It’s that time of year again—the time of year when, whether by genetic disposition, growing up in the football-crazed Midwest, or the simple fact that I enjoy the spectacle, competition, excitement, and drama, I am primed for another season of football.

I spent a good portion of my teenage years playing high school football for one of the best teams in our area. There were all varieties of typical injuries, including one shattered elbow. After a few weeks of rehab, I was back on the field in a cast, playing in the Ohio State Division IV championship game in the old Horseshoe, home of the Ohio State Buckeyes.

We lost to Columbus Academy on a cold and awful day in that cavernous stadium, but the journey with that team was one of the great rides of my life.

Like Steve Almond, I am drawn to football. And yet I always struggle with the question that Shakespeare might have asked: To watch or not to watch. That is the question.

The violence of the game can be devastating for many of the players. In my drawer is a novel I wrote called Take a Knee, which describes how one former player finds himself brought to his knees by brain injuries, a trauma that sends him and everyone around him to the darkest places.

There’s racism embedded in sports, sexism, homophobia, fetishization of the military and patriotism. In fact, if there’s a societal problem, you can find it, exacerbated as in no other sport, in football.

And yet, with all of its troubles and traumas, there is nothing quite like the thrill of watching some of the greatest athletes in the world do some of the most amazing things, with and without the ball.

They say football is a game of inches, but it’s also a lifetime of feelings parsed out from childhood to old age, play by play, yard by yard.

Football is about loyalty. It’s about teamwork. It’s about creating a plan and sticking to it until you have to bust out and do something no one expects. It’s about underdogs knocking off Goliath. And it’s about sticking with your team as long as you have stuck with anything other than your family, which is not so unlike religion in many ways.

For some of us, football is very close to a religion.

So once again, aligning with preparation for the Jewish High Holidays, I’m asking myself: What’s important in this life? Who have I hurt? Where do I need to go that I haven’t gone yet? Can I be true to my responsibilities and also to myself? What good can I bring to the world?

It’s that kind of season, a season of reflection, repentance, return, and forgiveness.

And every season like this since I became an adult has also been the time in which I have asked myself about the pros and cons of being a football fan. Can I abide all that’s wrong, even horrible, in a sport that I don’t merely love, but has accompanied me for as long as I have known myself?

To watch or not to watch: that is the question.

I played the game. I know what it can do to a body and mind. I know the troubles and traumas. And yet I am drawn to football in ways I cannot fully comprehend.

With rosters nearly set, it looks like I’m suiting up for another year. Once again, I’ll carry my questions with me into a new season. And it will not be easy. My team has been one of the worst in the NFL over the past few decades.

So be it.

This was my major goal for the summer. As part of a professional pivot, I’ve also been studying the work of Viktor Frankl and logotherapy, starting advanced training in coaching, honing my chops in Talmud, and reading more than I had a chance to do previously.

Though I’ve been at home for almost the entirety of July and August—not in a hotel room where a very particular habit usually takes place—my lunch breaks have often included episodes of Law & Order: SVU.

Why this show gives me grounding and comfort is a question I’ve not succeeded in fully understanding.

In my studies of midrash, one of the things I learned about the art of memory is that our brains are drawn to vivid colors and images, even violent ones, to help make ideas stick. That’s one of the reasons why manuscripts in the Middle Ages often contained strange and even pornographic images that helped monks and scribes stay on track and trigger memory.

When we’re in overload, flooded by content, it’s often the most extreme material that best makes something uniquely memorable in our minds. So what is Law & Order trying to remind me? What work is this TV staple trying to do?

My studies of Viktor Frankl’s teaching have been particularly cogent as I’ve worked on the final portion of my book. While Freud may have said that it all comes down to pleasure, and Adler may have held that it all comes down to power, the third pillar of the Vienna school, Frankl, says that the essential human drive is the will to meaning.

Immersing in meaning sometimes requires holding spaces where nothing seems to make sense. Maybe this is where Law & Order comes in.

Each show begins with chaos, a heinous crime, lives destroyed, disorder. Then cops that we’ve come to know, who in many cases know each other better than their own families, bring order to this chaos. They demonstrate that while things don’t always work out, by bringing guts, passion, intelligence, and a plan to a problem—and working together with people they trust to solve it—they can bring things back to order.

Part of the brilliance of the show is the characters. They are attractive, but not so attractive as to be distracting. Hard-boiled, with dysfunctional lives, often living alone, having wrestled with alcohol abuse, gambling, or crime themselves, they are driven beyond measure by the tasks of their profession. This is how they make sense not only of horrible crimes, but of life itself. And perhaps most importantly, they don’t have to make meaning alone—which is something Frankl would love.

In some sense, the war room of SVU, Special Victims Unit, which is my Law & Order franchise of choice, is like a family room. Here teammates reveal their secrets purposefully or by accident. They exchange glances of knowing based on years of working and suffering together. And they are, above all, a unit where everyone gets to play a part.

So at the margins of making meaning, Law & Order serves as a kind of contemporary parable, a myth, a teaching story.

It’s TV, so everything has to fit in a given set of minutes, including time for commercial breaks. The plots are, at times, ridiculous. A cab miraculously drives by Rollins as she’s stepping out of a bar and she witnesses, with odds of a billion to one, a crime in action. Liv adopts a victim of a crime as her own son.

But this fairy tale quality is not a detriment; rather, it’s an advantage. These are not stories ripped from the headlines in order to report facts. They are ripped from the headlines to create contemporary tales of good versus evil, of humans who are decidedly not gods trying to do something that resonates, captivates, and even inspires.

When they succeed, we are all rewarded with scenes of justice. When they fail, and there is no resolution for a crime, then they still have each other. And if this in turn means spending a little bit too much time in the bar together licking their wounds, well, that’s part of making sense of things too.

So this is how I’ve spent my lunch breaks this summer, seeking meaning in my own story by watching the detectives making meaning in theirs too.

This week, I am sharing a brief excerpt from the manuscript of my memoir. It reflects on a friend and coach who helped me make sense of things during a time of change. In part inspired by Avi, I’ll be expanding my own coaching credentials this fall.

I may have thought I was broken when we first met, but Avi was dying. He had been managing an unrelenting form of blood cancer for years. Even as waves of fatigue fluttered through him, he brushed them off like an annoying fly buzzing by his head. His hair was thinning, his face pale, but he held his attention on our conversation.

Towards the end of our work, Avi purchased an electric drum kit and set it up in his living room, where he now needed to sleep. Naturally our shared love of music was a common metaphor for reframing the fundamentals of my job, and also the contours of both of our lives.

Sometimes he asked me in a rush of curiosity how music worked. And one day he asked me, knowing what he knew, why I didn’t bring any of this creativity to the office.

“I’m not ready yet,” I said.

“I understand the ‘I’m’ and the ‘not,’” he said, “but what’s the ‘ready’ and the ‘yet’?”

“We work to live, not live to work, remember?” I said, sharing back one of the principal ideas I had learned from him.

“But how is that a not-ready-yet?” he replied.

“I’m trying not to let work be the place where I live or die this time,” I said, immediately wanting to take back the reference. “I mean, I don’t want to get sucked in like that again.”

Avi nodded, smiled, and gestured to the newly installed metal railing on the wall above the short flight of stairs leading from his study to the kitchen with its stunning view of Jerusalem. To the left was the living room, where his drums and a hospital bed filled the space.

“You know, ever since I got those drums, I just can’t understand how someone who can play wouldn’t do it all day,” he said with typically playful wonder. “Sometimes I play all day and I don’t even have any talent.”

He grinned.

“It drives the dogs crazy,” he said, patting a two-handed percussive flourish, his palms whacking his thighs. “But I can’t help it. I just love to play.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “But you don’t bring your drums into our sessions.”

“True,” he said.

“They’re in the living room, not the working room,” I said.

“Also true,” he replied, another gap-toothed smile expanding. “But we’re not a band. And I’m not teaching you how to drum.”

“And?”

“And you want to create a place where people want to be, right?” he asked.

“I do, but I don’t want to force the place to be in my image, just to do what I like,” I answered. “I want the place to do what the place is supposed to do.” I paused trying to finish the thought. “And no one really likes what I like.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” he said. “One person’s like is usually another person’s like too.”

He squinted, piecing together a thought.

“Why hold back what you know how to do best?” he asked, fingertips of each hand now resting on each other like he was preparing to pray. “How is keeping a gift to yourself helping anyone, including you?” he asked, lowering his hands, and reaching for a small glass mug of hot water and lemon on the table next to him.

He held my gaze as he raised the mug to his lips—peace, sadness, discovery, and friendship like soft light framing the contours of a suddenly quiet room.

I didn’t have an answer.

The City of K was beautiful: a striking portrait of Kafka as a young man discovering life in a vibrant culture—not black and white, but full of color, mystery, and bittersweet rapture.

As we wheeled her out of the museum, we asked her what she thought.

“I don’t like Kafka,” she said.

We still laugh when we think about it.

I can’t say for sure if Franz Kafka had a lighter side, but there’s no doubt that Leonard Cohen did.

I recall an interview, perhaps in Rolling Stone, where he is described as serving a plate of miniature hot dogs to the interviewer, saying they were his favorite snack as he chuckled. Cohen joked time and again in conversations with journalists and from the stage. Though I never met him, I benefited once from a personal email that included a clever wink even as he politely declined my request for an interview.

When I saw him in both Boston and Cleveland during triumphant tours near the end of his career, Cohen skipped off stage before the encore in his famous gray suit, waving a hat high above his head. It was a moment of pure joy. But how could a performer known universally for songs about despair and depression emanate so much light?

Melancholy, even a kind of darkness, has been a steady companion all of my years. Attracted to the blues, attracted to reflective writing, and attracted to longing, it’s clear to me that depth of experience doesn’t happen merely by jumping into the pool of life. Something presses artists down into the water, forcing him or her to see the world in its fullness, slowing experience to feelings encountered frame by frame. Often the hue of these feelings and frames is blue.

“Laughing and crying, it’s the same release,” Joni Mitchell sang on Blue, which is perhaps the saddest album in the classic rock canon. It’s also one of the ten greatest albums I know.

Joni Mitchell has a fine sense of humor too. It shows up in her songs and interviews, her patter from the stage when she still played, punctuating this or that thought with an errant, goofy giggle. Like Leonard Cohen, she has enjoyed a remarkable late chapter, often appearing in photographs smiling gloriously among her admirers. But her greatest music probes longing and loss, whether it is giving up a baby at birth, searching for love that stays, chasing a lost chord, or being “a lonely painter living in a box of paints.”

This month, while working on several other projects, my principal task is completing the final revision of my memoir.

Writing requires solitude. Solitude often produces longing and melancholy. But it has always been this kind of space that has urged forward the best writing for me. Even writers who exercise their social muscles at night have to spend their days undisturbed and alone.

This month I’m trying to go as deeply into my own box of paints as I know how, in the hope that the work will resonate. While that may sound like a dark cloud, I see silver linings everywhere.

Simply having the time to reflect and write, thanks to the unexpected circumstances of my professional life, is one blazing silver lining.

Having the opportunity to do this work in August, the slowest month of the Israeli calendar, when it’s hot all day but I can hear music drifting through my windows from not one, not two, but three music festivals by evening, is another.

Then there is the light that comes from revisiting, through memory and writing, so many people from my past whom I have loved, who have challenged me, or who simply graced my time in the world with theirs. That feels like glittering gold at the end of a rainbow of reflection.

I am blessed with time, memory, and inspiration to do my best to follow in the footsteps of memoirists, writers, and musicians who have shaped me. Even if I only know them through their work, they have quietly helped me build the most intimate containers for my own personal sense meaning.

My hunch is that Kafka had a sense of humor—that he would have been a fine companion for an al fresco meal or a drink at a pub in Prague back in the day. I have no proof of this. I only know viscerally his inspired melancholy, his battle with the absurdity of the outside world while on the inside, he sought truth, solace, relief, and beauty.

But I often think about something Kafka is said to have shared about writing in solitude. Even if it isn’t a joke, it makes me smile. It carries me forward. It gives me hope:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

His image of remaining quietly at one’s table, allowing the world to reveal itself rather than chasing after it, has become increasingly meaningful to me as I work through this final revision.

I think I know what he meant about ecstasy, even though there are moments of agony. There is something special about being open to one’s own interior—and letting it all out in words—that slowly becomes its own a form of joy.

My daughter was right to resist Franz Kafka when she did. His wrestling with misery and ecstasy can be painful. I had to grow into that paradox myself. This might have made Kafka smile.

In my olden days, before these golden days, I learned about a smoke ceremony from a Native American friend—a ritual to hold when leaving a place for a season or even forever. All you needed was a song, a prayer, and the smoke of your choice in an empty room.

I don’t smoke anymore, but I did say a prayer of thanks before I left my office for the final time. It began with the frame of a traditional Hebrew blessing, invoking the Creator with a formula thousands of years old, and continued with naming the good things, the unexpected things, the gifts both universal and unique with which I had been graced for nearly a decade of meaningful work.

I saved the song of the ceremony for when I came home. After a stop at the gym, I strapped on my red guitar and played along with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers:

It's good to be king and have your own way
Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day
And when your bulldog barks and your canary sings
You're out there with winners; it's good to be king

I wasn’t a king at work, but I was a boss. The live version of “It’s Good to Be King” that I love best has so much room for simply chorded middle-aged pathos and wide-open spaces for trading solos with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, I knew I wanted to lay my intentions for a ritual goodbye inside of it.

Somewhere along the line, even before I really understood Jewish tradition in the slightest, I realized rituals exist because leaving is too important to do casually. I assume every culture knows that. Since I was eighteen, my departures have always included music, prayer, and something like smoke.

There’s a case to be made, at least in the realm of classic rock, for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as America’s Beatles. Petty almost never wrote a song that didn’t have a sweet melody and memorable turn of phrase. Mike Campbell is the prototype for a tasteful lead guitarist and right-hand man in a rock and roll band—though all things being equal, it’s probably the Eagles who were America’s Beatles. That may say as much about America as it does about either group.

As emotionally substantial as Springsteen, not as esoteric as Dylan, not as maudlin as Cohen, Tom Petty is, to me, the John Irving of rock and roll: high art in the most popular, entertaining, colorful way. Easy to the heart. Easy to understand. But deep. Very deep. Songs that feel like lives lived. Songs inside moments that are wildly relatable.

Tom Petty could rouse you with life-affirming, youthful hope in a rocker like “American Girl,” spit deadly spite with “Breakdown,” help jilted bums like us rule the world with “Don’t Do Me Like That,” break your heart with “Louisiana Rain,” and explain the collapse of a twenty-year marriage in fifteen perfect tracks on Wildflowers, which I rank among my twenty best albums of all time.

It’s been taught in Jewish mysticism that people have a unique moment in their lives, a prism through which they glimpse the light of eternity. Even after that moment passes, it somehow defines the themes and direction of the rest of their days. I’ve experienced something like this with one of Tom Petty’s most durable hits.

I probably became aware of “The Waiting” when I was thirteen, and soon after started playing it poorly on my first electric guitar:

The waiting is the hardest part

I’ve been carrying that line around in my head for more than four decades, and finally I can say I don’t agree.

The waiting isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is the leaving. The hardest part is remembering the leaving, mulling over the leaving, knowing that the leaving will come.

When we’re young, we wait. We wait for greatness, for recognition, for a partner, for a family, for a dream job, for money, for the thing that’s going to make all the difference in the world. We wait for the thing that will catapult us from the world of “before” into the world of “after,” where real life finally begins.

We strive. We fight. We build. We make. But even as we do those things, we wait for the signal that we’ve arrived completely and whole to adulthood—as a partner, a parent, a leader. I’ve done all of that, but that isn’t the hardest part.

I’m thinking much more about leaving these days, and the hardest part is letting go. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped waiting. Someone who dreams and imagines is always waiting for something—for life to become clearer, better, more fully itself. But these golden, olden days, I find myself thinking more about endings: about losing a parent to time, or completing a job after nearly a decade; about how this job bridged one form of family life to another and the ways that children who had once depended upon me completely are now nearly grown.

When I was waiting through all those years of adulthood, I carried some hazy vision of what life would be like when the waiting ended. Those insistent, undefined images filled my mind. But my mind feels more spacious now—airier, less prone to fight or flight.

That’s probably brain cells dying, but it’s also a conscious release, or release of consciousness. Maybe it’s the beginning of wisdom, born not only from the fatigue that comes from overreacting to every bump in the road for too long, but also from the quiet pleasure of realizing that that release valve for troubles called “all things must pass” is neither a curse nor a blessing. It’s simply a state of mind that allows for a roomier, calmer, more grounded way of living in the world.

Share

Last week I learned something in a Talmud class that has stayed with me: the idea that kedushah—holiness—is defined not by limitlessness but by limitation. What is holy is what is set apart. That idea struck me.

Maybe this is part of why leaving and letting go hurt—not because what we’re leaving was perfect, but because it had become particular and grounded: this office, these people and routines, even this version of myself. The infinite particles that had somehow arranged themselves into a particular life, a particular place, a particular understanding of who I was held themselves in place for a long while, and then they separated to form something else that is as yet unclear.

Waiting is the smoke that drifted out of the windows of those many rooms I have already departed. Each arrangement was never meant to last forever. And maybe that is what made each of them holy.

This week, Marginal Prophet is republishing my essay, "Preventing the Destruction of Doubt," which appeared last week as the lead article in PROPHECY: A Journal for Tomorrow. I'm grateful to founding editor Ariel Beery and the PROPHECY team for the opportunity to collaborate on this thoughtful new quarterly exploring critical questions facing Israel, the Jewish people, the Middle East, and the world. I encourage you to read the full Issue 4 and subscribe to PROPHECY.

I can see the future from my porch.

A wall separates my side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian territories, and beyond it, on a clear day, I can see hills rising toward Jordan. The wall is ugly as policy and art, but after October 7th, it is difficult for me to imagine life without it. The breaches have been too great to risk life without walls. For the foreseeable future, an impossibly deep dispute will be managed by drab concrete. Of this I am sure.

From the window of my office, I have seen another flash of the future: streets filled with angry young men in kippot on Jerusalem Day. They sing of victory and blood. The air is thick with triumphalist chants. They are confident that our city belongs only to them. This too is a clear and certain vision of the future.

When I close my eyes, I see a different parade marching us into the years to come. Festive colors, clever placards, and the beat of drums. These are the demonstrations that consumed the streets of Jerusalem before the war, when thousands of Israelis marched because they feared their country’s future was being stolen. Then came October 7th. Then came the hostages and irrevocable losses amplified by a government of incompetence and cruelty. And then came exhaustion. But I am certain that these protests will return.

I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet; neither am I an optimist not pessimist. But I have led and lived in this forever-reimagined city long enough to know that competing certainties are fracturing the very foundation stone of Jerusalem’s future.

What worries me most is not that I disagree with all of these seekers and leaders of certainty. Are they wrong? Are they evil? As a liberal Zionist in love with music, religion, community, and words, who has been drawn to prophetic visions for most of his life, and as a person making meaning on the margins of a city becoming evermore fundamentalist and binary, who am I to say what version of God’s will is truest and best?

But the prophetic warning I share, “the words of the prophets that are written on the subway walls and tenement halls” (to paraphrase an old guitar-slinging rabbi in a baseball hat from Queens) is that if either I or these true believers remain too certain about what we think we know, we will all fail together. We will fall as one grand tragic mistake of biblical proportions. We will be the generation that will force a future upon Jerusalem that is utterly unsustainable.

The politician building a wall, the ideologue talking smack about the bad choices of everyone else, the jingoist circling the wagons against the rest of the world, the partisan with an unbending point of view for which she or he will go to the mat, the cynic who has given up on everything, the idealist with her or his head in the stars while absconding from reality, and the fundamentalist who claims (using words that different guitar-slinging rabbi from Minnesota rejected long ago) that “God’s on his side” all say the same thing: We are sure we have solved the problem. And of this, all that is certain is that all of us are wrong.

Jewish tradition has always harbored a deep suspicion of certainty, and so do I. We almost always preserve the question, the frustration, the logic of the dissenter. We honor the minority opinion because we never know when doubts about what once seemed assured will reveal the next right thing to do.

The nineteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitza taught in his commentary on the Five Books of Moses that before humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge, reality was whole. Divine truth was obvious. There were no blurred lines between right and wrong. But after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which he calls the Ilanah D’Sfeika, humanity entered what he terms the World of Doubt, Alma D’Sfeika.

And then the Izbitzer asks: Why introduce doubt into a world of perfection? Why interrupt the seamless flow of certainty? The answer, he teaches, is that if truth had remained perfectly obvious, there would be no struggle to make meaningful choices. And meaningful choices – seeking answers for what we doubt or do not know – are the essence of life.

The Izbitzer understood something many modern, self-assured ideologists and believers forget. Doubt is not a flaw in the human condition. It is one of the Divine’s central gifts.

Living with doubt about our most impassioned convictions is not easy. The Middle East in particular has rarely rewarded uncertainty. The monotheistic traditions born here have often spoken in absolutes: chosen peoples, final revelations, sacred lands, exclusive truths, triumphalism. And yet the future I fear most is not one in which one side defeats another. The supposedly powerless have a way of finding their path to revenge around here. The future I fear is one in which certainty wins. In which doubt is destroyed.

In that future, Jerusalem becomes less pluralistic, poorer, less beautiful, and increasingly unaffordable for those who sustain it. We become less and less curious about our neighbors, about differences, and about the rest of the country, region, and world. We will live out an ironic, tragic decline. One of the world’s great cities, which has served as a lighthouse in the wild ocean of history for millennia, will be submerged by its own small-thinking and small town delusions.

Diaspora ties will weaken because many Israelis and Jews and others outside of Jerusalem (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Jerusalemites whose basic rights will be stripped away) will no longer see anything worth saving behind Jerusalem’s walls. Retreating into tribes of self-assurance, our tribes will eat themselves alive. People like me will pay for it all. And the walls will grow taller and taller.

In this future, we will survive, because survival is what we must do. But it is not a future worth wanting. It is not a future worth living for. Something essential and life-affirming will be destroyed.

It is already cliché to talk about the lessons of October 7th and the realities that emerged on October 8th. Unlike the current Israeli government, much of Israeli society has done its analysis and learned its lessons. One of those lessons is that walls matter. Security matters. Shelter matters. Protection matters.

But another lesson is that people need more than physical safety. Having been part of Jerusalem’s civic response to the worst day anyone in Israel has ever known, I watched families arrive from the South carrying little more than backpacks, exhaustion, and shock. For a while, the task was simple: give people walls, give people safety. But it quickly became clear that people also needed somewhere to put their fear and grief. Somewhere to put their anger. They needed somewhere to put their hope. Security protects the body, but meaning protects the soul.

In my world, meaning often comes from music and thoughtful cultural expression, real dialogue, rich pluralistic study, neighborly curiosity, and shared public life that create moments where doubt and distance are transformed into connection. And it is connection, through music or shared meals or public infrastructure that works for all who need it, that transforms the gaps we experience into sources of hope.

Hope has a strange way of traveling. It can pass through concrete walls. It can move through fear. It can remind people that they are more than their trauma, more than their politics, more than the certainties that divide them.

Share

From my porch, I still see a wall every day. Some mornings it reassures me. Some mornings it breaks my heart. The future of Jerusalem will require walls as it always has. But the Alma D’Sfeika, the Age of Doubt, demands something harder than concrete. It requires the humility to live with doubt, the courage to remain in relationship despite difference, and the willingness to sing with people whose certainties are not our own.

We know how to build walls, sure as stone. The challenge of the coming generations of Jerusalem is learning how to build gates, prayers, and communities robust and safe enough to pass through them.

If, twenty years from now, standing on my porch with a cup of coffee, I see a gate in that wall and a high-speed train running from Jerusalem toward Amman and onward to the other capitals of the Middle East, I will not assume that we have solved every problem. The Middle East has never worked that way. But I will know that our willingness to live with doubt has saved us from the certainties that might otherwise have destroyed us.

In some ways, though it sounds like the title of an airport bookstore memoir by a faded crooner, the book could be called My Life with Music. Music is its soundtrack. But at its heart, it’s the story of a spiritual search: a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, purpose, and belonging. This is the story of stumbling into opportunities, receiving unexpected gifts, and slowly discovering that the richest moments of a life are those in which we become part of something greater than ourselves.

I remember books that have shaped me, teachers at crossroads or on long stretches of flat, boring road, living in places where religion is primary and where it isn’t, and what I have learned—and am still learning—that might be of use to others.

But music keeps peeking into all of this material. And when as it does, another book starts tapping me on the shoulder.

As I’ve been writing about different periods of my life, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the musicians who were there with me. Sometimes it was Bob Dylan, which isn’t surprising considering I’ve written a book about him. But just as often it’s been other artists—Joni Mitchell or Prince, Johnny Cash, Nirvana, or Tracy Chapman.

So I started sketching a playlist aligned with my memories on a legal pad on my desk. As the songs accumulated, I realized I had been circling the same question for decades, hearing it in many voices without ever really asking it myself in a holistic way: Why does popular music matter so much—not commercially or nostalgically, but spiritually?

For most of human history, civilizations carried around collections of stories that helped people make sense of life. Some were sacred scriptures. Others were epic poems. Still others were myths or philosophy or wisdom literature. Different cultures had different canons, but they all wrestled with remarkably similar questions.

What is love? What is justice? What is home? How do we face mortality? Where do we come from? Where do we go?

Of course, these questions never disappeared as art entered the channels of the modern world. Blues, country, jazz, fiction, film, and theater all wrestled with them as culture and technology coalesced at scale over the past century. Great popularity never guaranteed great themes, but neither did popularity exclude them. And then at the dawn of the golden age of rock and roll, something seems to have changed.

I think of a landmark moment that many future pop stars must have seen as kids. Marlon Brando’s Johnny is asked what he is rebelling against in the 1953 film The Wild One. He shrugs:

“What have you got?”

First-generation rockers like Elvis—and the restless antiheroes they embodied—had catchy melodies, great hair, irresistible swagger, and just enough attitude to shake loose the old rules. Like Brando’s Johnny and James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (just a Johnny and a Jim facing the starkest of truths) they knew what they wanted to escape. They were less certain what they were escaping toward.

Then came the next two generations of artists: Bob Dylan. The Beatles. Joni Mitchell. Marvin Gaye. Patti Smith. Bruce Springsteen. Public Enemy. Nirvana. Beyoncé.

Somewhere along the way, popular music stopped asking only what it was rebelling against and began wrestling with the questions religion, philosophy, and literature had posed for thousands of years: What is freedom? What is truth? What is grace? In this, popular music never stopped being entertainment, but it also became a conversation about the biggest themes that animate all great art.

Thinking about the music that has shaped me, I’m beginning to wonder whether, over the past seventy years, we’ve quietly assembled a kind of canon—not one written by a single type of author or school of thought, but by a chorus.

What did Little Richard teach us about sex? Ray Charles about holiness? David Bowie about change? Prince about transcendence? Tracy Chapman about mercy? Taylor Swift about control?

These artists do not necessarily agree with one another. Nor do they belong neatly to single themes, or to categories like high or low culture, philosophy versus melody, or seriousness versus fun. But because they have become companions in humanity’s oldest conversations, they have helped shape a world of ideas that matter.

I don’t think popular music replaced religion or philosophy or literature, but I do think it has earned its place alongside them. Whether we admit it or not, many of us have spent as much time being formed by playlists as by sermons, classrooms, or sacred texts.

So here’s my confession: While I finish revising the memoir—and see if it’s got wings in the world—another project has quietly begun taking shape alongside it.

I’m at twenty-seven artists so far, stretching from 1956 to today, each paired with a theme. (I’m not including U2 because I’ve never really liked them, though they probably deserve to be there. Sorry.) The working title is The Wisdom of Popular Music: A New Canon for the Modern Soul.

I still have two different drafts of the Great American Novel on my laptop, of course, patiently waiting for more obsession from their mostly unknown author. But this other possible project has my attention because I think these songs deserve to be heard the way previous generations read their great texts, their wisdom literature—not as infallible scripture, but as a living conversation about what it means to be human.

We’ll see where the songs lead.

Subscribe now

Toward the end of an insightful conversation, we arrived at the inevitable question—part Shakespearean tragedy and part cliché—where such encounters often find themselves marooned.

“You know,” she said, leaning in to be heard in a cafeteria full of rabbis brimming with animated talk about the future, “sometimes I ask my colleagues if we aren’t just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

It was the second time in a week that someone for whom I have great respect had applied this metaphor to the challenges of leading a community. A string of associations followed, some shared aloud and others brushed aside in my head.

There is the Titanicitude of any institution, lumbering forward against waves of resistance. How do you transport the people in the pews and the precious cargo of tradition to the port of meaning and fellowship when the best route is unclear, when supplies of both spirit and funding are limited, and time feels like it’s running out?

Does a house of worship, a denomination, or a faith itself see the iceberg ahead? And what is the iceberg? Aging congregations? Tribal hatred? The incompatibility of ancient doctrines and rituals with the most pressing questions of the day?

The metaphor does not stop there. It extends itself to the world as a whole. Fundamentalism. Global warming. Airborne viruses. The widening gap between those pirating away unimaginable wealth and everyone else.

The ship of humanity has no shortage of icebergs ahead. So are we, or are we not, simply arranging deck chairs on the Titanic before we drown?

I told my new friend that there might be other ways of understanding the question. First, there are the stories we tell.

Most of us know the narrative: a great ship, an iceberg, some heroes, and many living by the creed of “every man for himself”—all going down in a preventable disaster.

But what most of us remember when we think about the Titanic is the most popular movie of all time, in which the forever-young and beautiful Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet transcend class and fear as the lovers and heroes we would all like to be. An act of extraordinary self-sacrifice and devotion forever animates the life of a quirky old woman who survives to tell the tale.

In this sense, what remains of the Titanic in the popular imagination is a love story for the ages. But there is also something more strategic, more connected to leadership, and perhaps more livable about the story of the Titanic than this mythic tale of love.

We often build things like the Titanic driven by a kind of edifice complex—a desire to make something big that will last and impress, that will withstand the forces around it, something we can bequeath to the next generation as a symbol of what mattered to us most.

The people in the nicest cabins pour massive resources into these symbolic fortresses while those with less labor below deck to keep the thing moving forward. And then the supposedly well-trained caretakers of the ship, somehow blind to the forces of the future, ram that magnificent vessel and all of its resources into oblivion.

Human ambition probably makes this part of the story unavoidable, but the story does not have to end there. There is another scene waiting to be explored.

The Titanic can also be seen as a receptacle of tremendous resources that might very well be saved and repurposed if we thought smaller, not bigger. Through the lifeboats lowered into the sea as the ship strikes the iceberg, the singular Titanic can become an armada of possibilities.

Those boats ferry forth people who leave the great ship as they set out for new waters and new lands, outlive the blow, and carry forward the best part of what the Titanic was meant to be.

After all, the great ship was built to transport people, to reflect the grandeur of new ideas and new technologies. It was something to be proud of, something that reflected the majesty of human imagination and still captures that imagination more than a century later.

What if, on my ship or your ship, we settled in with a small band of like-minded people and decided anew where we wanted to go? Maybe we would notice another ship nearby heading in roughly the same direction and agree to sail together.

We could share resources, help the injured and sick, redirect one another when our compasses seemed off, comfort each other, share fire, food, and stories, and take turns keeping watch at night. Together we could ensure that we were greater than the sum of our individual boats.

Is it not possible that an armada of small, determined, nimble ships could escape the Titanic and carry forward the very best of its intent?

Let the deck chairs fall into the sea. Not much happens in a deck chair anyway. We nap. We sun ourselves. We drink. It gets very boring up there.

But in a small ship with people who care about the things we care about, passing by other ships where people care about different things but are moving in the right direction in their own way, perhaps we would discover that the Titanic actually gave birth to us.

Human history is often like that. What seems at one moment to be the most impressive and important idea winds up giving rise to many smaller ideas that carry its deeper hopes forward.

Share

So are we on the Titanic—as communities, as denominations, as people of faith, as nations, perhaps even as a planet? The answer is undoubtedly yes.

But now that we know where we are, the next question is whether we should spend our time rearranging the deck chairs or preparing ourselves to return to the water, to band together in dynamic, ever-changing ways, and to set forth in new vessels for the next part of the journey.

The deeper lesson of our cultural obsession with the Titanic is not what it lost, but the new fleet it might unknowingly launch.

Some albums arrive when you buy them. Others arrive years later.

Somewhere on Interstate 90, with the windshield wipers slapping time in the storm, I understood that a man could sing about love ending without becoming cynical about love itself. Those songs seemed to know something I couldn’t yet name—like maps showing me where I was headed as I drove.

Art imitates life. Or maybe life catches up to art.

Last week, one small wish came true: the final season of The Bear finally appeared on my screen. I tore through the episodes the way I had raced across western New York in the rain.

I have loved this show because it gathers together so many things that matter to me: restaurants, the blood friendship of chosen families, music, and people trying—sometimes beautifully, sometimes disastrously—to build something worthy in service of others.

By the end of the story, Carmy realizes something we already knew: He is extraordinary at what he does in the restaurant. He loves the people. He loves what they have built together. But he no longer loves the work itself. So he announces that he is walking away. One storm rages outside. Another gathers in the kitchen.

I have thought about that scene all week, and about how art imitates life. Or maybe life just borrows from art.

Two days later I was riding my bicycle through Jerusalem, following roads I first navigated on a long-gone, slightly battered bike after moving to Israel more than thirty years ago. In my AirPods was Paul Simon’s “Cool, Cool River,” the version from Concert in the Park. It was same recording I had played on my Walkman back then, an album in heavy rotation alongside Blood on the Tracks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Court and Spark, and Blood and Chocolate by Elvis Costello.

I was on my way to a meeting I suspected would not go well, but I arrived on time, smiled, engaged, put on my public face, and it still went worse than I had expected.

As I rode home, I realized that I had spent the afternoon listening not only to Paul Simon, but also replaying an earlier version of myself. Here again was the young man who believed that meaning was always waiting just around the next corner, the one who assumed that if he kept pedaling long enough, everything would eventually make sense.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Life has bruised him a little, but still he rides. And there’s so much to be grateful for—just not the things he dreamed would come true while listening to Paul Simon sing about how life is like a comet that disappears.

Music is no longer my escape. It is my companion. Sometimes it still says the things I cannot quite say. Sometimes it lends me courage that doesn’t belong to me yet. Other times it simply sits beside me until surprise or disappointment softens into wisdom.

People often say that art imitates life, but I’m no longer sure that’s the direction the traffic flows. Sometimes art arrives first, waiting patiently for life to grow into it. And then there are the days when the life I actually have resembles, in its own imperfect way, the songs and stories that first taught me to imagine what was possible.

Last week, as we hosted the annual Zamru Prayer Festival alongside the closing sessions of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, the building was packed with more than one hundred musically-minded people trying to make something beautiful.

Musicians from across Israel filled more than half the spaces of the institution. One group was creating a suite of new pieces, others were preparing for an evening concert, and a third cluster joined one of several master classes. Palestinian and Israeli teens huddled in smaller rooms by section to learn their parts for the chorus’ final concert of the year. And because there was nowhere else to put them, some gathered with one of their voice instructors in my office. In came a keyboard, sheet music, and extra chairs, and out went the boss with a laptop to sit on one of the yellow chairs in the lobby.

I was lucky to be there.

Musicians of different ages, backgrounds, and traditions checked one another out, introducing themselves and wondering exactly what all of these people were doing in one place.

As they buzzed from room to room on what had become the campus’s fullest musical day of the year, one of the teenagers pointed to an unusual instrument an older musician was tuning. He asked in Hebrew, and then slightly broken English, “What is that thing you’re playing?”

“It’s a lyre,” he replied, lifting the strange instrument into view.

Pentatonic chords drifted through the air beneath melodies drawn from the Psalms as he demonstrated. The lyre, tradition tells us, was the instrument of King David. He used it to soothe Saul’s troubled soul and perhaps accompany some of the earliest and most enduring expressions of Hebrew poetry and prayer.

“We call it a nevel,” one of the other teens offered.

“Oh,” said a Zamru musician walking by. “We call it a kinor.”

“Not nevel,” said one of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus staff members. “In Arabic we call it a simsimiyya.”

“Never heard of that,” said the musician who was playing. “How do you say it again?”

“Simsimiyya,” he repeated.

The musician smiled and tried to repeat the Arabic, getting it partly right.

“I’ll try to remember that,” he said, scratching his cheek with the long fingernails meant for strumming. “But I probably won’t.”

They both laughed.

Many days, work is work—emails, phone calls, meetings, watching the clock between breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You do what needs to be done. And then there are days like this one. You have a hand in making them happen, but what emerges is much more interesting than anything you might have planned. Voices, traditions, imaginations, and certainties that might never have otherwise bumped into one another meet in a lobby, and curiosity quietly overtakes conflict. It becomes a chorus of good questions, each with more than one answer.

It struck me later that no one was trying to settle the question of what that instrument should be called. Each person simply added another name. The instrument seemed to grow larger and more compelling with each attempt to define it.

Many of my deepest urges for meaning, my most lasting questions about why I’m here on this earth, have flowed in and out of music. It’s not that music has answered my questions of purpose or explained the things about life’s worries and woes that I cannot understand. But I have come to believe that asking the right questions is often the result of being surrounded by the right answers—the ones you haven’t thought of yet, the ones for which you are almost but not quite ready.

They’re there all along, and sometimes only an unexpected moment of harmony allows you to hear them.

Sometimes those answers come not in words, but in the curiosity that opens when someone teaches you a new way of describing something beautiful.

And sometimes it’s enough to ask a good question, take a beat, play along, and simply listen.

I wasn’t truly homeless, at least not for the reasons many people find themselves without a home: mental illness, crushing debt, or some catastrophe that untethers them from the place where they belong. Rather, I had set out to find something by which I could measure the meaning of my life.

Having left college and not wanting to return to the home of my origin, I took a backpack and guitar, rambling back and forth across the United States and Mexico as heroes like Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell had done. I was looking not for a home, but for the part of me that was brave and wild and connected to something greater than myself.

It’s a little ironic that I fell in love with Moore’s book back then. Moore had created a poetic, wide-ranging user’s guide to shaping routines by which people living ordinary lives might reach up and out of themselves toward something magisterial, something divine. I wanted to blow everything up in order to mingle with the spheres—dive bar to sofa, canyon to ocean, busking for change in Nashville or New Orleans or Ashland.

I did the things. Time passed. And slowly, I settled into a set of faith, people, places, and work that established who I would become as an adult.

Now it has been more than thirty years since I first set eyes on Care of the Soul. And in that time, the copy of the book that I bought at a Barnes & Noble in a suburban Cleveland shopping center has traveled with me from home to home and stage to stage. I have read it, on average, once every year or two, returning to refresh the wisdom I have tried to embody whenever it called me back.

Moore taught me, along with his teachers Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, that mythology or religion can become the light that illuminates meaning in even the most mundane corners of life. Each in his way explained how the things we do that seem ordinary can actually contain a touch of eternity.

Whether it is the rituals and routines by which we clean our homes as if they are sanctuaries; the ways we engage with food; the care we provide for our own bodies or the ways we touch another; how we record the important incidents of our lives and look for patterns at work, in love, or in raising or being a child—everything can be a vessel for soul; and anything can become soulless if we neglect what could have been soulful.

Through the most common acts, we become what we are genetically and spiritually designed to be: makers of meaning. Perhaps the deepest wisdom of religion is not found in doctrine, but in the countless ways human beings have learned to welcome and honor the life of the soul, trusting that through it we might catch glimpses of something greater than ourselves.

So much of our sense of meaning comes from how we feel, that unique internal landscape where we make sense of things. But feeling and personal intuition alone are not enough to dance with the spheres. Making meaning requires a kind of alchemy in which our simple days flirt with what’s eternal. If we can’t find such sparks in our routines, it is hard to make any kind of greater meaning at all.

Sitting today at a certain crossroads of my life, having celebrated my third child’s high school graduation and feeling a little more empty space in the home than ever before, I find myself wondering: How will I fill it? Which routines and rituals, which work, which songs and books, and most importantly, which people, will help me make meaning in this next stage?

I wonder, but I also wait.

One of the lessons I have tried to learn from Care of the Soul is that grounding one’s purpose and connecting to one’s soulful roots cannot be rushed. Sometimes it is the empty spaces, the sadness, the melancholy, the not-knowing, that become the necessary openings through which light enters.

We do not always find illumination because we finally discover an answer that makes everything clear. More often, we reach a place of darkness and, by tending to it—as we would a garden or someone who is unwell—we slowly make the space lighter, warmer, easier.

Soul can live in both darkness and light. By honoring it, we create a place for it to stay. And sometimes, many times, once that place is offered, the soul seeks us as much as we seek the soul. Gently, like a breeze crossing a porch on a late afternoon, we feel the touch of something divine unexpectedly—the tingle or chill of something both of us and beyond us, and palpably more present than before.

We pause, maybe to offer thanks, or maybe just to be where we are for a moment. This is soul. And this is how we care for it.

We’ve watched them happen a thousand times in movies and television shows. We’ve read them in novels, turning a page and then suddenly everything has changed. A marriage ends. A career collapses. A secret is revealed. The world before and after are separated by a moment that somehow feels outside of time.

In stories and films, these moments arrive like explosions. In life, they are usually quieter, and take a much longer time to understand or explain.

...

We spend much of our time imagining possibilities: solutions to difficult problems, words before they are written, new jobs, new loves, new homes, better futures. We wonder what’s coming and paint pictures of what might be. Imagination is one of humanity’s great gifts. But there are moments when imagination reaches its limit and reality catches up.

...

Standing at my father’s grave at the unveiling of his headstone today, I found myself reciting words I had heard countless times before. The melody was assembled from fragments remembered from teachers and mourners who came before me. Yet the Hebrew sounded different when it came from my own mouth, as though I wasn’t entirely sure it was me chanting those words.

The stone itself is simple: a name, dates, a few words about who he was and where he came from—the briefest possible account of a human life.

...

El Malei Rachamim is a chant that feels like releasing a caged bird into the air. Let the soul fly. Let it sing. Let it be bound up in the eternity of creation and the Creator, finally unchained from this world and absorbed into something else entirely.

As I chanted El Malei Rachamim, my father's name woven into its ancient phrases, I heard as a soft refrain a line from Tom Petty's beautiful song "Runaway Trains." It had been one of my favorites when I first left home long ago:

I guess it’s one of those things
You can never explain
Like when an angel cries
Like runaway trains.

Some moments are both predictable and inexplicable at the same time. They wait around a corner. They surprise you like a ghost. And then they stay. They become part of the inventory of things we know but cannot fully understand—one of those things we can never explain. We live these moments, mark them in words and song, and then somehow, carrying them with us, move on.

Caffe Vita at KEXP in Seattle may be my favorite of them all. It’s the coffee house attached to a world-renowned radio station, the frequency of Sub Pop, grunge, and above all Nirvana, that sits at the intersection of so many musical roads that eventually lead back to the Pacific Northwest. One of those roads carried me unexpectedly to a house in Northampton on the other side of the continent thirty years ago.

There were four of us in a run-down squat near the center of town: me, a guy who liked to be called Dali, Maureen, and Holly*.

I could tell that Holly had a story from the thick white scars rising like strips of fleshy icing across one of her wrists. She left her room once a week to drive a well-kept Honda hatchback three hours south to see her therapist in Manhattan.

“Trust me, he’s worth it,” she told me once.

Her door was usually cracked open enough for me to see inside as I walked past. She was often curled up on her bed, dressed smartly as if prepared for a job interview, a miniature sandbox and tiny rake by her hip, MTV dialed-in as long as the electric bill had been sorted.

Nirvana was singing the song of the year, maybe the song of an entire era, an overture on repeat for a tribe of people in their twenties with nothing much to do in the middle of the day.

I leaned against the doorframe to watch.

“You can come in, you know,” she said in a slow, smooth cadence thick with medication and resignation.

“I’m cool,” I said, one hand buried deep in the pocket of my favorite pair of jeans.

“Suit yourself,” she said, moving closer to the wall so that I had a clear view of the television. “These guys are the shit. This video must be on fifteen times a day.”

She was right. They were the shit. What a song. What a video.

I could imagine latching onto a song like that as a life preserver just as easily as I could imagine the lead weight of Kurt Cobain’s jadedness pulling a person all the way down with him—so distant, so much cooler than I thought I could ever be, seemingly careless about whatever it was that had broken inside him long ago.

And what exactly was he saying with those sneers and that stick-figure body inside an open flannel shirt?

“Here we are now,” he sang. “Entertain us.”

That was a winter when my hopes had gone the way of the weather. A romance gone cold, rock-star dreams frozen, I was beginning to think about returning to college after a few years on the road.

For knowledge, for self-improvement, for purpose, to find some light, I was reading books about the hero’s journey as if they contained an atlas in which I might locate myself. Nirvana raged with cool indifference in one room, while I dug through Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, and Robert Bly in another.

The phrase that worked its way through all of those books, directly or indirectly, belonged to Campbell. His advice could be summarized in a simple phrase, one that stood in direct opposition to “Entertain us.” Campbell said: “Follow your bliss.”

You could sit back with a scowl and wait for someone to thrill or impress you, knowing that nothing could quite satisfy the ache, or you could follow your bliss and track the things that affirmed life and risk and joy in the ground you covered.

Looking back now, three decades, another double espresso, and two shots of jet lag later, I no longer think either path tells the whole story. Bliss can become its own form of self-absorption, a distraction, even a deception. And waiting to be entertained could last forever. Yet both invitations carried me forward in their way. I still love Nirvana, and I am still tracking the signposts of nirvanic bliss.

The song doubts that meaning can be found. The epic tale assumes meaning must be sought. In this café lit up with my generation’s best music, I can still hear them both.

_{*I have changed the names of the people appearing in this piece.}

Why Bob Dylan?

It’s a question I answered in the final podcast of the three-year series that led to writing my book, which you can find here.

Today I want to share an answer that came later, a reflection on one beloved song in a midrashic mode. Like a sacred text, a great rock song can be turned in many directions—like a jeweler examining a diamond in the right light, looking for origins, testing the finish, tracing its angles.

Recently I’ve been listening to Blonde on Blonde, which is where “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” lives. It’s an album that overdoes words, instrumentation, themes, styles, and emotions. This overflow required two LPs, not one. Its grooves are a journey of transition and bounty, challenge and grace and bluffs, and getting lost in the rain in Juarez when it’s Eastertime too.

I play this song almost every time I appear live, and have probably performed it more than any Dylan song except for “All Along the Watchtower,” which is at the top of his setlist frequencies as well. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a song with which I have been in dialogue for more than three decades. Lucky me.

In addition to my midrashic riff, enjoy a playlist of versions I love: from Dylan now and then, to Nina Simone, Neil Young, and the Handsome Family too.

Even sacred time cannot save you from the blues
Bags packed for Juarez
and bad weather too,
you’re carrying that melancholy with you again.

All of the steadying hustles you typically play—
what keeps you up,
what brings you down,
what you imagine will heal the pain—
have lost their edge.
Time moves slow,
a movie click, click, clack
in black-and-white frames.

Be humble.
Maybe you are alone,
but you are like everyone else,
especially when it comes to this room.
Saint Annie can hurt you more when she wants you
than when she doesn’t.
Sometimes it hurts so badly
that even your fingers are stilled.
And what good is a guitarist
whose hands are frozen,
unable to fight back
or pull out a tune?

We reach for friends and lovers,
but still,
we transact,
we look to distract,
we find someone
to take our minds off of the matter.
Mind over matter, you say.
But Sweet Melinda,
to whom there are no debts to be paid,
does not owe you her reasons.

In intimate chambers,
trying to be you,
if it’s really just you and her.
Acting as if you know better,
you want to be a gentleman
and make your history sing.
Then feeling wild
and wilted
and estranged,
looking out the window,
washed up and weak,
seeing faces and views,
out on Housing Project Hill,
it’s really your own crossroads
you’re staring at—
left or right,
richer or poorer,
wonders and ruin:
The material world is speaking in tongues
and you’re finding it hard to hear.

Stay humble.
Most people live on a plane
of right and wrong,
while all of the authorities,
they just stand around and boast.
If you confine yourself to those chambers,
you may never leave.
But if you stay outside,
who will comfort you—
mocking,
bragging,
working the lines,
charming the gatekeepers,
finding your way into other rooms?

Have a drink.
Have another.
It’s sour,
it’s sweet,
it’s weak,
it’s stronger stuff.
But nothing quenches the thirst.
No one really understands
what’s inside your head.

Isn’t it funny?
When you turn to face it,
when you think
you have it all figured out,
what was it you wanted?
To tell us what we already knew?

And now you’re leaving
without a tale to tell,
looking elsewhere.
So back to New York City
you go,
to the place where the work began.

Maybe you will find it there.
Or maybe it will be another once-familiar place
that doesn’t feel that way anymore,
just another place
for passing through.

Bob Dylan is the artist I’ve spent the most time with as a listener. (Number 1 on my personal Spotify, except for a single year when Beyoncé toppled him to Number 2.) I have taught and sung Dylan all over the world, written About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan, and hosted three seasons of a podcast devoted to his work. That’s a lot of Bob.

The essay below was originally published in Zeek in 2006. It explores Dylan and rock and roll through the lens of the “art of memory,” which I studied intensely in my research on the origins of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, and was written in conversation with the brilliant work of colleagues Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, and others.

Reading this twenty years later, I’m struck by how many of the questions remain the same. The language is more academic than what I write now, but the obsessions—memory, tradition, belonging, inheritance, and the stories that help us survive—have stayed with me ever since.

When we think of memory these days, we often forget to remember that, until very recently, it was less about nostalgia than humanity’s primary tool for carrying tradition, myth, culture, and knowledge from one generation to the next. Dylan naturally flows out of that ancient current—like Homer, like Shakespeare, like a rolling stone.

In Memoriam | Welcome to Bob Dylan’s Modern Times (Originally published in Zeek, October 2006)

When Mikhal Gilmore of Rolling Stone asked Bob Dylan about the significance of the release of his album Love and Theft on September 11, 2001, Dylan offered a metaphor capturing the essence of his artistic vision:

I mean, you’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s always been that way for one reason or another.

Ever since he trundled into New York City at the age of twenty in 1961—in the words of early patron and former partner Joan Baez “he burst on the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond”—and thirty years after he declared unequivocally “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” people still look to Bob Dylan to make sense of what does not make sense in the world. Now, amazingly, with the August 2006 release of Modern Times, Dylan at age sixty-five becomes the oldest living artist ever to top international record charts.

The key to understanding the longevity of Bob Dylan’s creative output and public appeal lies in the self-reflection he offered to Rolling Stone. Dylan’s allusion to Pompeii is fitting both because his technique of composition dates back to the artistry of sages, poets, and rhetors of the classical world and because the stories he tells are grounded in committed, creative remembering of faces, names, stories, phrases, and melodies otherwise frozen in the past.

In considering Dylan’s pattern of awakening the artifacts of the past so that they might be carried into the future through art, an insight Walter Benjamin once raised about the appeal of great novels applies. Great novels, Benjamin said, offer “the hope of warming the shivering life [of readers] with a death we read about.”

As an artist immersed in translating societal and personal loss, Dylan masters contemporary expressions of ancient systems of memory that transform even the most powerful and painful truths into generative and life-affirming lyric verse that people can truly hear. Despite the little daily deaths of loss of meaning or the gaping losses generated by events like 9-11, great art and great artists suggest maps for turning forsakenness into resignation and transcendence. To understand Dylan’s creative process is to reveal strategies for living righteously amidst empires, East and West, that are continually flattening memory and misinterpreting the opportunities of mortality as an excuse for promoting a culture of death.

Pompeii Revisited

Bob Dylan has often been compared to Homer—and Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and Keats and Whitman and Rimbaud too. But if one wants to flirt with a juxtaposition of Dylan to a poet of the past, particularly a poet from the classical world, Simonides is the most fertile pairing, exemplifying work memorializing and renewing the cultural rubble that the mainstreams of their societies would otherwise leave behind.

In a well-traveled story related by the Roman rhetors Cicero and Quintilian, the lyric poet Simonides (ca. 556-469 BC) had been invited to chant at a large banquet in honor of the wealthy nobleman Scopas. When Simonides concluded his poem—and after Scopas had told him that he would pay him only half of his fee—a messenger informed Simonides that two young men were waiting for him at the door. Simonides went outside, but there was no one there.

With the poet still absent from the banquet hall, the roof collapsed, killing Scopas and all of his guests. As friends and relatives of the dead arrived to collect the bodies of their loved ones, they found them so disfigured that they could not identify who was who. Simonides, however, recalled the place where each of Scopas’ guests had been seated at the table and identified them all.

Very much by accident—an actual, horrible accident—Simonides had discovered the “method of loci,” a core memory technique of the ancient world, which uses exacting visualization of specific locales as templates for storing and remembering information.

Just as Simonides had instinctively used the fixed tableau of a banquet table to place and recall the names and faces of the scores of guests at Scopas’ feast, so many ancients employing the method of loci “placed” or “stored” information (for example, the words of a speech) piece by piece in different locations throughout a meticulously crafted, unique, and unchanging background.

The memory tableau might be a perfectly reimagined banquet table—as was the case with Simonides—or the rooms of a house, a main street, or any other stable and intimately known space. When a person required the knowledge stored within the tableau he or she would take a “stroll” through his or her mind to “re-collect” and “re-member” the words.

While the description of Simonides’ “discovery” is almost certainly apocryphal, serving as a narrative mode for teaching a system developed by many people over a long period of time, it suggests a compelling and singular role for poets: that they have powerful tools of memory and communication to make sense of the past in a way that allows those still standing to move forward, particularly in times of communal crisis.

As echoed in his statement to Mikhal Gilmore, the central narrative figure of Dylan’s body of work has always been a solitary person on a life-stroll through the United States of Pompeii, his songs representing glimpses into the stages of a journey through what was has been upended, what is changing, and what has been damaged.

Yet unlike Simonides, the memory system Dylan employs offers shifting tableaux for memory—songs carried in a rotating backdrop of archetypal lyrical vessels such as the proverbial traveler’s road, a ship, a train, a dream, a horse, or a woman’s face. The content buried and drifting and tripping in and around these tableaux consists of the flotsam and jetsam of the lyrical vocabulary of traditional post-Civil War folk and blues, country and art songs from the heyday of recorded music leading up to the Depression and beyond it, cinema from silent to noir to Western, literature and poetry, old radio and television shows, the Bible, and layers of mythology.

The raw material of Dylan’s songs is an exhaustive library of popular culture spilling forth from the shelves of collective memory onto the poet’s writing table for filing; pieces of a cultural puzzle configured and reconfigured, each song a “re-membering” encounter with the popular canon in which elements of a hero’s quest unfold.

Dylan’s narrators’ rambling with a supporting cast of archetypal friends including Leadbelly and Charley Patton and Neil Young (the Bards), Mona Lisa and Madonna (the Lovers), Jesse James and Frankie Lee and Judas Priest (the Outlaws), Jesus (the Savior), Lenny Bruce and Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee (the Jesters), and Captain Ahab and the Vice President (the Madmen) epitomizes the breadth of the raw cultural material upon which he calls.

The allusions to figures and texts in the landscape in which Dylan’s heroes seek adventure directly reflect the fluid, and heavily referential (as the title of “Love and Theft”) way that their creator composes music. “Well, you have to understand that I’m not a melodist,” Dylan said to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times in 2004:

My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it’s a proven fact that it’ll help them relax. I don’t meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to a song in my head. At a certain point, some words will change and I’ll start writing a song.

Dylan’s practice of repetition and “meditation” leading to new work is familiar to any committed musician, the jamming and wood shedding of repeating scales and riffs, a familiar rhythmic phrase, or a favorite song that ultimately bends itself into a melody that is called “new,” even if its creative genetic code can be traced back to the original, older form from which it slowly emerged. Though this repetitive practice takes place in garages from Olympia to Boston and in jazz clubs and in the locked rooms of teenagers everywhere, Dylan is also describing an art of composition used by bards for thousands of years.

The Singer of Tales

One of the most compelling studies of the art of repetitive, formulaic, meditative musical-poetic composition appears in Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales (1960), an attempt to explain how it was possible that Homeric epics—some of which are well over 10,000 lines long—could have been memorized and performed orally by the composers and bards of ancient Greece.

Lord maintains that singers, performers, composers, or poets in traditional cultures create an original though inherently formulaic lyric every time they perform. They do not repeat a text verbatim, having memorized it “word for word.” Rather, each performance is comprised of a performer’s reworking a shared body of modular, traditional formulae within deep structures of action and narrative common to his or her culture.

Think of how the basic narrative of a story like Little Red Riding Hood exists across scores of cultural milieu. A person well-versed in fairytales, even if he or she has not heard a particular version of a fairytale before, can quickly fill in the details of a new version within the genre because a prototype already exists deep within him or her. While the names and places and emphases of the story change based on the locale of the storyteller, its “Little Red Rising Hoodedness” stays the same. It is the strength of the skills of the storyteller that make a story great or mediocre, but a stories’ essence carries through regardless.

Recall the old joke of a man visiting a monastery where the monks know each other’s shticks so well that they just tell each other the numbers assigned to the jokes rather than telling the jokes themselves. After a few weeks watching the monks fall down with laughter whenever they hear the numbers “43” and “5” and “16,” the man stands up before the group, takes a deep breath, and loudly says “20.” The room is silent. No one laughs. Later, the man asks one of the monks what he has done wrong, “It’s all in the way you tell it,” the monk says.

Hence the Iliad and the Odyssey follow predictable epic narrative patterns and are full of stock characters and repeated epithets like “rosy-fingered Dawn” and “grey-eyed Athena” that serve as signposts, basic riffs of the repertoire to help the bard stay within the traditional form. Having grasped both the deep narrative structure and the catch phrases and formulae of the genre after years of listening to masters, a bard does not recite a rote text from memory. Rather, the bard activates his ability to access all he has heard recited before him, the “performance notes” gathered over years, laid out in various orders in a Simonidian tableau in his head, creating his own, traditionally grounded, but original performance as he sings and plays. The more he listens to other bards, the tighter his system of memory, and the more he practices, the richer his own expression becomes.

By obsessive, attentive, meditative listening and repeating, Dylan has gorged himself on the deep structure of the music of the Carter Family and Robert Johnson, as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poetry of Rimbaud, the phrases and personae of James Dean and James Dillon, and being the very greedy listener that he has always been, he has gorged himself on just about every other form of cultural content as well. Throughout this process he has stored this material, meditating upon it and reworking it so that “[a]t a certain point, some words will change and I’ll start writing a song.” The result—musically, lyrically, and thematically—is a reworking of a memorial of inherited content placed upon the tableau of a song.

Dylan’s work is full of examples of this creative model. Christopher Ricks and others note how “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” comes out of the deep structure of the Scottish ballad “Lord Randal,” itself part of a particular song pattern and type reaching back hundreds of years. The traditional ballad says:

O where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?
O where have you been, my bonny young man?
I’ve been with my sweetheart, mother make my bed soon
For I’m sick to the heart and I fain would lie down.
And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?
And what did she give you, my bonny young man?
Eels boiled in brew, mother make my bed soon
For I’m sick to the heart and I fain would lie down.
What’s become of your bloodhounds, Lord Randal, my son?
What’s become of your bloodhounds, my bonny young man?
O they swelled and died, mother make my bed soon
For I’m sick to the heart and I fain would lie down…

Dylan says:

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests…

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it…

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’,
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world…

Ricks traces parallels, allusions, interpretations, and plain old playfulness between Dylan and scores of texts of the Western canon—from the Bible to Yeats. Jenny Ledeen, a marvelous character who travels the Dylan circuit in the summertime with a trunk load of copies of her book Prophecy in the Christian Era, cites meditative parallels between Dante and Dylan and Dylan and the Bible.

Or consider the obvious example of Modern Times’ “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”—its words, and music, and tempo sliding directly out of the deep structure of the original “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” performed most famously by Muddy Waters, who himself likely crafted a version of the song from blues idioms and forms already traveling in America for generations before they coalesced in the performance of a master singer and storyteller at a dive on the South Side of Chicago. Examples of Dylan’s practice of repeating “old” material in order to produce “new” material abound because this is exactly how Dylan as a traditionally grounded poet and musician works.

Commenting on the apparent overlap of phrases from Modern Times with the 19th century works of the previously little known poet Henry Timrod, Suzanne Vega misunderstood Dylan’s art in recent piece in the New York Times:
It’s modern to use history as a kind of closet in which we can rummage around, pull influences from different eras, and make them into collages or pastiches.

Actually, it is modern to think that composition and imagination must represent something “new,” that “new” is better than “old,” that creativity grounded in repetition of inherited work is less original than “modern” work that an artist claims to have generated from his or her mind alone.

Return to Sender: “Desolation Row”

“Desolation Row” is one of the finest examples of Dylan’s use of inherited content reworked boldly by a poet attempting to make sense of a world gone wrong. Step right up and see science, legend, sacred text, show business, and literature circa 1965. See Cinderella, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Einstein, Robin Hood, Dr. Filth, the Phantom of the Opera, Casanova, Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic, and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot “coming to the carnival tonight” on Desolation Row. (Click here for the full text of “Desolation Row”)

Understood as a modern day use of the method of loci, the figures and things of the song emerge in a fixed geographical tableau, Desolation Row, a street whose emotional value gives it the “stickiness” classical teachers demanded for their students’ memory tableaux.

In fact, childhood homes were favorite vessels for ancient memory technique, precisely because of the emotional pull they exerted on the memory in the very same way that childhood homes are often the stages of people’s dreams regardless of the dream’s apparent subject. Dylan’s narrator walks through a series of invented actions and poses dictated to himself, “re-membering,” i.e. putting together, cultural content from everywhere lest, as in the later masterpiece “Visions of Johanna,” he find that “his conscious explodes.” The stroll through memory, even if it is painful and bordering on absurd, is controlled by the choices of the rememberer.

Imagine the scenes of “Desolation Row” as a massive, baroque painting in a cavernous ivory hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre to gain a sense of how a poet takes possession of cultural content, majestically reworking and reorganizing material in order to create a memorial in the same way that the great painters populate the walls and ceilings of cathedrals with mythic tales containing their own revisions (and reservations) concerning the sacred canon.

Just as Simonides grabs the social elite in the steel trap of his mind so that their faces might be preserved and dispersed when the time is right, the storyteller of “Desolation Row” slowly unravels his memory of faces when the world calls for it. But unlike Simonides, who claims to match the map of the people at the banquet precisely, Dylan employs an aggressive form of the method of loci, applying his own unique order to the raw material of history because this is the only way that tradition makes sense to him. He reorders the canon, history, and life itself so that he can survive them:

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the door knob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row

The letter he receives, perhaps the motivation to which the song as a whole responds, is an artifact from before the poetic salvation of the reimagined life of Desolation Row. In fact, this letter may as well have been written in another language altogether. It is unreadable, even offensive, because it ignores the fact that only reconstructed reality can preserve a sensitive soul from the cultural chaos of the “real world.” Dylan’s narrator sees the same faces as his pen pal, but each with “another name,” planted within his personal grid of desolation, grounded in the only terms that he can understand and accept.

In the same Mikhal Gilmore interview cited earlier, when Dylan was asked if he had a message for people about 9-11, he quoted the Rudyard Kipling poem “Gentle-Rankers”: “We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth/We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung/And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth/God help us, for we knew the worst too young!” Dylan goes on to say: “If anything, my mind would go to young people at a time like this. That’s really the only way to put it.”

Just as Allen Ginsberg says in “Howl”—when Dylan was still just a little squirt wanting to be Little Richard—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” Dylan, at least in his mind, emerges from a generation where visionaries face loneliness and rejection from their society. Fittingly, the word “desolation” comes from the Latin word desolare, desolatum, meaning “to forsake.” Dylan literally sees his generation literally forsaken, frozen and dead, forcing him to create a new matrix for living.

The result, as he sings in “Dirge,” is that he “paid the price of loneliness/but at least I’m out of debt.” Despite its dark side, the reward for carving new cultural paths can be freedom and lucidity that hints at transcendence and, based on Dylan’s immense popularity, might even draw others towards new paths as well.

Welcome to “Modern Times”

Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, describes to the phenomenon of “memorial” culture in the realm of medieval monks. From the time of Simonides through Cicero and onto the stages of the Church Fathers and medieval monastic culture—not the same monks telling the jokes above, perhaps —the method of loci served as a basis for sacred arts of meditation, prayer, translation, and manuscript production grounded in reworking and relearning classical, inherited texts.

Ostensibly the monks created nothing “new” for generations. Yet as a form of “memorial” culture, monastic life was a constant process of resurrecting societies’ dearest inherited figures and symbols in study and art, “making present the voices of what is past, not to entomb either the past or the present, but to give them life together in a place common to both in memory.”

According to Carruthers, a creative act in the ancient and medieval world was not an act of invention ex nihilo, but an act of re-imagination—the reconfiguring of texts and images preserved by the monks in the various tableaux of their memory so that they could form new sacred content out of inherited material otherwise lost and left for dead.

While Bob Dylan is no monk, no saint, and no angel (particularly in light of a public religious quest that has included both Christian and Jewish orthodoxies as well as a healthy dose of anti-doctrinal fervor) he thrives not only on the content of religious stories and thinking, but also lives creatively through forms of memory and song craft derived from the ancients and utilized by the great religious traditions of the world for millennia.

Bob Dylan—to whom so many look for insight during troubled times, demanding clear answers about what to do about the meaning of life but instead receiving cryptic, laconic messages leading to so much babble and frustration—has always been quite clear about how to make sense of the world. He relies on the bounty of the canons of music, art, literature, and legend to provide the inspirational colors with which to paint and repaint personal interpretations on the canvas tableaux of his choice.

“Don’t follow leaders,” Dylan once said: reject leaders who lead you towards meaningless death even as you accept the infinite possibilities of your finite life. Reject damaging cultural norms precisely because you love culture so much. And if this calling for independent thought and living leaves you feeling forsaken and alone, remember that Bob Dylan also said: “’I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,’ I said that.”

In other words, turning inward towards a vision of a re-formed and re-membered world does not mean giving up hope on the world outside. Honest, disciplined, generous memory creates a generative tableau upon which the histories of neighborhoods and nations can be rearranged the way that they are supposed to be. Great art that gives history “another name” allows people to begin to share stories of a future that makes sense. If we listen and look carefully, we might even be able to hear and see these reimagined worlds well enough to make them real.

And so, my friends, this is how rock and roll—and art and literature and theater and more—can still save the world. Thank you very much for the map, Mr. Dylan, and welcome to Modern Times.

If you’re ever sad, just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as…

I’ve seen this meme used for an Eddie Van Halen solo, one of Michael Jordan’s signature dunks, a great new breakfast sandwich, and so much more. The point is that in our misunderstood, incomprehensible world, there are certain encounters with greatness that make life worthwhile.

Now, I will never fully get up to speed on pop culture at this point in my life. The cresting of my pop-cultural knowledge probably came when I was a preteen, back when television still functioned as a common denominator for most of us. More precisely, television, sports, and Casey Kasem’s Top Forty Countdown. And I knew it all: the three networks, the sitcoms, the afternoon shows, the evening news, the morning cartoons, the Top 40—and, of course, everything relevant to the NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball.

But even as a musician and writer, I fell behind quickly, captivated more often by things that mattered to me than by things that were popular.

These days if I’m ever sad, I just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and I somehow managed to exist at the same time as my kids. And one of the 4.543 billion virtues of having children is being offered a peek into the reality of pop culture as it exists today. That’s how I got to the immaculate song “Where Is My Husband!”

This song knocks me out.

Firstly, and this is not “poppish,” but very cultural, I know so many people close to me whose husbands have been away on reserve duty over these past years, and so many others—Israelis, Palestinians, and on and on—who have lost husbands, or are parents of sons whose partners have lost them. So the question itself lands like an explosion.

But a different kind of explosion takes place in the song itself, which is, first and foremost, beautiful. Raye and her back-up crew, the melody, the whole conception: they are all beautiful.

I have been listening to this song over and over again, probably way too much. It’s ear candy, yes, but it’s also something more, and I am grateful to be alive at a time when it could exist.

One of the reasons why I’m grateful, putting on my musician’s midrash hat for a moment, is that this song itself could not exist without its countless forebears. There are so many, but I’m thinking of three in particular: James Brown, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder.

Embedded within any great pop song, just like any sacred text, are layers of traditions that precede it. The question is not whether a songwriter, writer, or prophet can touch something timeless. The question is whether they can weave those traditions together without the seams showing. And this song has got it going on.

There’s that melisma, a kind of reaching upward, like a person stretching for a dish on the top shelf, that Joni Mitchell perfected from the very beginning, and that these ladies pull off together about a third of the way through the tune. Almost silly when another singer attempts it, but with Joni, and here, it somehow spans not just an entire body, but an entire range of emotions, even an entire lifetime.

There are the horns that smack the listener in the face the moment the song begins, just like James Brown would knock you backward before he had even opened his mouth. He had a way of claiming the rhythm before the song even started. It’s a miraculous skill, and “Where Is My Husband!” employs it with distinction.

And then there’s Stevie Wonder—maybe the greatest master of American popular music at his peak—who can climb up and down as if on a crooked ladder, octave after octave, syncopating, vibrating, explicating, rising up the scales from bottom to top, baritone to alto to falsetto and back. Raye and company climb those ladders too

Oh, music.

You always remind me that as vicious and nasty as things and people can be, even in these times of bleeding ignorance and trauma, somebody out there can always find a way to make a new song. And with this one we also received a tongue-in-cheek video, in which three stunning women, who look like some postmodern combination of Amy Winehouse and the Supremes.

(I know Winehouse was a white retro singer on the edge of appropriation, but she could still wail and could be awesomely moving; and those girl groups had to travel a hard road in a man’s world. The world is madly imperfect, the music industry all the more so.)

In “Where Is My Husband!,” skill and fate conspire with all of these archetypes and styles to produce a fresh remix of melody, rhythm, longing, fun, and a question to which anyone can relate. That’s a marginal pop prophecy if I’ve ever heard one.

“Help me, help me, help me, Lord,” Raye sings at one point—an obvious echo of gospel, which is the boiler pumping out soul in the basement of all popular music. So with that, please allow me to tip my midrashic music hat to the Church too. Thank you for sharing the glory with us.

And thank you also to the dingy folk club in Detroit where Joni became Joni Mitchell, like whom there is no other; and to the broken homes and difficult childhoods that produced so many of the greatest voices ever heard, including the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. And praise too for the wonder, the national treasure, that is Stevie Wonder. The world is 4.543 billion years old and we get to live at the same time as him.

Here’s to all of the strange conditions that bring forth new masters of the genre from the old, who leave behind what is sacred and good for us to gather, generation after generation. So put on that sparkly red dress, strap on that beat-up red guitar, top off your day with a spin of that record you know you love to love—and let us say: Amen.

Growing up in Cleveland, there was only one enemy, only one evil empire that our good guys needed to overcome. And that was Pittsburgh.

Cleveland in the ’70s and ’80s did not need to create any more trouble than it already had, and it didn’t fare well in the imagination of comics and critics all across America. We were known for being the city where the Cuyahoga River had been so polluted that it had caught fire, for being the first major city in the US to default, and for being, as the phrase went, “the mistake on the lake.”

Is it possible for a city to have low self-esteem? Yes, we did.

In 1976, the expansion Cleveland Cavaliers—who had, until that time, one of the worst records in NBA history in previous seasons—defeated the Washington Bullets in the first round of the playoffs thanks to a last second layup by Dick Snyder, who looked very much like my dentist. It was called the Miracle at Richfield. Maybe this wasn’t much in the grand scheme of sports history, but it meant a fleeting moment of redemption for us.

The once poorly named Cleveland baseball club, now known as the Guardians, has not won a World Series since 1948. In the seventies and eighties, it was often only rain delays that saved us the pain of watching those fellows fail.

And though they were one of the teams of royalty in the old AAFC and then the NFL, a team that won championship after championship, coached by the legendary Paul Brown, and also the team of perhaps the greatest football player of all time, Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns fell on hard times in the ’70s too.

The hardest of the hard times in the self-defeating mythology of Cleveland were signified by the drubbings of the Browns by the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were, in that decade, football’s ultimate kings.

There are still some people in Cleveland and the vast Cleveland diaspora—and I have met plenty of them all over the world—who won’t say the “P” word. During games, they wipe their armpits and worse with the famous “Terrible Towel” that fans of the Steelers twirl as a tribal rite. And while we Clevelanders call it our cities’ greatest rivalry, for a Pittsburgh team that has been amongst the most successful in league history, Cleveland is still just an afterthought twice a year.

Our rivalry is more like a mismatch, like a skinny kid who hits the gym all summer to prepare to take on a bully on the first day of school. Then when he struts across the playground to stand his ground after all of that effort, the bully bonks him once on the head and he’s done for the year once again.

And this brings me to The Pitt, with which just about any pop culture maven will be familiar. It takes place in an emergency room in downtown Pittsburgh of all places, a setting that has the feel of being untethered, uncared for, and down on its luck just like Cleveland was imagined back in the day.

The essence of the show is, in some ways, the audience rooting for deeply flawed characters who are struggling in their personal lives, and yet, because of professional passion or human character or both, are committed almost to the point of self-destruction to the well-being of the downtrodden and ill. They are on the front lines of a part of the city that has been left behind, but they still leave nothing on the field for the people who need them.

In The Pitt, just after disease and injury, there is no greater common enemy for the doctors and nurses than those very doctors and nurses themselves. Almost all of them struggle mightily with intimacy or substances or fatigue or burnout, and yet, as a liberally-minded and very realistic show, the common enemies beyond the internal ones are obvious: It is the bureaucracy of the hospital upstairs that just wants to make money. It’s the health insurance companies that leave people without means to fend for themselves, even in states of grave decline, after a tragic accident, or with a chronic condition that’s gotten out of control.

There is a sense that even in its absolute chaos and constant demands, the ER is somehow an isle of sanity in a city that has lost its bearings. It’s the only place that makes sense and it is also falling apart.

Watching The Pitt as a Clevelander took a minute to adjust to. I admit it. Releasing oneself from childhood fandom is about as hard as releasing oneself from the religion of one’s birth. We go by the customs of the parents and grandparents who cheered on the teams that we grew up with, and even today, having not lived in Cleveland for more than two-thirds of my life, I find a way almost every Sunday during the season to watch one of the worst teams in the NFL, year after despicable year, because I unequivocally love my team. It’s ridiculous.

But it’s also a way of checking in with who I was, a way of reconnecting with a mythology that was formative until I was well into my teens and perhaps beyond. And it’s also a way, despite the cruelty and racism embedded within football—which both have and have not been addressed by serious people over the years—to enter into a battlefield of good versus evil and enemy versus hero, without the drones and boycotts and guns and blood that define the battles of the real world.

Football is clearly a less than perfect choice for experiencing mythic battles, considering the ways it is dominated by commerce and masculinity and violence, just the way the conflicts of the real world are waged by other expressions of the very same lowest common human denominators.

And yet, I often ask myself, when I’m watching a game alone with my popcorn and beer, or encouraging my Israeli children to join me to watch with me, why these giant men armed with muscle and synthetic padding and physical strength almost beyond measure provide me comfort.

And so I think again of The Pitt.

Firstly, at least I have matured enough to support the innocent of Pittsburgh for a change. I am rooting for The Pitt’s team to prevail, to teach, to heal, and to show us how it’s done.

But also, in a space where people are cut open and bleed out, or watch the lives of their loved ones unravel—in a place where the doctors seem to be the ones who need as much care as the patients—a battle for the good is taking place. And I love a good battle between good and evil, the more imaginary and symbolic and mythical the better.

Why do we need pain to do good? Why do we need a foil to do right? Why do we need Pittsburgh to feel like Cleveland? I don’t know, but I am still wrapped up in all of it, and still cheering the good guys on.

Having always been a bit literary-minded, and having been shaped by schools where reading great books really mattered, I have more than a few classics on my shelves that I first opened decades ago. Sometimes these are books with chapters that I almost fully underlined before a quiz, and sometimes the margins carry the name of my middle school crush or insignias of Van Halen or the Doors.

I’m not returning to these books because I’ve aged out of writing. Quite the opposite. I’m doubling down on writing. And I’m not returning to my library because I’ve lost interest in contemporary work. Again, quite the opposite is true. But I’ve begun to fold rereading into the rotation, the way an amateur cook adds a new spice to keep a dish alive, returning with a hunger for a new taste of words that filled me up long ago.

Most recently—devoured in a day—I returned to The Odyssey. Reading The Odyssey in Jerusalem at a time of war was much more powerful than I had anticipated.

I cannot see the Mediterranean from my landlocked balcony. In one direction, Jordan comes into view, but in another, it wouldn’t take long to reach that same sea across which Odysseus wandered—moving from island to island, from trap to escape, from danger to cunning survival—plotting and enduring until he reached his final destination.

Reading The Odyssey in Jerusalem means thinking about ancient peoples and the long arc between war and return, and about what it takes to come back home, not just geographically, but as part of a journey through the straits and shadows of war that feels never-ending.

Two things struck me most.

First: I’m grateful I didn’t start with The Iliad and the Trojan War. I’m glad I didn’t begin with war at all. The Odyssey had no choice, it’s narrative emerging definitively from bloodshed. But here in Jerusalem, amid war in Gaza and Lebanon and facing the looming tension of Iran, I do not seek nor take pleasure in war stories. There are too many. I’ve already heard enough, and I know—sadly—that there will be more.

Like Odysseus himself, I want a story that takes me away from the fight. And yet The Odyssey is, in its way, the story of a warrior who cannot stop fighting, a man who has escaped one set of battles, triumphant on the surface, only to find himself trapped in the long, bewildering journey homeward that includes fighting with himself.

Odysseus says all he wants is to be reunited with his wife, his son, his life. But does he? If so, why does it take so long? What does war do to the idea of home that makes return so difficult, so delayed, so uncertain?

I find myself lingering with that question. I wonder if an entire nation is lingering with that question too.

The second thing that most struck me reading The Odyssey in Jerusalem is the way the rich mythic map of gods and heroes charts the porous boundary between the human and the divine.

Consider the role of grey-eyed Pallas Athena, always my favorite god or goddess—in no small part because I first read this story when The Who’s song “Athena” was released. She appears again and again, not as a distant deity, but embodied. And those eyes. I’ll always have a crush on Athena, just like Pete Townshend did:

Athena, I had no idea how much I need her
My life has been so settled and she is the reason
Just one word from her and my troubles are long gone
But I get along
She's just a girl, she's a bomb

The goddess enters the world as a mentor, and as Mentor himself, but also as a beggar, a fighter, a seeker—a changing voice within a conversation of many, but always behind the blue eyes of someone real. Again and again, divine consciousness merges, if only for a moment, with human speech in a way that makes it simply impossible to know who is actually speaking.

On the one hand, these conversations are not abstract. They are intimate, face to face. But they are also fluid, as something passes between decision and fate, between free will and destiny. But what is it? What does Athena have to offer beyond intervening in fate when deus ex machina is critical? Always, words.

These characters talk and talk. They narrate. They pontificate. For thousands of lines they recount what has happened, how they’ve suffered, and what they hope for. The language is expansive. It rises and falls like the sea itself.

And yet, as Erich Auerbach teaches in “Odysseus’ Scar,” my favorite academic essay of all time, there is something hidden beneath that expansiveness. Writing from Istanbul in the 1940s, having been exiled by the Nazis, Auerbach describes the Homeric style as one that reveals everything on the surface, fully illuminated and richly detailed, while somehow holding back deepest interiority.

We watch the minute detail of the slow reveal of Odysseus’ singular bodily sign that affirms that he is, in fact, who he is hiding, and that his return home is finally complete. Nothing is left unsaid, yet something is unspoken.

Auerbach contrasts this with the biblical style, particularly the story from the Book of Genesis in which Abraham and Isaac walk together up Mount Moriah. So few words are spoken, and here silence is meaning itself. The gaps are where the emotion lives. This effect is almost unbearable, the gravity of what a father is prepared to do to a son so heavy that the text can barely lift itself.

Reading The Odyssey in Jerusalem, I am enmeshed in both of these traditions, caught between saying too much and saying too little—between the need to narrate everything, to speak it all out loud, and the equally powerful need to fall silent, because the truth is too deep for words.

I don’t think I get to choose between these two ways of living within life and myth. Maybe this is the blessing of the reasonably well-read, somewhat believing, partly Hellenistic Jew reading The Odyssey in Jerusalem: to live in that tension.

As Philip Roth suggested, there comes a moment when the task is not to produce something new, but to put down the pen and rest one’s head on words that have carried generations. It was hard and beautiful then. It is hard and beautiful now. But the words remain, worn smooth by sea and sand under the gaze of ever-watchful Athena, ever welcoming us home.

I come to Brené Brown’s teachings after they’ve already spread widely through popular culture, psychology, and corporate life. And I find a lot there that aligns with things I’ve been thinking, practicing, and even teaching for years, though I haven’t always named them as such.

Last Shabbat, I finally read Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, and a few ideas stand out.

To start, the wilderness is often where courage lives.

I used to go to the actual wilderness when I was a teenager. I would take my guitar without a case, a gallon jug of distilled water from Lawson’s, maybe some cigarettes or dip, and I’d find a spot as far away from other people as I could. Then I would sit on a tree trunk and play and sing. The songs weren’t particularly spiritual. They were just the ones I knew—“Margaritaville,” that song by Loggins and Messina whose title I can never remember, “Sunshine” by Jonathan Edwards, and a few I’d written myself. I would howl and play until I was emptied out.

This something I learned about through the great Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s techings on hitbodedut: to be alone, preferably in a forest, to encounter the silence outside of us and the storm inside of us.

So too I am reminded of what the late writer David Foster Wallace once spoke about in an interview I come back to on YouTube from time to time. He spoke of our fear of silence. There is constant noise in our public spaces—the background music in stores, the chatter of talk radio, the television humming in the background. All of it keeps us from encountering the wilderness within and the wilderness without.

Brené Brown also teaches that people are hard to hate up close. And yet—oh, the hate. It’s everywhere.

David Grossman wrote “The Sticker Song” with the Israeli rap group HaDag Nahash, composed only of a litany of bumper stickers, messages of division that people drive around with on their cars, flaunting some pushy, pithy phrase like the red backside of baboon for all to see. One after another, we pass them and they pass us, stickers of over-opinion, often hateful, all sounding so starkly small in repetition.

Combined, the stickers become a screaming match. Just stepping outside your door, getting into your car, driving down the street, you see how loud we are, how sure of ourselves, and how easy it is to direct hate at what is passing by us in a blur. But when we get up close, it becomes harder to hold that false boldness because if we really look, we can see ourselves in the human being in front of us.

Some of this hate comes from what Brown calls a “bullshit meter”—a kind of healthy skepticism, a generative doubt gone wild. At its worst and most overreactive, it tells us that everyone and everything is bullshit. I get it. Sometimes my lack of trust feels like consciousness itself. But really, it is how I protect myself. It keeps me from being too vulnerable.

Judgment, that hypersensitive, almost reflexive critique I direct at myself and others, is often just a way of not listening—especially in a world where so much noise has made it hard to hear.

Our judgments, which in Hebrew mystical thought are called the force of din, need to be softened with rachamim, the force of mercy. Mercy toward bullshit. Judgment toward bullshit. We need them both. It’s a balance.

As I dig deeply into writing my second book—a project I’m now thinking of as a spiritual memoir—I’m realizing more and more that despite my best intentions and after every stage of seeking and discovery, I can only know myself as I am today, and that too is changing.

Who I was at twenty, forty, or fifty was never any one thing, but some combination of doing my best, my blind spots, my bullshit, and circumstances of noise and wilderness beyond my control.

Better late than never: what I hear now is that true belonging is not stasis, not settling. It is becoming comfortable with the fact that we are a never-ending project deserving of grace—and so is everyone else.

After multiple phone conversations, I didn’t understand why the piano tuner kept asking for such precise details about where I lived: bus lines, intersections, landmarks. He called from the bus stop at exactly the hour we had planned.

“I need you to meet me,” he said.

That’s when I understood that he wasn’t being meticulous in the usual way. He was blind.

My friend and I cut short our conversation and walked to the nearest bus stop. The piano tuner was seated on a bench with a large suitcase at his side, dressed for the end of winter even though the first summer heat had arrived on the same day as his visit.

We exchanged greetings—me speaking louder than I should—and began to walk.

Suddenly the sidewalk was dreadfully uneven. It was cluttered and neglected and unforgiving. The piano tuner placed his hand on my friend’s shoulder, and I pulled his suitcase ahead of us, narrating the world as we moved: the dips in the pavement, the electric poles, the cars half-parked on the sidewalk—all of the small urban obstacles that usually pass beneath notice as I rush back and forth along that same street every day.

As we moved, something in me shifted. So often, I live inside words, especially on writing mornings, or in deep conversation with a friend. But now I was called to a different kind of attention. Look at me, seeing fully with two working eyes, while this smiling man, full of quips and easy familiarity, knew the world only through what he heard and touched. Surely in his way, he needed me. Was that a ridge in the road? A dip in the sidewalk? A car edging too close? But as we walked, I began to feel something else as well, a kind of cloak of understanding settling over me: I needed him too.

Moving through my neighborhood, step by careful step—through obstacles, small talk, directions—I found myself thinking about Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Tiresias, the blind seer a poet I know has long been obsessed with, and about the metaphors we inherit so casually about “seeing” and “insight,” without ever really considering what those words mean.

Subscribe now

My friend left when we the three of us reached my building. Then for the thirty stairs up to my apartment, I carried the suitcase and described each and every turn: where the banister ended at a landing, the spot where a piece of a step was missing, the overgrown bush a neighbor had neglected to trim.

Once inside, I poured him a glass of water. He drank it in one long swill, explaining almost apologetically how necessary it is to drink water in order keep the blood flowing properly.

I offered coffee. He preferred tea. And then the work began.

First, I helped him remove the wood panels, the keyboard cover, and the top of the piano. He told me that he would inspect every moving part, adjusting or replacing what had shifted or been worn down. Then, at some point in the early afternoon, he would begin tuning.

“It will all take nine hours,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“Of course,” I said, already recalibrating my day.

And so, for nine hours almost to the minute, we both worked. I moved through my usual routines—calls, Zooms, emails, meeting notes—while in the next room, the instrument I loved was being taken apart and put back together, one note at a time.

Every so often, I would enter the salon to ask if he needed anything. Only then would he ask me for help—finding a tool, sanding a small piece of wood. At one point, I watched him insert a wood toothpick into a screw hole to give a peg just enough grip to settle.

“There’s a solution for every problem,” he said, chuckling.

Late in the day, as he packed his tools, he said that in ten years when I might be thinking about retirement—“As if I’m not already,” I interrupted, and we both laughed—that this would be about the time this piano might be ready to retire too.

“It’s solid,” he said, “but it will get tired eventually.”

“Like us,” I said.

“Oh yes, just like us,” he answered, laughing. Then he passed his hands lightly across the keyboard, fingertips barely touching the ivory like soft steps on the sidewalk, all the way to the highest keys.

“You know, Stephen,” he said, “these Russian pianos never really have the top three notes.” He tapped them one after the other, producing triplet with a thin, almost ghostly sound. “But that’s okay,” he added, sitting down gingerly with small grunts on the stool I had moved into place behind him. He played a bit of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” smiling broadly.

“Now you’ve got an instrument,” he said, raising slightly the brim of the hat he had not removed all day. And then, casually but with assurance, he added that when the time came, he would take me to Tel Aviv to buy a Yamaha.

“We’ll work it out,” he said. “Monthly payments. Then you’ll have something you can play for the rest of your life—until 120.”

We gathered his things, packing them precisely, and began the slow descent to my car so that I could drive him home.

Lately, I have been living inside a frame of mind that tells me, again and again, that things are hard—that it’s not clear how or when they will get better, that I am alone, that I simply have to endure and make the most of it.

But here, unexpectedly, was another way of seeing, one shaped by someone whose experience of the world is entirely different from my own.

This lesson has stayed with me: the possibility, even now, of getting in tune—with the song I’m playing, with the world I’m living in, with the bench I’m sitting on, the open window, the light breeze, the familiar melody that both hurts and helps, and the sunlight coming through—warm enough to feel, bright enough to see.