulsion.

and everything else as well (here is where is where my ignorance is showing, i can't come up with a better example of physics than a canon ball...).

And Newton was right about most everything! he figured most of it out but there were a few things that famously could still not be explained according to his equations, most famously the movement of the planet Mercury across the sky. you see where Newtonian mechanics is lacking is that he did not even attempt to explain the underlying force of gravity per se. he just made lots of observations about it and created equations that would encompass and express those phenomena.

And Newton was king, for 500 some odd years, until Einstein came around and changed everything.

Einstein got at the root of the issue and explained the force of gravity per se. He envisioned a fabric of space time that created gravitation when distorted by mass and or gravity. there was an essential connection between space, time, and light and they all affected each other, and mass and gravity created distortions in those forces. (an in-depth explanation of that last sentence is needed, but i am digressing so much already i will have to push that off for another time).

what is important though, and what i will take a second to explain is the concept of time dilation. time dilation  is one of those distortions i spoke about before. without getting in to the weeds, and as i alluded to before, Einstein theorized that space and time were connected and that mass and gravity creates in them distortions. namely, in areas of great mass or great gravity, time slows down.

this creates a very interesting thought experiment when we take a second to consider black holes. black holes are thought to be collapsed stars that have created an almost infinitely dense environment. since we said that density creates distortions in space-time, that almost infinite density creates an almost infinitely strong force of gravity and and almost infinite time dilation.

lets unpack this a little.

there is something called escape speed. escape speed is something that belongs to Newtonian mechanics. escape speed is the speed necessary to break a given mass' gravitational force. The stronger the force, the faster you need to go to escape. Earth, with our relatively weak gravitational force, requires that in order to escape earth's atmosphere you have to be moving 11.2 kilometers a second. One of the other things Einstein's theory says is that it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light, around 300,000 Km a second. so if you think of a gravitational force like earths, but you keep turning up the mass, and so the force of gravity keeps going up, and so the escape speed keeps going up. if you could conceive of a mass so great that it creates a gravitational force so strong that the escape speed eclipses the 300,000 km a second, boom -- you have a black whole that nothing could escape, even light.

if we take this idea just a little further we can conceive of a point of no return in relation to this gravitational force. as we get closer to the source of the gravity the force gets stronger, as we pass the point where it gets so strong that even the 300,000 km a second cant escape, you have crossed the point of no return, or what the scientists call the event horizon.  

so as you approach this event  horizon you begin to experience time dilation. that is as you get closer, and the force of gravity becomes stronger, time begins to slow down. so if i were watching you fall in to a black hole from earth at the start every second for me is a second for you. but as you get closer time for you slows down and it takes you two seconds for every second on earth. so as you fall closer you time gets slower and slower, eventually a year for you is a second here and you would be in super super slow motion from earths vantage point. As you you approach the event horizon time has slowed down so much that a second for you is an infinity here on earth, so if i was watching you fall pass the event horizon you would be slowing and slowing until a second for you is an infinity here on earth and you would, for all intents and purposes be permanently stopped from a vantage point of earth (to tickle your noggin you can think about how according to the guy falling, nothing changes, and your second passes in moment, like any other second).

So now to get to Reb Shalom's vort. he brought up the famous comment from the Rabbis that the darkness of the plague of darkness was not like any other darkness, it was a heavy darkness that prohibited the Egyptians from moving. it was Reb Shalom's contention that god created a black hole here on earth. it absorbed the light creating an appearance of darkness and time slowed down for the Egyptians so much that a second for them was the whole duration of the plague to everyone else. it wasn't that they couldn't move, it is that time slowed down so much for them due to the gravitational environment used to create the darkness. the entire plague lasted but a moment for them.

Chag Kasher V'Sameach

~ChassidShoteh

Conflicted Like The Rav

We learn from our holy teachers that the wellsprings of your first blog post must be deep enough to quench the thirst of all future thoughts and ideas.  Something elemental yet all inclusive, saying nothing (something) while saying everything.

Our holy teachers have, in the past, described their religious experience in the form of an inner dichotomous dialogue pulling them this way and that. In the words of our holy sages (?), a person should keep in his pockets two pieces of paper, one inscribed with the words "For me the world was created", and in the other "For i am but dust and ashes."



Sitting by the Rosleener's feet for so many years there are so many teachings, but in a more rebbish style then he would like to admit, the Rosleener rarely commits his teachings to writing.  So with the limits in place, all i can speak about is my impression of things, but the thought that the Kotzker and the Izhbitzer having sat in the same beis medrash is a thought that should remain close.
I know we already spoke about the existential struggle expressed in the sages teaching, this prescription is not wrong, but i think I would keep those notes and their messages in my overcoat. The one that is in this rosleener's gatkes (kishkes?), so unbelievably close yet so unbelievably far, my two notes contain two very deep teachings. So similar, yet so very different.


       Our mother Rivka has a confused child inside of her. The baby can not decide if it prefers the study of Torah or the worship of idols.  But Rivka reacts very intensely, questioning her very existence because of her child who could not make up his mind. quite a strong reaction to a child with indecision.  God's assurances do not make things clearer.  The clarification that in fact two different children were growing inside her, one of which who loved to worship idols and will become an eternal enemy to the jewish people, is more placating than would be expected.
       I once heard from Rav Moshe Weinberger from Rav Tzvi Meyer Zilberberg the following interpretation.
one of the tools that the evil inclination engages in is trying to get us to identify ourselves through the sins that we do instead of the good that we do.  "Hey big shot, you are now coming to do *******? remember how your were just coming from doing ########?  you have no connection to this. It's just not where or who you are."  But it is important to remember that man was created with two souls inside of him. An animal soul constantly chasing the world surrounding, and the other a godly soul which can know no tainting and is forever pure.  Our identity is defined not by our animal soul, but by our godly soul. We may have fallen but that is never who we are. We come from a place much higher, those sins are accidental characteristics, not essential ones.
       Rivka knew the dangers of her child's confusion, and though Esau's path may have been one she did not wish for her child, the fact that it came with tkifut was nevertheless a comforting thought.

The other pocket:

       The pasuk in Vayikra begins "Behold the torah of the sin offering..."  such an introduction seems grand. Powerful fundamental ideas surely are represented in the sacrifice dealing with the shortcomings of humanity, and "Behold the torah of the sin offering" is the introduction that would deliver it to you. But as quickly as the stage was set, the legs were knocked out from under it, as the pasuk continues "in the place where the olah, ascending (burnt) sacrifice is slaughtered, so to the chatas, sin offering. A grand introduction to basically say 'ibid.' Why the straw man tactic?
      Perhaps it is speaking to one of the tools the evil inclination uses to steer us in its direction.  The ability of the human mind to suppress, bifurcate and ignore our own shortcomings is quite strong. We cleverly can forget our misdeeds, wholly and completely engross ourselves in the momentary action of good, and ignore the incongruousness of our lives.  We fail and refuse to see the relationship between our sin and our ascent.
       The pasuk comes to teach us: Behold the divine suggestion in dealing with our own shortcoming. Realize that the sacrifice atoning our sin is not completed in the back alley, or in the privacy and complacent comfort of some other milieu. The place where our sinning is happening is the exact same place our ascent is taking place, and the sooner we can understand ourselves as one organic whole, responsible for our sin as well as our ascent, one individual embodying two contradictory ideals, the sooner we will learn to deal with both halves of our existence in a healthy, mature, respectful and successful way.