Journalistish

This was originally published on The Huffington Post.

“Melody is the outpouring of the soul. Words interrupt the stream of emotions. For the songs of the souls, at the time they are swaying in the high regions to drink from the well of the Almighty King, consist of tones only, dismantled of words.” –From the Hasidic masters

Loosely centered around The Sixth Street Community Synagogue in the East Village and avant-garde label Tzadik Records, a community of Jewish artists, including Jake Marmer, Basya Schechter and Rabbi Greg Wall, is lifting up and re-forming those dismantled words.

Their endeavor is an ancient one.

Rav Kook, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, says the Jewish people are themselves a song. It’s no coincidence, then, that every word in the Torah has music to go with it. Without music, the words remain ink on parchment. With a melody, the words can lift and dance, float and fly, expand and explode. Rav Kook’s poetry seems to reflect this:

…Whatever I say
Only covers my vision,
Dulls my light.
Great is my pain and great my anguish,
O, my God, my God, be a help in my trouble,
Find for me the graces of expression,
Grant me language and the gift of utterance,
I shall declare before the multitudes
My Fragments of Your truth, O my God.

– from “Expanses, Expanses”

“The more complex the music is, the higher the words can go,” says Rabbi Greg Wall, a saxophone sage who lists among his many projects an album of Rav Kook’s poetry soaring atop cosmic jazz. Over the years at his shul, the Sixth Street Synagogue, Rabbi Wall has hosted a line up of Jewish-music all-stars, most tending toward complexity and expansiveness. Throughout the month of June, some of these artists have graced Sixth Street’s stage for the Tzadik Radical Jewish Culture Festival. And on June 29, the festival ends with the public debut of Basya Schechter’s poetry-and-music project, “Songs of Wonder,” to be released on Tzadik in the fall.

But why does Rav Kook call the Jewish people a song? Envision Jacob: his neck pressed on rock, his eyes closed, angels streaming to and from God above. It’s a vision without sound.

But later, Jacob wakes up. He doesn’t just imagine the angels; he wrestles with one. And at the end of this struggle, after the angel is exhausted, Jacob receives a new name: Yisrael — Israel. In Hebrew, the name means, “struggles with God.” But Rav Kook rearranges the letters: Yisrael becomes Shir El, the “Song of God.” So too, today, the people of Jacob, the people of Israel, are a song.

The Jazz Talmud

The memory of Jacob’s dream, the dream of Israel’s memory — Jake Marmer hears it and it all blends together: recollection into projection, stranger into native, dreamer into struggler, words into music.

It all blends into one endless “Dreamemory,” the name of one piece of Marmer’s cycle of performance poems called “Jazz Talmud.” The idea is simple, but the results — music that sounds the way a page of Talmud looks — are rambunctious: Take one Jewish tradition of legal discourse and mix with one part Ukrainian roots, two or more parts American immigrant imagination and 18 parts sonic shtetl goodness; bring to a methodic boil; let simmer for a few thousand years while the commentary collects and coats the edges of the pot. Eventually, when the stew has simmered long enough, when the dream has been thoroughly dreamt, it’s time to taste.

…If the dream is a sound,
an invisible musical cloud,
then you are the one being cooked:
on the spinning black-bottomless vinyl,
as the needle of you spirals
into the eye of history.
–from “Dreamemory”

At the end of September 2010, Marmer debuted his Jazz Talmud at the Cell Theater in Manhattan. He was backed by the Ayn Sof Arkestra & Bigger Band, which is led by Rabbi Wall and Frank London, both mainstays of the Jewish jazz scene.

LISTEN to Jake Marmer and the Ayn Sof Arkestra perform the “Dream Perek”:

Marmer’s verses provided the launch pad for the orchestra’s Talmudic commentary: Marmer is the Mishnah; London and Wall (on trumpet and sax, respectively) act as the main commentators, Rashi and Tosafot; and the big band fills in the empty spaces with the discussion of the ages.

“Poetry is my spiritual practice,” Marmer says. “The truest.”

As a poetry columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward and a Dorot Fellow who spent time in Israel performing his unique brand of spoken word, Marmer is truly a Hasid of Text. But that doesn’t limit him. A poem may at some point be written down, but the moment it leaves the poet’s lips, it grows wings and takes flight.

The Jazz Talmud premier in September stuck to the script, but in December, at Sixth Street and Tzadik Records’ Radical Jewish Musical Festival on Christmas night, it wasn’t hard to hear Marmer stray from the text, respond to the sax-and-trumpet commentary and dismantle some words in the process. But to send those words soaring, he had a bit of help.

The Saxophoner Rebbe

“It’s hard to institutionalize spirituality,” Rabbi Wall says.

Though he may eschew institutional Judaism, his shul has become an institution for innovative Jewish culture in New York City. There is music at the synagogue on a daily basis. Learning precedes most concerts. Others are hybrids of performance and lesson.

Rabbi Wall, too, is a hybrid. He’s the rabbi, but he’s also an artist. Many of the performances at Sixth Street find him on stage with sax in hand. The music came first. And in some roundabout way, music is what brought him to Jewish practice.

“It transformed me,” the rabbi says about his early encounters with group playing. “I was tapping into something greater than me.” He felt access there to something supernatural and he wondered why. Music, and specifically improvisational music, became an access point to the spiritual. He found the hidden, infinite hallway, and it seems fair to say that he’s still exploring its treasures.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know where the door is to get inside,” he says. That’s why Sixth Street will soon offer a kollel (an intensive community learning program) for musicians who want to find out how to access their crafts from a Jewish place.

It shouldn’t be hard. If the whole idea of the Jewish people is founded on a dream, then the revelation of that idea is a result of sound. One can see Jacob asleep on the stone with angels flowing from his head, but one can’t hear this scene because it is only an idea in the divine mind.

At Mount Sinai, “sight and sound came together,” Rabbi Wall wrote in the November issue of Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility. The dream of Jacob and the song of God became reality, when, at the foot of a mountain, multitudes of people “saw what is heard, and heard what is seen.” At the point of revelation of Godliness in the physical world, the usual function of the senses became meaningless. But before and after revelation, there is only sound: “Sound,” he wrote, “predates any other physical or spiritual manifestation of the divine.”

God created the world with sound, and it is the sound of creation — of revelation — that we hear to this day. On June 29, as the final performance of the Tzadik Radical Jewish Culture Festival, another N.Y. Jew, Basya Schechter, will unveil a project of song and verse that echoes this sound.

Words of Wonder

On “Songs of Wonder,” Basya Schechter, the artist otherwise known as Pharaoh’s Daughter for her multi-ethnic Middle Eastern musical project of the same name, melds the mystical Yiddish poetry of another 20th-century great, Abraham Joshua Heschel, to music.

Heschel wrote the poems in a time of transition. He was leaving the Hasidic world of his motherland Poland just as the Nazis were wreaking havoc, but he was not yet the influential multi-denominational American Jewish leader he would become. Schechter also grew up in the Hasidic world and now inspires Jews across the spectrum of observance. So the project, which is based on a book of Heschel’s poems called “The Ineffable Name of God: Man,” fits.

For “Songs of Wonder,” Schechter did not compose music. Rather, reading the Yiddish verse late at night, over and over, she started to hear the cadence of the words. At this point, though the music still had not emerged, she says she felt, “OK. This poem, I can wrap my mouth around it.” Repeating the lines again and again, she could finally sense a rhythmic pulse. After that, the music composed itself.

For Schechter, whose habit it is to craft melodies, riffs and trances to create a framework and then fill in the spaces with words, that the words themselves created the song speaks to the secret of language. It’s as if the soul of each letter in each word were singing its song.

Schechter says there’s a boundary that must be crossed with a given text — from outside poem to inside poem — before it can sing its song. Read enough times, the verse becomes like breath, and the words flow within. After that, the music just emerges, and thus the words ascend.

Because the music came from reading Heschel’s poems in Yiddish, the “Songs of Wonder” remain in the original: “The language that they’re written in has a certain cadence and integrity that gets lost when they’re translated,” she says.

But stripped of the song and source, the soul of the words remains. And the source of that soul? The echo of creation, of revelation, as Heschel exclaims:

Transmissions flow from your heart to Mine,
trading, twining my pain with yours.
Am I not you? Are you not I?

My nerves are clustered with Yours.
Your dreams have met with mine.
Are we not one in the bodies of millions?

Often I glimpse Myself in everyone’s form,
hear My own speech a distant, quiet voice in people’s weeping,
as if under millions of masks My face would like hidden.

I live in Me and in you.

Through your lips goes a word from Me to Me,
from your eyes drips a tear its source in Me.

When a need pains You, alarm me!
When You miss a human being
tear open my door!

You live in Yourself, You live in me.

– “I and You” (Ich und Du)

WATCH Basya Schechter perform another poem by Abraham Joshua Heschel, “My Song”:

From the documentary “Praying With My Legs,” (c) 2010 Ways & Means Productions from Steve Brand.

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts chronicling Jewish mystical musical experiences and encounters. Read the first post on transcendent song and the second on the Jewish connection to Phish.

This was originally published on The Huffington Post.

This was originally published on The Huffington Post.

Sex, betrayal and weird skin disease — Bible stories aren’t so different from the everyday.

So says Alicia Jo Rabins, frontwoman of Girls in Trouble, which released its second album of “post-biblical art pop” on Tuesday (May 17).

The songs on Half You Half Me (JDub Records) are part of a growing body of work — about 20 songs at this point — that mines biblical texts for obscure, unusual and mysterious tales of strong (and mischievous) women.

On the first album, released in 2009, the characters were clearly heroines, and Rabins stuck mostly to stories from the Five Books of Moses for material. On Half You Half Me, there’s more ambiguity about the women’s morality and some of the songs draw on sources outside of Jewish text entirely.

On “Lemons,” for example, Rabins uses Sufi poems and Quranic texts to craft a song about Potifar’s wife (Zuleikha in the Persian sources), who tries to seduce Joseph. Zuleikha’s friends mock her for loving Joseph. Her payback, in this musical midrash, involves citrus and knives. And on “Bethesda,” one of two violin-driven instrumental pieces on the album, Rabins interprets a New Testament story from the Gospel of John about an angel hovering over water to give it healing properties.

Interfaith engagement is an increasing part of what Girls In Trouble is doing. Everyone in the band has his or her own story, Rabins said. Some are Jewish. One person is a committed yogi. One grew up going to yeshiva, and, though he is no longer observant, still has a deep connection with the text. The band members are more likely to analyze a Miles Davis drum beat than debate some aspect of religion, but interfaith concerts, like the one Girls In Trouble played at the N.Y. Public Library, can bring out a great dialogue between the audience and band. Rabins hopes this will happen again in the future.

“We Are Androgynous” by Girls In Trouble

Still, Rabins is Jewish and this is the major source of her inspiration. Few songs on the new album stray from specifically Jewish texts. In fact, the opening track, “We Are Androgynous,” starts right from the beginning. The biblical beginning. The first beginning, at least, as two creation stories are tucked into Genesis, the first book of the Torah. Before Adam and Eve, it was Adam and Lilith. But the first man’s first mate was a bit subversive, to say the least, and Lilith was banished. Now, she’s a lonely demon pining for Adam. And that’s just the first song.

Lilith is matched — if not surpassed — in obscurity by the subject of another song, “Tell Me,” which relates the story of Serakh bat Asher. Serakh is the granddaughter of Jacob and it is she who tells the ailing patriarch after many mournful years that his favorite son, Joseph, is alive. As legend has it, Serakh delivered this joyful message to her zeide in a song. Some other marginalia about this mysterious figure: She never physically died, but was carried to heaven, like Elijah, alive. That and she will supposedly announce the coming of the Messiah. A minor character, to be sure.

The famous females of the Bible — the matriarchs — get their due respects on Half You Half Me, too. “DNA” tells another side of the story of Rachel and Leah’s successive marriages to Jacob (spoiler: the sisters were in cahoots the whole time), and “Emeralds & Microscopes” introduces Rebecca to Isaac just as his mother, Sarah, has died. And on “O General” and “Waltz for a Beheading,” respectively, Deborah and Judith find their ways into the frame.

Touring the Orchard

“Although we’re far from Eden/and dirty with the centuries/come lie with me beneath them/imaginary apple trees.”

As if to weave every Jewish woman of every age into this sonic tale, two more songs, “Rubies” and “Apples,” are based on rabbinic sources about the ideal and redemptive woman. After all, in Jewish mysticism, an apple orchard or breath-taking jewel commonly represents the divine feminine.

Girls In Trouble is a song cycle and a band. It is also a text study. For Rabins, who grew up secular, this project is a way to stay connected Jewish thought and practice. As a young adult, she attended to Pardes, a progressive egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem whose name evokes Eden and the mystical orchard, and had two years of great chevrutah experience (the traditional, one-on-one mode of Jewish learning). Now, on the road and far from the holy city, Rabins draws from boxes of “old, holy books” and studies these stories mostly alone.

“I kind of see everything that you meet each day and come to over and over again as spiritual practice,” Rabins said on the road from Atlanta to Carrboro, N.C., Girls In Trouble toured the southern United States in the weeks leading up to the new album’s official release (to be celebrated with a hometown show at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan on Thursday). Writing poetry, creating music, friendship and marriage are all part of the violinist’s daily spiritual life. (It helps that her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman, is in the band.)

When Rabins returned from Pardes in 2000, she had to balance touring life and observant life. She began playing in Golem in 2004, her first Jewish music playing experience, and felt less pressure then to be “observant.” She now feels very intuitive about her observance. For example, she says the traveler’s prayer every day. Even on Shabbat. She feels she’s probably one of the only people who would say this prayer while traveling in a car on the Sabbath.

Investigating spiritual experience is a big part of Rabins’ work — specifically, investigating spiritual experience that brings people together. A lot of times there’s a distance between the artist and the audience, she said. With this song cycle, there’s a closeness created through the stories told. The concert setting is a great way to have this dialogue.

Too often, religion is simplified, she said. All the adult, complicated stories get pushed under the rug. Rabins studied English in college and didn’t have a lot of familiarity with the text of the Torah at the time. She loved literature and was gratified — and surprised — to find that the stories in the Torah are great literature. Similarly, part of touring, beyond bringing people together and “studying” these new/ancient stories, is being surprised and gratified by unexpected twists.

Like earlier on, when Girls In Trouble was supposed to play a house show in Columbia, S.C. Arriving in town, the band learned that the house was shut down for noise violations the week prior. Stuck trying to find a venue at the last minute, they walked into the communications museum in downtown Charleston — filled with old recording gear, cameras and weird stuff, Rabins said — and got permission to put together a show there. Amid the wires and speakers and electronics was a Stroh violin, which is kinda like a violin with a horn on it for amplification that was created in the early 1900s. Rabins, who had only ever seen the instrument on video, was able to play this bizarre violin during the show.

At Joe’s Pub on Thursday, the full incarnation — all five pieces — of Girls In Trouble will be present. To Rabins, that means the show will be a very full compared to the stripped-down three-piece sound during this tour. Drums, accordion, live violin looping. Musically diverse and emotionally present.

After this tour, she’ll start mining the Talmud for material. The volume of stories there is almost endless, and the stories themselves almost weirder than real life.

“The Talmudic stories get pretty psychedelic,” Rabins said.

But don’t assume that trippy anecdotes will equal a new surreal sound. Rabins likes tension and angles, and she’s tempted to compose grounded tunes about heavenly matters.

“I like the music to express the story,” she said, “but I also like it to challenge the story.”

This was originally published on The Huffington Post.

This review was originally published on Pop Damage.

From the very first staccato pluck of piano, Creep On Creepin’ On — the fourth album from Canadian folk poltergeists Timber Timbre and their first with Arts & Crafts — declares itself: Here is a canon of incantation. Here is a cauldron of bubbling, poisonous bliss. Here is a collection of pop mantra from the underworld.

You freeze. You smell. You sneeze. You drink. You chant. You are sucked in. And within, among the creepy crawlies, hexed and cursed and gripped, all that darkness reveals itself: Here is an album of frightening, beautiful light.

“It’s a bad, bad ritual/but it calms me down.”

By now, it should be no surprise that Timber Timbre, with its signature haunted ‘n’ happy sound, straddles heaven and hell. But on the group’s fourth go-round, the shock is how effortless this walk on the tightrope feels. Sure, ritual is rote. Ritual is repetition. Ritual is insane. But it is in the over-and-over that you dig deeper and deeper. It’s a bad, bad ritual that is only what it seems.

Creep On Creepin’ On, from “Bad Ritual” and beyond, is the sound of an underground metropolis emerging for a stroll in the park. Ruins awakened. The creak, shudder and moan of gutted skyscrapers come suddenly to life, and, on “Obelisk,” the drumbeat of marching, colossal metal and stone. The church bells turned gong. The violin wind. The crush, the crumble, the groan.

Now, risen and stretched, this once-lost city, this Gotham-sized golem, catches its stride by the title track.

“I was invited, I was called out/to watch you frolic and dance/I buried my head in my hands/I buried my heart there in the sand/I was cock-block cured, encharmed/I was ferociously put upon/until it was clear, I should not keep on/I’ll just creep on creepin’ on.”

Shucking layer upon layer of pavement and bone, this bewitched mass of buildings and homes has found, once again, its resolve. Enough decay. Enough sleep. Time to march on, alone. Spurred by twinkling organ and saxophone drone, by “Black Water,” the album is weightless and lifted and the cityscape sings its heartbreak, its haunting, in a mantric moan:

“All I need is some sunshine/All I neeeee-he-eee-heeed/ All I need is some sunshine/All I neeeee-he-eee-heeed…”

This is a song about fire over there on the horizon, how it draws you deadly toward it, possessed, “begged to the spirit that [you] crave.” The fire will burn you, the ritual will kill you, but your legs are moving, your heart is praying, and when you reach the flames, when you find the sun, so the paradox unfolds.

Cool me down, calm me down, black water, call me down. The undead city has reached the edge of the earth and, singed by the sun, yearns for the depths once again. Come up for air, dive in for sin, Timber Timbre flings you like a pebble into the kaleidoscopic pool, wraps you in “Swamp Magic” and sends you careening home.

“Hand to hand to/mouth to mouth to/mind to mind to/mouth to middle/oh woman!/why aren’t you moving with me yet?/Do you forget what you tried to remember/and do you remember what you tried to forget?”

The fevered peak of Creep On Creepin’ On comes, undoubtedly, with “Woman.” Everything tumbles, everything spirals, everything is up just as it is down, the cauldron bubbling over, the stone tumbling stone. This monstropolis can’t remember where it’s going, or where it’s been. Your memory, too, is muddled.

“No incantation now will save us/now that we’re too old to die young.”

The old spells and spooks don’t work anymore. And so the bridges burn and the foundation sinks and the city disappears to the depths and all the while a doo-wop lullaby from ephemeral angels in the heavens, resigned.

“Please break this spell you have me under/every heart is a lonesome hunter.”

But it is too late. The spell cannot be uncast. On “Lonesome Hunter” and “Do I Have Power,” it’s as if the deranged sock hop has reached its denouement. The last dance. Every boy, girl and zombie knows it’s the end, but they hold each other still and sway to the saxophone’s scream. And meanwhile, the city: buried, ancient, asleep.

With “Souvenirs” the lights flicker on in warning: This haunted klezmorium is closing. Even the ghouls must catch a wink. Gather ‘round. Come quick. The streets are empty. Hear an echo. Grab a whisper. Swear it wasn’t all just a dream.

Which, of course, it isn’t. The curse is never fully lifted, and Timber Timbre’s eternal enchantment merely expands its reach.

On Wednesday (April 13), Joe’s Pub was the scene of a séance: Taylor Kirk’s incantorial crooning, Mika Posen’s possessed and cackling violin and Simon Trottier’s slide-steel spells all worked to transport the crowded venue to another plane.

Howling through expanded versions of “Bad Ritual,” “Obelisk,” “Creep On Creepin’ On” “Too Old To Die Young” and “Black Water,” the beginning of this collective spooking showed Timber Timbre at home in their new compositions. Later on, versions of “Lonesome Hunter,” “Do I Have Power” and most groovesome “Woman” yet further proved the group’s magic-music mastery.

But it was the few other songs in this hour-long set, the ones not, seemingly, from Creep On, that showed the musicians tapping into something otherworldly: “Demon Host,” “Until the Night is Over” and “Lay Down in the Tall Grass” all stalk-hunt-haunted in the same Timber Timbre vein. They could’ve stuck to the new stuff and the set would not have lacked. But this way, a gruesome romance was enflamed.

“It’s like a night, night crawler crawlin’ out in the yard/and it’s comin’ over me in waves/But you’re not haunted by the morning sun/you keep diggin’ until the night is over.”

And the night is most certainly not over, Creep On Creepin’ On exclaims.

Read this review at Pop Damage…

Editor’s note: A much shorter version of this story originally appeared on The Huffington Post as the second part in a series of posts profiling artists and chronicling unexpected Jewish mystical experience. Read the first post on transcendent song. Discussions on various Phish-related sites prompted the publishing of this expanded post. Still, in all likelihood, it will probably only serve to further confuse the confused and expand the expanded. Also, I wanted to out Mr. Miner.

For Phish fans, New Year’s Eve is a High Holy Day. And in Phish lore, Madison Square Garden is a sacred temple — perhaps the most sacred.

So what happens if you’re diehard for both Phish and Judaism and one never-miss-it concert falls on the Sabbath? Do you skip synagogue? God forbid.

Yerachmiel Altizio, 35, is a devout Jew who has seen Phish perform more than 200 times, but because a live concert on the Sabbath presents a number of Jewish legal issues (traveling, carrying and listening to live music are prohibited) he was not able to attend the New Year’s Eve extravaganza in Manhattan.

Perhaps now I should give full disclosure: I’ve seen Phish 12 times and though my standards for observance aren’t exactly the strictest, I would also call myself a devout Jew.

It’s in this context that I raise the question: Is the mind-altering environment of a Phish concert an appropriate place for a devoted Jewish seeker? And further: Is it, even on the holy Sabbath, perhaps the ideal environment?

The Duality of Phish

“The thing with Phish, why they’re so unbelievable, is because everything about them has two sides. It’s like a duality,” Altizio says. “For a righteous person, it’s a completely uplifting spiritual positive experience. … For someone that’s done something bad, it can be the worst trip.”

Altizio has spent a lot of time thinking about what goes on inside a venue while Phish plays. After hundreds of shows and thousands of hours, he thinks he has an inkling of an answer. Yes, it has something to do with intentional ecstatic dance. Yes, the pervasive communal joy is a huge part. Yes, yes, the unknown destination of Phish’s improvisation has an effect. And yes, most certainly, the fact that the rhythm section of the band is made up of two Jewish guys is key.

But this formulation unfolds slowly. It is still unfolding. First, the fact that I sit in his apartment in Queens, asking him questions about mysticism and jam music and not laughing in his face when he responds in biblical terms, he says, is vindication for all the time and money spent following the group and the what-are-you-crazy reactions from those uninitiated who’ve had similar queries.

Every time I meet him, Altizio, like any good follower of the Chabad Hasidic tradition, which is based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, wears black slacks, a white button down shirt and a black jacket. His beard is wispy enough to imply that he hasn’t been in the Chabad world for too long, but it is long enough to prove that he’s fully committed (Altizio became shomer shabbos-observant in 2001). The bookshelves in his room are brimming with Hebrew-inscribed leather-bound spines — the “kosher” books — that conceal the more secular, even heretical, titles leftover from his youth. On his walls, for every picture of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe there is another piece of Phish paraphernalia. But it’s his go-to guitar — a hollow-body Ibanez electric — that reveals just how central his experience with Phish remains to his identity.  The guitar, which resembles the custom-made axes used by Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitar player, stands front-and-center on the cover of Altizio’s first album. Walk the streets of Crown Heights and you can often find that same guitar adorning posters for upcoming shows of his band, Merkavah. On the album and on the posters, the guitar is topped by Chabad’s iconic black fedora.

Here is a Jew who cannot escape the Phish. Here is a Phishhead who cannot escape being Jewish.

For all the time, money and sweat I’ve spent in the world of this band and the world of this faith, this and other talks with Altizio give me the feeling I’ve barely glimpsed the depths of Phish’s music — the Jewish depths. In 2009, I attended a four-show run leading up to New Year’s Eve in Miami, Fla. That is, I gladly went to see Phish perform four nights in a row, and when it was all over I wished there would be a fifth concert. When it was all over, I yearned to get back to a very real, very powerful feeling of spiritual elevation, the likes of which I’ve only felt through the music of this band and for fleeting moments while living, learning and seeking in Jerusalem and New York City.

In Jewish thought, the Torah can be read or studied on four different levels. There is the simple meaning of a text (peshat), the allegorical understanding (remez), the deeper metaphorical interpretation (derash) and, finally, the secrets hidden deep beneath it all (sod). What this teaches me is that a story is a story. Stories are ends in themselves. We can take a story for what it is, and, on one level, we have understood the story’s message. On the other hand, even the simplest story contains the deepest mysteries: We can understand the story’s obvious teaching, we can find its allusions and learn from its implied comparisons, we can parse each sentence, squeezing out every drop of meaning, and still there will be a depth to that story that we will never fully perceive.

This progression from peshat to sod, from definite meaning to endless mystery, is played out in full in the Phish experience. Phish’s music is often derided as a self-indulgent, “mindless” drug soundtrack. Their lyrics have been called meaningless, nonsensical dribble. Phish fans are routinely lampooned as clueless, hedonistic hippies. But for those who “know,” the music and the scene are so much more than the story of the music and the scene. Peel back the layers, and you may see the whole.

A Brief Account of the Divine Chariot

When he was 19 years old, Altizio dropped out of college in Massachusetts and moved to California. He had dreadlocks. He’d been to countless Phish concerts. He was an uninvolved, unconcerned secular Jew. He was a wandering hippy. At some point, he visited the Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was there, in an area called the Valley of the Lost Souls, Altizio says he had a vision. He had a friend with him. His friend saw the same thing. In the vision, a ring of seven clouds formed in the sky. The clouds were like cookie-cutter Stars of David. The clouds formed the Merkavah, the divine chariot.

Or something. Certainly, something. Now, far from the Valley of Lost Souls, after countless more Phish shows, after returning to college and studying jazz guitar, locks shorn and tzitzit adorned, Altizio cites this vision as the turning point, as the beginning really.

But despite the vision’s ringing clarity, Altizio won’t quite make the claim that what he saw was “the chariot.” It would be a high claim. The Merkavah is one of the earliest recorded instances of Jewish mystical experience. It’s the throne of God that Ezekiel saw. The first Jewish mystics, precursors to the Kabbalists, who were precursors to the Hasidim, were known as “descenders of the divine chariot.” That is, through their mystical practice, these devotees aimed to draw the divine down into the world. Despite his apprehension, I think all the pieces are there.

Descenders of the Divine Chariot

“It takes two people to create the Merkavah,” Altizio says. “You must have two Jews.”

This makes sense. In Jewish tradition, a person does not study Torah alone, lest he or she come to an incorrect conclusion or find false meaning in a passage. The traditional solution is that you should have a study partner — a chevruta — so that, in moving from peshat to sod, from simple understanding to underlying secret, you have a check against opening the wrong door, or descending into a textual trap.

Conversely, in Jewish law, any action that requires speaking must be done alone. I heard this from Raz Hartman when he visited New York City before Hanukkah. He explained that two people talking simultaneously cannot be heard. Their messages are lost. This has practical application when studying Torah. One person in the chevruta reads a piece of text and then his or her partner responds with a question or conclusion. But in music, Raz teaches, the opposite is true. Two people can, and should, sing together. In music, Jews strive for harmony. Harmony cannot exist if you are alone.

To create the musical Merkavah — that is, to become a vehicle of divine action — you need two Jews. Not only does Phish have two Jewish band members, Altizio explains, but the Jews, Mike Gordon on bass and Jon Fishman on drums, create the foundation of Phish’s music. They hold it down. They are the vehicle — the “chariot” — that allows the rest of the band and everyone in attendance to fly.

To describe their music as a cosmic vehicle is nothing new. It’s nothing necessarily Jewish either. Dave Calarco aka Mr. Miner, 35, who maintains a popular Phish daily, Mr. Miner’s Phish Thoughts, regularly invokes mystical metaphors to describe the contours of a piece of improvisation or the impact of a given concert. Calarco says the Phish experience is a modern extension of an ancient dance ritual. He’s working on a book about this very subject. But even though he’s known for his creative, play-by-play reviews, the blogger, who’s been to so many hundreds of shows he’s lost count, says he’s never brought a pen or piece of paper into the experience. Asked what he does do during the show, Calarco’s response is to the point:

“My eyes are closed.”

There’s a statistic out there, unverified as it may be, that roughly one-third of the audience at every Phish concert is Jewish. Gordon and Fishman, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, have helped create a uniquely Jewish mystical experience to which an unusual number of Jews flock.

In their own ways, these two secular American Jews can be viewed as modern-day Jewish mystics. The very idea that there is a Jewish people is founded on a dream, and Mike Gordon has a sort of obsession with dreams. On his hotline (yes, he has a hotline) he can often be heard speaking about dreams from nights past. A visit to his website is like a trip down the rabbit hole. Read any of his “stories” from Phish’s archive of official newsletters, and you’ll encounter the sometimes-incomprehensible meanderings of an artist, who, I think, is also a mystic.

On “Voices,” a track from one of his solo albums, The Green Sparrow, Gordon even sings about the mystic calling:

A choir of guardian angels asking me to take a deeper breath/telling me to slow down and live before I’m gone and dead.

And in a recent journal entry posted to his website, Gordon describes the elevated collective consciousness he’s reached with his solo band: “The gelling that happens when you simply do something a lot is indescribable … enough for mystical connections to occur.”

Similarly, Jon Fishman is like a merrymaker straight out of a Hasidic tale. Not only is he the namesake of Phish but much of the band’s prankster reputation also hinges on the absurd comedy of Fishman. At most concerts he wears a dress. At some concerts he plays the vacuum (yes, plays the vacuum). He’s gone streaking across the stage. In Miami in 2009, as the clock counted down and the New Year began, Fishman was shot out of a canon.

Mysticism is the stuff of paradox. And Matt Butler, the conductor of an improvisational music group called Everyone Orchestra, with which Fishman has played shows and whose upcoming album will feature the drummer, describes Fishman as a bit of a paradox: “He’s either a man of no words or infinity.”

While Gordon and Fishman help build the chariot, a lot goes on at a Phish concert to keep the vehicle moving. The musicians on stage become vessels for energy to pass from the audience and out into the universe, and visa versa. The experience sounds like a traditional communal Jewish prayer service. Wordless repeated melodies, ecstatic dancing, the sweat of focused intention.

There’s a story told about a certain Hasid who came to his teacher, Rabbi Yisrael of Rushin, with a complaint that his son-in-law was wasting time. Instead of meditating or immersing himself in the mikveh, the ritual bath, before prayers, as is the custom, this young man would wander about singing songs composed by Rabbi Yisrael over and over, to the point of exhaustion. The rebbe assured the man that not only was this not a waste of time, but singing with such devotion is actually the greatest preparation for prayer. In fact, singing with such intensity and concentration can cause a person to sweat and this sweat, since it is a result of a holy intention, becomes like a mikveh. Taking this idea further still, intentional dance, like the circular Hasidic steps on a Friday not or the out-of-body contortions of a Phish fan, is an appropriate preparation and necessary component of any “authentic” Jewish prayer experience.

So yes, the pieces are there. But has Altizio’s experience — his Jewish experience — been replicated?

“When I was a teenager and I used to listen to Phish, that opened up my entire world to spirituality,” Matisyahu says.

Matisyahu Miller, who has become somewhat of a global Jewish hero for his brand of Hasidic reggae, is who he is because of his experiences following Phish. When I interview him ahead of his Festival of Light Hanukkah tour, I know this. I have met him before. Once, in his “Shabbat Tent” at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, as his crew sang and dance and stumbled drunkenly, Matisyahu, sitting quietly to the side, asked me how Trey Anastasio’s solo set went. Anastasio, the guitar player from Phish, was touring at the time with his solo band and headlined the festival on Friday night. Matisyahu was set to play on Sunday, but because the he couldn’t consciously attend the set on the Sabbath, the message would have to be relayed. He still felt invested in his hero’s music. He wanted to stay in the loop. The next time I met Matisyahu was in Miami during that New Year’s run of Phish shows. Turns out he was at the show on Dec. 30 and was trying to get a minyan (prayer quorum of 10 Jewish men) together to pray the daily evening prayers.  So there, in the hall of American Airlines Arena, as the Phishheads streamed ecstatically by, a bunch of Jews intoned ancient prayers — and nothing about it, even for a second, felt strange or out of place.

Altizio didn’t know Matisyahu from their Phish touring days. But they both reconnected with Judaism at about the same time, and when Matisyahu was in the studio recording his first album, Shake Off the Dust … Arise, Altizio was called to play on a number of tracks. The rest, at least for Matisyahu, is history. While he has managed to couch specifically Jewish lessons in specifically “non-Jewish” music, Altizio has almost the opposite approach. On his first album, and on the follow-up he’s busily producing now, Altizio takes traditional Chabad melodies and transposes them into Phish-inspired improvisational funk music. The goal is the same: to uplift and to reconnect the Jewish masses.

The Oneness of Phish

Leave it to four nerds from New England to proclaim, on the verge of such an auspicious date (Jan. 1, 2011, or 1/1/11), the truth of global oneness via a song about processed meat.

Jon Fishman, Page McConnell, Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon rang in this New Year by flying above a sold-out Madison Square Garden in a giant hotdog, while 50 or so dancers dressed in costumes representing the nations of the world circled the stage, singing over and over, for nearly 20 minutes, the chorus to a tune called “Meatstick”:

Time for the meatstick/Bury the meatstick/Take out the meatstick time/Whoa, shocks my brain/Whoa, shocks my brain.

The crowd went ballistic. The whole time.

On one side is the spectacle of the thing. On the other side are the layers of meaning in the verses around that chorus, the sincere embrace of all world cultures and faiths (there were represented, among others, African tribesman, Swiss yodelers and, believe it or not, Hasidic Jews singing in Hebrew), the date, the place, the audience reaction and the fact that America’s greatest ongoing improvisational rock group used a pre-recorded loop to back the dancers on stage. Did I mention the crowd went crazy the whole time?

But every time we say goodbye/The pain I can’t identify/Reveals to me the hidden door/That leads to several moments more.

Any Phishhead will corroborate that feeling upon waving goodbye to their favorite band. But there’s nothing “special” about Phish. Just like there’s nothing “special” about Judaism. Every person has his or her inherited tradition and current reality. Improvisational music hides within itself an infinite hallway of doors, a hallway of meaning that is open to all who wish to explore.

Hasids and Phishheads dance the same dance. They sing the same song. They peer into the same void. They fill the void with the same joy and love. And for the same reasons, they forget what it is to dance, to sing, to peer, to be. They ascend; they descend. They go out; they return. They are one, because all is one.

While he wasn’t physically at Madison Square Garden for New Year’s Eve, he was definitely there in spirit. To sway and pray anywhere on a Friday night is to add one more blessing to the same cosmic stream.

“It has a endless positive effect on the world,” Altizio says. “Like a spiral that never ends, it just keeps going and going and going.”

Editor’s note: This begins a series of posts profiling figures and chronicling examples of Jewish mystical experience that may or may not have resulted from unscripted and unexpected ecstatic musical endeavors. Published originally by The Huffington Post on Jan. 12. Read it there.

The whole idea that there is a Jewish people is founded on a dream.

Jacob, running from his brother, dreams of a ladder that goes from the earth to the heavens. Angels ascend and descend the ladder, and God, above it all, vows to protect and strengthen him. That dream kept Jacob going for his whole life. Perhaps that dream has also kept the Jewish people going to this day.

I learned this from Raz Hartman, a rabbi and classically trained pianist from Jerusalem, who leads a community there called V’Ani Tefillah — “and I am prayer” — and has so far recorded two albums of spiritually driven music.

Not long ago, I set out to find if and where the spirit of Judaism and the energy of improvisational music converge, and going to hear Raz at an egalitarian yeshiva on the Upper West Side in the weeks leading up to Hanukkah was one part of that quest. He was scheduled to play a set of music at Yeshivat Hadar, but even before I arrive, I know it’ll be more spontaneous collective prayer than choreographed performance.

“I want to tell you a secret,” Raz says. “A lot of things in yiddishkeit are like this, but especially songs. There’s this custom — at least, Hasidic songs — to sing the song over and over and over.”

Raz came to New York City from Nachlaot, the maze-like Jerusalem neighborhood where V’Ani Tefillah is located and where I once spent a half a year living and exploring. It’s easy to get lost in Nachlaot — in thought, in song, in prayer, in alleyways. The neighborhood has an undeniable allure, and it attracts a bevy of characters. Nachlaot is a neighborhood of secrets. And Raz, whose name literally means “secret,” knows quite a few of them. This is partly why I go to hear him sing — why I go to sing with him. I want to learn the secret of song. I want to figure out why music has become so central to my own Jewish identity. I want to understand what it is I feel so connected to when I am “lost” in song. I sing, but now I want to know why.

“It took me a while to realize that there’s something very deep about over and over and over,” Raz says. “The truth is, when you sing niggunim you can just sing them or you can also have an intention. And we can have the intention of really, each time we go through it, trying to get a little deeper into ourselves, get a little deeper into being together, b’ezrat hashem.”

His original melodies and adaptations of traditional prayers are generally simple, but when a room of openhearted seekers joins the chorus, that simplicity soars.

Raz brings down a teaching from his rebbe, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav: In dreams, we transcend time. A dream may last for 10 minutes in reality, but the dream itself can cover years. As much as they’re fantasy, as much as they’re not real, Raz says between songs, dreams are very real. Dreams drive us. Sometimes, dreams drive us more than reality. We can even dream a dream into reality. So too with song: With the right intention, a simple melody can transcend itself, and the souls who sing can transcend time.

Judaism is my tradition, and improvisational music is my meditation. When the two combine, I often feel as though I am having a lucid dream. On this musical quest — in this dream — I’ve crossed paths with many other likeminded travelers: Greg Wall, the rabbi of acid jazz and his big band of horned mystics; Jake Marmer, an immigrant poet, who models his verse on ancient Jewish legal discourse; Yerachmiel Altizio, a freak for Hasidic funk; Rachel and Matti Ravitz-Brown, a religious Jewish couple who met and now daven through Sufi Islamic dikhr; and Joey Weisenberg and Sameer Gupta, a mandolin-tabla duo whose second musical date was also their first public presentation.

The whole idea that there is a Jewish people is founded on a dream. For me and for countless others, the force that sustains this dream is unrestricted song. Together, may we wake up, listen and speedily learn the tune.

Published originally by The Huffington Post on Jan. 12. Read it there.

Published originally on The Huffington Post on Nov. 30. Read it there.

Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, which begins in the evening on Dec. 1, is all about exposing what is hidden, uncovering mysteries and embracing unbelievable miracles. Matisyahu, the hometown Hasidic hero of New York City and a cultural icon for Jewish America, crafted his own light-filled musical mystery at the Brooklyn Bowl on Nov. 29, opening his nine-night Festival of Light tour with a nearly non-stop, two-hour set that covered the span of his career while peeking into the unknown future.

This show was the first spark, the shamash of Matisyahu’s touring menorah. Let me explain: There are eight days of Hanukkah, which celebrates the miracle of one day’s worth of oil lasting for eight days as the successful revolutionaries of the Maccabee family rededicated the once-desecrated Holy Temple. Modern Jews celebrate the holiday by lighting a nine-branched candelabra, called a menorah, the number of flames increasing with the number of days.

So why does the menorah have nine branches instead of eight? There’s a special commandment that one may not use the lights of the menorah for any practical purpose other than proclaiming the miracle of the holiday. An additional flame, the shamash, is needed to symbolically help the other flames be revealed in the world. Hence, eight days, nine flames. So too, if each show in Matisyahu’s Festival of Light is it’s own unique flame, then the shamash, this opening show, was a helping of pure holiday fire.

Other parallels abound. Born Mathew Miller, Matisyahu took on his Hebrew name after becoming religious in 2001, and it is that moniker that has become a household code name for observant Judaism in the face of cultural and spiritual Jewish assimilation. In that context, there’s nothing new about a Matisyahu today because there lived, more than 2,000 years ago, another Matisyahu, also a symbol for strengthening Jewish roots in a spiritual desert. He, of course, was the father of the Maccabean revolt that reclaimed the Second Temple in Jerusalem from unholy Hellenist hands and therefore created a new Jewish festival.

“A name is a deep thing, you know,” 21st-century Matisyahu said before the Brooklyn Bowl show. Hanukkah, while it might not be the most holy holiday, is the most widespread.

“Any Jew who’s never even been to shul on Yom Kippur has probably lit a menorah, right? … In that same way that, you know, my music has penetrated into some pretty far out places where a lot of people might not know anything about Judaism.”

The venue on Nov. 29 was the opposite of far out. It was like a home-cooked meal: The disco dreidel hanging above an audience — in which visible Torah observance was the rule, not the exception — that chanted things like “baneh beis hamikdash, bimheira b’yameinu” (“Rebuild the temple speedily in our days”) along with an unabashedly side-locked reggae artist felt the perfect way to bring in the holiday.

Wanting to spread this hamish feeling to farther corners of the Earth, Matisyahu will take his Festival of Light, which is in its sixth year, out of the confines of New York for the first time.

“Whereas normally I’m not considering who’s coming to the shows, on Hanukkah I’m thinking, ‘OK. So I should go to Baltimore, there’s, like, a bunch of Jews there,’” he said. The tour also makes stops in Boston, Philadelphia and Portland, Maine.

Another parallel: Hanukkah is the holiday of light amid darkness; Matisyahu’s is the music of light within darkness. His first album, Shake Off The Dust … Arise, whose copious amounts of roots dub devotion first brought about the Rasta reputation, is replete with references to spiritual fire. The collection is anchored in part by a song called “Aish Tamid,” which literally means “Eternal Flame.”

“Uncovering debris lifting up the fallen arisen within / to reach the Yiddin even in Manhattan / exposed menorah glowing in the shadows of destruction / trailblazing through affliction / brushing off the branches golden / standing strong flames / dancing like a lion roaring rising out of nothing.”

An extended exploration of this song anchored the show in Brooklyn, it’s lyrics a maze of rhymes whose entrance is the streets of New York City and whose exit is backwards in time to the scene of the ancient Temple’s revitalization. Backed by the Dub Trio of drummer Joe Tomino, bassist Stu Brooks and guitarist D.P. Holmes, who provided a rippling blanket of organic electronic music, Matisyahu brought this eternal flame into the cosmos. “Space Tamid” it should forever be called.

There was no preaching on this night — no stories or interludes or appeals to the unconvinced.

“Don’t describe it. Don’t explain it. Just do it. Do it with your music,” Matisyahu said about his approach to music at the end of 2010.

The rest of the set was itself a maze of Matisyahus — the otherworldly beat boxer, the ecstatic rapper, the mystical mensch — a version of the man peeking around every corner of this non-stop dance party. The newest and most divergent Matis takes the mic for “Miracle,” a single released just for Hanukkah.

“Eight is the number of infinity / one more than what you know how to be, / and this is the light of festivity / when your broken heart yearns to be free.”

It’s a pop song that’s as catchy as it is substantive, as accessible as it is deep, as simple as it is meaningful. It gets in your head only to get into your heart. It is the story of one tiny, insignificant, imperceptible spark of light that manages to illuminate infinite darkness. It is the story of Hanukkah.

Published originally on The Huffington Post on Nov. 30. Read it there.

Read this review at Pop Damage…

Standing room only at the Rock Shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Sharon Van Etten is home here. Her show on Oct. 8 begins more like impromptu sound check than official album-release show for her new collection of songs, Epic (Ba Da Bing Records).

To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime / To admit I’m still in love with you after all this time / I’d rather let you touch my arm until you die / seduce me with your charms until I’m drunk and then go home and drink in bed and never let myself be in love like that again.

Van Etten is alone with a guitar and her overstuffed verses for the first song of the set, “A Crime,” also the first song on the album. The veins in her neck are already bulging, the sound of her voice strained and strung out to dry.

To say the words I want to say to you would be a lie / By the time I get the courage I am drunk and you are tired / Alone in this basement where I will write these songs / of the things I’ll never say to you again but you know why.

Never let myself have preconceived notions about folk singers like that again. Not sure what I expected. Gentle plucking perhaps. A pleasant refrain or two. A touch of tambourine. No. Van Etten’s digging, deep-reaching voice is not on this night gentle or pleasant or touching. It shakes, shudders and roughs itself up. And then it invites on stage a properly pulsating ensemble of local humble rock-heavers and earth-toilers.

“Peace Sign” rears its beautiful head and announces the intention of this evening, of this album maybe: We come in peace, yes, but don’t think peace means all smiles and no pain. It doesn’t mean a train floats smoothly into a crowd of open arms and comes always to a slow stop. No. Some of Van Etten’s songs say peace and mean war, some careen along and aim to maim. Takes a while to pick up the pieces, but by “Save Yourself,” Van Etten and her band have hit a groove. Ben Lord and Doug Keith tie down the tracks, while Van Etten and song-sister Cat Martino compliment and lift each other into the air. They’re eventually joined on stage by Jessica Larrabee, another local raw-voiced songstress and co-operator of She Keep Bees, a duo that opened for Van Etten tonight with a collection of soul-stampeding rock songs. (The opener for the opener, Julianna Barwick, with only her voice and some looping, was more like a choir of cave angels. Exotic, holy en-chant-ment.) Choosing to skip “DsharpG,” the harmonium meditation that comes next on the album, Van Etten instead begins “Don’t Do It.” The song at first feels reserved, but soon the band melds in and the songwriter’s voice rips itself out of her throat and the words comes crashing. Growling. The rabid beast is finally tearing at Van Etten’s insides. The veins in her neck are bulging again. She’s howling, rasping, grating. This is the slap of rawness that stings in myriad ways while listening to Van Etten live or on tape.

Self-conscious comedian. Bashful folk-rock hero. Epic enchanter. Brutal romancer. Whispering siren. Not afraid to write a sing-a-long songs like “One Day” and dedicate it to mom, the show finally fully becomes a joyous family affair. It’s her party, no need to stick to a strict schedule. Next is an untitled song not on the new record. Name it if you want, but wait ‘til you hear it, Van Etten says.

Tell me that I’m something that you just don’t know / Tell me that I’m somewhere you don’t want to go / Tell me that I’m some place you don’t want to know / like the back of your hand, I don’t understand.

Even in this nascent phase, the song feels fully formed. Lines like these offer their own titles just as they pull you into their mysteries.

I was something that you couldn’t feel / I was something that you couldn’t feel that was real.

Van Etten weaves the tapestry and then laughs as she hangs it. She invites you give her song a title even as the song declares itself — or is that her declaring herself –  both nameless and near. To hear how this track may or may not evolve is reason enough to go soon to a show near you. (Van Etten will play a string of shows in Japan in December before she’s back stateside in the New Year.)

“Love More” brings the singer to the harmonium for the first and only time of the night. This is the album’s final track, and, with Martino’s yearning vocal accompaniment and some sparse rhythmic additions, is a perfect landing pad of enrapture for the full-band segment of the show. The rhythm section soon leaves the stage and on “For You,” a track from Van Etten’s first album, it’s just her and Martino.

I was walking up the street / I was thinking of the dreams that might come true / with you / I was whispering in my sleep / All the secrets that I keep I tell to you / I do.

It’s quite in the crowd. And it’s safe to assume each person here hopes and thinks and knows Van Etten is singing solely to her or him, and as she bares herself and as the crowd absorbs what’s bared and as eyes close, it’s safe to assume there really is only Van Etten singing to an audience of one.

And then she’s the only one left on stage. On “Consolation Prize,” “Tell Me I’m Wrong” and “Damn Right” there is the same truthful self-deprecation, the same beautifully lopsided verses, the same yearning tearing digging well-bursting emotion. All flows from one woman’s impossibly craned neck. All of it’s on tape. All must be heard or else be bereaved.

Read this review at Pop Damage…

Published originally by The Huffington Post on Nov. 12. Read it there.

On Sunday, 45 years after it began, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz finished his English translation of the Talmud, the seminal, 45-volume work of Jewish law, and to mark the occasion, hundreds of communities from Russia to the United States celebrated a Global Day of Jewish Learning. New York City alone hosted more than a dozen Global Day learning opportunities.

At one of those events — and it doesn’t take a leap of faith to assume at most of these events — more questions were raised than answered: What would Rabbi Steinsaltz say about the state of journalism today? Would he agree that the modern endeavor of reporting is really just craze mongering? What does the Talmud have to say about journalism? What does Judaism in general (not that Judaism can ever be generalized) think about the Fourth Estate? And what is journalism, anyway?

Uri Heilman, managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), commonly known as the Jewish AP, and Ari Goldman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, set out to answer some of those questions at the Columbia Barnard Hillel on Sunday night.

The discussion, titled “Is Journalism Kosher?” centered on the Jewish prohibition against lashon hara, which literally means “evil tongue” but is commonly translated as “gossip.”

The guy who wrote the book about such evil speech, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (1838 – 1933), and is referred to by the name of that book, Chofetz Chaim, said that lashon harah harms three people: the speaker, the listener and the one who is the subject of the gossip.

The Chofetz Chaim didn’t like newspapers. He said newspaper editors sin. He said editors cause other people to sin. Reading a newspaper, according to the Chofetz Chaim, is an unholy act. He apparently didn’t even like the telephone, thought it was a tool that could be used for gossip.

“I can only imagine what he would think about the Internet,” Goldman, the journalism professor, joked.

When he was a teenager, Goldman attended a rather strict yeshiva in Brooklyn. Every day he had to take the train from his parents’ home in Queens to the school. It was the 1960s and there were seven daily newspapers in New York City. On the subway, he started picking up wayward papers and fell in love. Noticing that Goldman had started to bring the paper with him to yeshiva, one of his teachers was furious. The rabbi told Goldman the paper was filth, lashon hara. He told him not to read the newspaper. Instead, he told him, go study the Talmud.

Since that experience and throughout his career as a journalist — he covered religion for two decades at the New York Times — Goldman has asked himself: Is journalism kosher? Is journalism the right thing to do? Is it a good, noble, appropriate profession?

Heilman, the managing editor of JTA, had a different experience growing up: “In the interest of full disclosure, I went to into journalism without asking a rabbi whether or not it was kosher. I didn’t have a rabbi who told me, ‘Feh! Throw that newspaper out.’ If he did, I probably would’ve ignored him,” he said.

“But I became a journalist first, and then afterwards I went looking for justifications. I am a religious Jew and as many religious Jews know, that’s often the way you do things. You’re not sure: Is it trief, is it kosher? You’ll eat it, and then you’ll find a rabbi who will give you the OK.”

Heilman looks to a story in the Torah to explain the Jewish view of reporting: Before the people of Israel entered the land after wandering in the desert for so long, they sent a group of spies into the land with the express purpose of finding out if it was a place of strength or weakness, if there were many or few people. The spies returned with an accurate report of what they saw. Accuracy aside, the spies, and the Jewish people as a whole, were punished.

“How could they be punished for recording what was accurate?” Heilman asked.

In the Torah, there are explicit and implicit warnings against gossip. But the spies didn’t gossip. The traditional answer to this problem is that the spies veered from their assignment, Heilman said. Sure, they reported the facts when they talked about the land of Israel being “a land that consumed its inhabitants.” They had witnessed many funerals there, and that was the scene the spies described when they returned. But, as the commentaries explain, the funerals were taking place so that the locals wouldn’t pay attention or notice the spies, not so that the spies would pay attention to the funerals. The spies forgot their assignment.

That’s the traditional response. A journalist-centric answer is that there are details that are material and there are details that are immaterial to the story. The spies didn’t tell the wrong story, they told it in the wrong way.

The Torah itself is just a bunch of stories about people who have sinned and failed in some way or another. So is the whole of Torah lashon hara? And the Talmud, the Jewish oral tradition that was later written down in the face of exile and fills in many of the missing details of the Five Books of Moses through stories about people, is that also lashon hara? God forbid. Nothing’s so black and white. There is good speech and there is bad speech. There are good stories and there are bad stories. In a similar way, there is good journalism and there is bad journalism.

The Talmud Times

“The Talmud is a guide, a model for good journalism,” Goldman said. It’s not just a book. Instead, it’s like a library of Jewish wisdom and lore. It’s filled with arguments. There’s a majority opinion and a minority opinion. In the Talmud, every side has a say, and what every side says is important.

Even the structure of the Talmud is like a newspaper. In the Talmud, you start with a Mishnah, which is a short summary of a given law, and then move to an exposition of the law. This is not unlike a news story, which has a lead, a succinct summary of the news, and then the body of the story, which delves into all the elements of the story mentioned in the lead.

On a single page of Talmud, many disparate points of view are entertained. In the same way, a good newspaper represents all the views. Everyone finds his or her place in the pages of a newspaper — a good newspaper, at least.

So how could journalism be unkosher, if its structure so closely resembles the compendium of Jewish law itself?

“Journalism can be kosher if practiced the right way, but it can be very unkosher, it can also be, as we say, trief, if practiced the wrong way,” Goldman said. “To know the difference is the difference between being a responsible journalist who works within our tradition and a journalist who is doing damage and harm.”

The examples of good, kosher journalism are obvious. Goldman points to Pulitzer Prize for Public Service-winning stories as examples. These are stories that heal the world and help the society: The Boston Globe’s reporting of local priests’ sexual abuse of children; the Washington Post’s coverage of care at the Walter Reed military hospital; the Chicago Tribune’s reporting on dangerous car seats and toys, which led to a recall of such products; the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s actions during the crisis of Hurricane Katrina (it served as a community center, a point of connection); the New York Times’ coverage of 9/11 and the work it did to strengthen New York and New Yorkers.

There are also cases of journalism gone wrong. For example: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coverage of the case of Richard Joule, who was accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing but, after his reputation was thoroughly damaged, was later found to be innocent.

“I like to think that when my rabbi said, ‘Put that newspaper away, that’s trief,’ he was speaking about bad journalism, not good journalism,” Goldman said.

Kosher Correspondents, Unkosher Commentary

So a journalist learns the ins and outs of responsible, ethical, world-healing reporting. He or she absorbs these principles and uses them in the field and in the newsroom. Does the difficulty of keeping journalistic kashrut end at publishing time? Today, in 2010, it does not.

The very notion of journalism is now blurry. Modern digital “reporting” is an infinite progression of tweets and tumblrs, and the people doing the posting usually have no formal training. That is a good thing, I think. Anything that blends the boundaries between storyteller and audience is a good thing. Or it could be.

Just as likely, blurry could be bad. The abovementioned journalist, trained or not, hits publish, and then the story really begins. Today, it is not enough to practice ethical reporting. Editors and moderators can read comment threads until the end of time and not even begin to have an inkling of the itch that would eventually cause them to scratch the surface.

So what can be done? Censor the obscene? Well, what’s obscene? OK. Shut comments down all together?

That’s what the JTA did when comments got out of hand on its website.

“We found that most of the comments were … hate-filled,” Heilman said. “What’s the point of having it?”

Forget the stories themselves. Before the shut down, subjects of JTA stories would often call Heilman and say they were embarrassed by the comments below the story. The comments didn’t further the discussion. They weren’t conducive to, well, anything. So JTA turned the comments off. Now, thoughtful and hateful readers alike can send their thoughts as letters-to-the-editor, and the JTA will hand pick the best.

For a news wire service like JTA, that’s a fine solution. But what about a publication such as the Huffington Post, which has a lively community of commentary?

As the boundaries get blurrier and the barriers to entry fall away, simply shutting down a comment section on a website will not be a viable solution. Doing so will spell the eventual failure of any site that relies on an active community of readers — that is, on a steady stream of commentary.

Rabbi Hillel, an epic (the epic) figure in the Talmud and Jewish history alike, famously pinpointed the essence of Judaism: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn” (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a).

Rabbi Steinsaltz, who just completed his translation of that and thousands upon thousands of other bits of Jewish wisdom, ended the live Global Day of Jewish Learning webcast on Sunday with the following:

The great secret of the Talmud is the brit to be involved. And so, what I wish, what I pray, what I try to give to people here: Please, be involved in your Jewishness, in your life, in your soul. Be involved. … Heaven is not the limit. We are going because we say in some way that the Torah is above heaven. Oh, as somebody once said really beautifully: ‘In all kinds of religions, they believe that the law, their religion is from heaven. We believe that our law, our Torah is heaven itself.’ So please, continue to be in heaven.

Keep reading. Keep learning. Keep commenting. Keep connecting. Keep pouring yourself into this conversation that is life and history. Do that, and this world should be blessed that its stories are stories of peace and its commentaries are commentaries of love. Do that, and you will help keep journalism kosher.

Published originally by The Huffington Post on Nov. 12. Read it there.

Read the whole review at Hidden Track…

The three dudes on stage are from the future.

B is on bass. He’s an outer space wizard or a witch doctor or a shaman. Or something. He wears a white moo moo – or is that a kimodo? – an ornate feather headdress, yellow-tinted work goggles and a yellow cape. The cape might just be a table cloth, or plastic wrap. B’s Earth name: Brad Steuernagel.

To B’s right, on an azure Ibanez and in a full Thor motocross outfit – down to matching neon green Adidas sneaks – is J, a professional dirt-bike racer from the year 3000. Earth name: Jay Bois.

On drums is CJ, who wears a garbage man’s jumpsuit. He’s a “worker drone of the future,” Jay said. “The dark oppressive future where everyone is an automaton.” Though CJ clearly broke out of the trance, he continues to wear the uniform out of pride. Earth name: Cary Prusa.

These are the Psychedelic Knights of Zohar.

Photo by Vince Averill

“Coffee shop rock. That’s what we do,” one of them says. “Psychedelic dad rock,” says another. But then, from the get go – a Zeppelin-inspired drone-based intro – there is mostly much thrashing. Ear-bursting thrashing. Drum bursting, too. Literally. The white bass drum has a massive puncture through its face.

The next song, Colombo, is just as shreddy and just as loud, but there are hints of Southern Rock in the intro and outro, that is, before and after the Knights enter the Fourth Dimension.

Come and see: The music at this rock concert is only 50 percent of it. The other half is this crazy world that Brad, Jay and Cary – all comedians – have created.

“This fourth dimensional outer space kinda thing,” Brad said, “is telepathic communication in jams.”

“We’re just a working band that just so happens to be able to travel through time and space and dimensions and space-time,” Jay said.

And the Zohar? Are these guys mystics? “The illumination and imagination of enlightening yourself by being proactive as opposed to being reactive,” Brad said about the name. “It just seemed like the perfect other-wordly name,” Jay said, adding that the band members have no real connection to Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, for which the Zohar is the canonical text.

Like Andy Kaufman’s comedy, where you can’t tell if the artist is the creation or the creator, The Psychedelic Knights of Zohar, through seriously searing music and comically absurd stage presence, simultaneously love and hate, honor and ridicule, celebrate and mourn the over-indulgent glam, prog and psychedelic rock of their youth.

“It’s always ‘The Insert Adjective Insert Noun of Insert Pronoun,’” Jay said.

Some old Earth influences: Dave Gilmour, Robert Fripp, John McGlauphlin. The Stooges. Early Bowie. Deep Purple. The Who. Black Sabbath. The Tubes. King Crimson. Frank Zappa. Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Some newer influences: Thomas Erak from The Fall of Troy, Chris Sullivan from the band Ohm (“though some people might call it douchey jazz rock,” Jay said), Doug Martsch from Built to Spill, The Moody Sazuki and Pavement.

They grew up with music that was about kicking ass. Now, so much music is just guys in skinny jeans.

“There’s a tuba and a triangle. It’s not so much about rocking,” Jay said.

Read the whole review at Hidden Track…

Read the whole review at Pop Damage…

Dense and dreamy pop this is. Dripping, too. In less than 30 minutes, Paul Sicilian, Willie Miesmer and Gabriel Wurzel — the guys who together equal (The) Tony Castles — manage to mine the heart of the earth, traverse the entire universe and, from their exploration’s findings, furnish a unique sonic castle. This is the band’s debut.

“No Service,” the title track, sounds like David Bowie took a trip underground to discover dancehall music, recorded his findings but left the tape in the bathroom of the club only to be found decades later by this Brooklyn band, who reinterpreted the soundscapes through a modern lens of digital glitch and kitsch, stripped their take of both, robbed it of pretense, and put it out into the world to shine in all its precious, infectious dance-worthy glory.

“Black Girls in Dresses” is a dive into warm, kaleidoscopic waters. The waters are warm because the riffs are tropical. And this is a kaleidoscope because the song peaks just as it plateaus, voices linger just as they fade, the beat drops just as it stops. Falsetto fingers reach for icy depths. But the rhythm is too buoyant. The singer, the listener, the song is left to tread on. For the moment.

Read the rest of the review at Pop Damage…