The Said Symphony: moves 13 – 15

“Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art”, writes Abraham Joshua Heschel in his great, short book, The Sabbath — “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce … He must go away from the screech of dissonant days” and “How else express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts? These restrictions utter songs to those who know how to stay at a place with a queen…”

Links claimed:

There are other pauses, pauses of dissonance, pauses of rending.

To Auschwitz: The pause that Auschwitz enforces on us is a silent scream, atonal, ultra-modern in its sensibility, the attempt of a little, unmoored, desacralized western consciousness to get to moral grips with the factory extermination of one’s fellow beings by the millions, perpetrated by people who wear the same shoes and suits and ties, and carry the same briefcases as ourselves. It lacks all that has previously been called  musicality: it cannot cope.

I do not believe there is any escaping this scream: it is to be heard and held, embraced even. It is ugly, and it is an ugliness increaed by magnitude, by repetition, by number.

To Golgotha: The pause that Golgotha asks of us is of another order.  Christ, “when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.” The Word is silenced. Only after three days will it begin to speak again.

Comment:

Leading into the next move, I have suggested that the rest is a musical silence – whether it be the deathly silence we may sense in Golgotha, the hideous silence that Auschwitz draws from our exhausted lungs, or the encompasing silence of glory of which Rabbi Heschel speaks.

It is a musical silence, a silence in each case to be listened to – tolerable or intolerable – a John Cage zen silence if you will…

In that silence, sounds can be vaguely sensed, emerging as if a morning mist is lifting, and some bird or twig or trill takes form…

Our board thus far:

[ my appreciation and thanks to Cheryl Rofer, who corrected me with regard to the notation of rests ]

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Move 14: Jerusalem

And so a new movement in our Symphony begins.

I have been aching for this moment: as move 14, I play Jerusalem

Move 14: Jerusalem

Move content:

Jerusalem is at the heart of the Israeli / Palestinian and Israeli / Arab problem, and thus of much of the tension in the  Middle east and the world.

It is also the city of peace, Salem – and you might say the ultimate hope, not of this game, which cannot aspire so high, but of the heart, is expressed in the three words: shalom salem salaam… In fact, ubi shalom, ibi salaam might be the motto of this work: where there is peace, let there be peace.

In making the opening move of this second movement of my game Jerusalem, then, I am taking us into the heart of the conflict, and into the heart of the hope for peace.

Jerusalem is a contested city, and we shall explore that contest in the moves to come.

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First, to the rest in 13: because in the silence, three sounds can be heard.  I quote here the words of Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian Knesset Member — not for who he is but for their music:

The sound of the Muezzin, the church bells and the blowing of the shofar have always existed.

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