Parashat Chukat: Love in Song

 

 

“My heart cries out for love and all that goes with loving, Love in song, Love in song”

Paul McCartney and Wings, from the ‘Venus and Mars album’ 1975

It was one of the worst famines on record and it took two musicians with hearts of gold to try to do something about it.

Nearly forty years ago, on Shabbat, 14^th July 1985, Sir Bob Geldof and Midge Ure staged the legendary ‘Live Aid’ concerts simultaneously in two locations across two continents.  Wembley Stadium and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia rocked to the sound of some of the greatest popular artists the 20^th Century had witnessed.  Not only that but Phil Collins even managed to play at both venues!  162,000 people attended the combined concerts and they were watched on TV by an estimated audience of 1.5 billion people across approximately 150 countries.  The world had never seen anything like it.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid), Queen’s twenty-one minute performance, which began at 6.41 in the evening, was the ‘greatest live performance in the history of rock in a 2005 industry poll of more than sixty artists, journalists and music industry executives,’ and it was recreated to great effect in the excellent ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ film of 2018.

It is estimated that £50 million (which is equivalent to £100 million in today’s money) towards famine relief has been raised directly as a result of the concerts (although it is unclear how much actually made it to the victims due to misappropriation by the Ethiopian Authorities).

There is no doubt that this was one of the greatest contributions that music has had on influencing the minds of the world’s citizens.

I recall Live Aid as being a seminal event that I couldn’t participate in (beyond donating to the charity).  At the time, I was living at home with my parents in Golders Green.  I was seventeen years old and it was a long, hot Shabbat.  Standing in our back garden, I could hear the neighbours’ TV sets blasting out the songs.

In the days before YouTube and VCRs, you had to wait to see the highlights on the BBC whenever it chose to broadcast them – which meant that not only could I not watch it being live streamed but I missed most of the replay as Shabbat didn’t terminate until after 10.00 pm.

As they say, “Es shver tzu tzein a yid.” which means, ‘It’s not easy being Jewish!”

One couldn’t ignore the magnitude of what was taking place.  That I had recently discovered the Beatles, and knowing that Paul McCartney had closed the Wembley concert with ‘Let It Be’ (although his microphone famously cut out mid-performance), made missing the event even more regrettable.  Whilst the world watched in amazement, I contended myself with spending much of the afternoon in the garden on a particularly splendid summer day.

I recall a friend of my parents, who sadly passed away at too young an age, telling me that ‘Music has the ability to move people in such a powerful way that this can lead to revolutions.’ I didn’t really understand what he meant and whether he was being particularly dramatic but forty years on and with life’s experience added to my being, I now ‘get’ where he was coming from.

If you knew very little about our nation but decided to step into a shul, any shul, on a Shabbat morning, it would become patently clear that ‘we do music big time’.  From the moment we start our prayers, we infuse them with the sweet sounds that stretch back through the millennia.  We even call the earlier sections, Pesukei de Zimra which literally means ‘Verses of Song’ (aka ‘Songs of Praise’).  We chant the Shema, the Amida and sometimes, Hallel.  When we read from the Torah and the Haftorah, we use musical notes.  In short, music is embedded in the DNA of the Jewish People.

The Torah records three songs that our ancestors sang.  The first, which we recite daily, is the Shira or the song that was sung when we emerged from the Yam Suf, the Sea of Reeds.  The second is the beautiful poem we recite throughout the majority of Parashat Ha’azinu and the third, which is the least known, is found in this week’s Parasha in Chapter 21 (verses 17-21) which extolls the water supply that accompanied the Israelites throughout the desert and ceased when Miriam died.  This of course led to the infamous episode when Moshe struck the rock and the consequent punishment he received in being precluded from entering the land of Israel.

“Then Israel sang this song: “Come up, O well!  Call out to it.” Well that the princes dug, that the nobles of the people excavated, through a lawgiver, with their staffs.  A gift from the wilderness – the gift went to the valley and from the valley to the heights, and from the heights to the valley in the field of Moab, at the top of the peak, overlooking the surface of the wilderness.”

Song is the ultimate expression that describes simcha or joy.  When we are happy, how can we demonstrate this?  Through song.  When we are sad, what do we need to hear to lift our hearts?  Music of course!  This is why, for many of us, one of the hardest challenges during the year of mourning (or even over a limited time such as the Omer or the upcoming ‘Three Weeks’ period) is surviving without music.  I know how difficult I found it and conversely the elation I felt once my ‘year’ was over and I could hear music again.  It was as though my soul was soaring in a way that I had forgotten it could.  Music is the gift that keeps on giving.

We Jews understand the limitless power that music has to express our deepest emotions.

The world too is in on this act and through Live Aid demonstrated what could be achieved.  When people come together to celebrate music, extraordinary events take shape, except when they don’t. The power of music to break down boundaries and engender love has been sorely tested in recent years.

Ask a survivor of the French Bataclan massacre of January 2015; someone who lost relatives in the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017; a parent of any of the 378 young people killed at Nova on 7^th October (and we can add another 44 taken in captivity in Gaza, dead or alive) how they feel about the power of music.

And when you have your answer, ask them how an ignorant, foul-mouthed, arrogant and obnoxious musician can dare to incite people to kill Jews and Arabs who are fighting, risking and losing their lives to defeat an enemy that despises and hates everything music stands for.  Ask the privileged, empty-headed fans who sang along to the chants of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ what they would do if they had been present at Bataclan, Manchester or Nova.  What tune would they be singing if they had seen their brothers, sisters, cousins or childhood friends meeting the same fate as those who had attended those concerts.                     Would they still be singing?  Or worse, would they be amongst the victims?

How can those whose parents and grandparents participated in Live Aid sink to such a level that it was akin to a Nazi rally of the 1930s?

“My heart cries out for love and all that goes with loving, Love in song, love in song”

·         Last Shabbat, where was the love that Wings sang about fifty years ago?

·         Where was the compassion that led those artists who participated in Live Aid to waive their fees so that all the monies raised could be sent to the starving in Ethiopia?

·         Where was the professionalism that the BBC demonstrated when broadcasting one of the seminal events of the latter part of the Twentieth Century, as it breezily live-streamed antisemitic incitement and kept the footage online for a further five hours?

We have yet to receive proper answers to these questions because so far, the responses have been feeble and frankly pathetic.

There was no love at Glastonbury this year but unbridled hate.

We don’t know exactly how much the artists were paid (although it ranges between the £10,000 and over £100,000 mark) and tickets to the festival cost the attendees £373.50 apiece (and more if you were ‘glamping’)

As of the time of writing, the BBC has promised to avoid the live broadcasting of ‘high risk’ acts in the future but I wait to be convinced.

The artist in question has been dropped by both his agent and management company and he has been denied entry to the US which resulted in his having to cancel all concerts there.

It could have been so very different.  Music, which should be the language of love (as per Shakespeare) has been cynically and cruelly twisted into a weapon of hate and division.

But not for the Jewish people.

Throughout the centuries, we have experienced persecution - and there were many who tried to silence us - but despite everything, we carried our songs in hearts and expressed our emotions through the most challenging of times in song.  Our Psalms were written to be sung, even those that were mournful in nature because music, at the end of the day, is the ultimate expression of the soul for even on our darkest day, Tisha B’Av, we sit on the ground and chant.

I remain optimistic that, despite everything, the power of music can help society heal itself.  The outcry from those around us, who know the difference between right and wrong, has demonstrated that there is a reason to be hopeful.

I just hope that those who chanted, and the people who stood by, pause and consider a direction they can take to channel the power of music for good.  Society has reached a precipice but it’s not too late to pull back from the edge of the abyss.

May the music and its message that we heard all those years ago remind us of what we can achieve if we listen carefully to each other and demonstrate all that goes with loving.

Love in song.

Love in song.

Shavuah Tov.