Robbie Gringras is the Artist-in-Residence for Makom, the innovation place for educating about Israel and the Jewish People. He creates content for Makom, runs their website www.makom.haaretz.com, and is an independent playwright and performer whose works have played stages throughout the world in English, Hebrew, and Spanish.
It was while listening to Ehud Banai’s latest album, Night Fragments, that the penny dropped – everything I know about the arts in Jewish and Israel education, I learned from Ehud Banai. Each of my encounters with the music of this Israeli singer-songwriter revealed another aspect of the challenges and the opportunities that Israeli arts can offer the Jewish educator.
The first time I came across Ehud Banai there were birds involved.
I was on a trip to Israel, and had been offered tickets to a performance of his on a kibbutz in the North. The kibbutz didn’t really have a concert hall – the gig was in an empty factory warehouse. A long, flat, air hanger-type warehouse full of dust. At one end, partially hidden by the heads of those in front of me, was the stage on which stood some guy with glasses and a guitar. And above him swirled the birds. As is the way in empty warehouses, it had become the home to a family of birds that was deeply concerned by all the noise.
And noise it was. I’d been told to listen out for the political critique called Golden Calf, and the protest song about the Ethiopian aliyah that argued Moses might have been black, but I couldn’t make out a word. The sound was swallowed up by the chasm-like space and the birds tweeting and swooping above the stage, trying to quieten things down.
Here I first realized, on my own buck, that when the technicalities of presenting art are ignored, when the prosaics of the poetry are forgotten, no artistry can save the event. You can waste a whole lot of money, time, and effort, if the art isn’t respected by the production surrounding it. It seemed that Banai found the birds to be quite funny – he wasn’t the kind of guy to get too worked up. He didn’t feel disrespected. But his art was, and as a result the performance was a failure.
Next time I saw him was at Limmud UK conference. By this time I’d got to know his work. I’d listened to his sharp Middle Eastern indie sound in Black Labor, to his Israeli folk rendition of a famous Christie Moore Irish folk song, and grown accustomed to his strong/weak Banai voice. I’d also understood the over-represented place of the Banai clan in Israel’s cultural scene. Cousins, uncles, parents – Israel is littered with the Banai family’s cultural contributions.
At Limmud he’d been invited to perform solo. The conference was saving money, I guess. Imagine a concert with Bob Dylan performing solo, in a foreign language, for an audience that doesn’t know he’s Bob Dylan. It was a disaster. No one understood the deep and challenging lyrics that so skillfully blended social comment with the language of the Jewish People, no one appreciated the status of Ehud Banai in Israel or at least was not impressed by it, and no one enjoyed themselves. Further than this, to a non-Israeli non-Hebrew-understanding ear, Banai wasn’t a great singer, either. Someone turned to me and muttered: “That’s not singing. That’s moaning…”
It was painful to experience the waste. The quality and depth of an artist is irrelevant if no one understands what they are saying, or the social context in which they create. The work of the educator has to be to find engaging ways to give participants enough of a cultural handle – the ‘code’ if you will – to be able to appreciate the artistic event.
My next experience of Ehud Banai was at my wedding. I sang one of his songs to my wife. Banai does not create Beiber-ish Baby Baby love songs. One of his famous love songs admits that “It’s true: I don’t always show love, but today…” Banai’s songs are aware that love is a complicated and sometimes weighty thing. I sang Everyone Knows, in which he expresses commitment to his love but at the same time hints at the ending (separation? death?) of which ‘everyone knows.’
It is a complex, multi-messaged kind of song that confounds the standard educators’ question: What is he trying to say? Most of Banai’s work is like that, and as such is our greatest ally in a more nuanced Israel education. Neither a good piece of art, nor Israel, can be summed up with one ‘message’. Life is more complicated than that. Everyone knows…
But not everyone knows a Middle Eastern rhythm. I had great trouble singing the song in time with the musicians. We in the West are weaned on African-American rhythms. Some geniuses have even mastered the odd Salsa class. But these rhythms are a far cry from stop-start darbuka beat of the Persian-influenced Banai… As I sweated for all the wrong reasons before my wedding, I began to internalize how difficult it is for us to transcend our musical traditions.
It is no surprise how we in the Jewish community ended up in a spiraling loop with Israeli music for so long. We searched out the Israeli music that sounded most Western, and therefore comfortable to our ear. But, at least in the seventies and eighties, Israeli Western-sounding music felt like a poor inauthentic copy of Western bands, and so was disappointing. The authentic and the unique in Israeli music lies in its foreign-feeling Arabian blend. For a Westerner, it takes work to connect to its magic.
It wasn’t until I had the privilege of hearing Ehud Banai in synagogue that all his music fell into place. One Shabbat in a tiny community, it fell to Banai to lead us in prayer. Close up, un-miked, non-produced, and singing the tunes of his grandparents, I noticed two things. First, Banai has a beautiful voice. It sounds less like an artistic tool developed through technique, and more a direct expression of his soul. What might sound like weaknesses to those searching for technique, are adopted and employed as emotional strengths by the singer. In the world of American Idol warbling, this is important to convey.
Second, one cannot understand the music of Ehud Banai without referring to the synagogue. Not all his music is religious, and his musical influences are far broader than liturgical Persia, but there is an element of his singing, his rhythms, and his writing whose home will always be in prayer. Too often we are keen to differentiate between the sacred and the profane in Jewish culture.We suggest that that which emerges from the synagogue must stay there, or at least remained categorized as such. But Banai is one of many Israeli artists whose work makes a mockery of these dichotomies. He pushes us to acknowledge one of the true, most challenging aspects of the State of Israel: real life has burst open the synagogue walls and instead of destroying that which lay within, has embraced, scattered, and enlivened it.
The only exception to this rule would be Banai’s penultimate album, Shir Hadash, which presented his studio version of Kabalat Shabbat. This is a disc I can only listen to on late Friday afternoon. Living, as I do, far from a thriving synagogue, I comfort myself with Banai’s Here Comes the Sun– like version of Lekha Dodi, and his Persian-tinged renditions of Carlebach niggunim.
But it is his latest disc that struck me how inspirational Banai’s work is to a Jewish educator, and at the same time how challenging.
Take, for example, his deeply moving A Story of the Four. On the face of it, this is a haunting ballad about four youths who decide to drop acid together when their parents are away. One is experienced, and attempts to guide his friends through a bad trip, but they do not follow his cryptic instructions and are left scarred forever. The elusive lyrics leave us with a terrible sense of loss and wounded innocence.
Yet any Jewish educator will recognize both in form and language that this song is also a version of the enigmatic Talmudic tale of the four Rabbis who set off on a mystical journey into the Pardes (literally Orchard, but referring to the Garden of Eden, or Paradise). When we hear of the youth who returns from the Orchard but becomes “different,” we do not only hear of a kid damaged by drug abuse, we also hear the echoes of the fall of R. Elisha ben Avuya who loses his faith and is subsequently referred to as Aher – different, the Other.
How does an educator ensure that the student at the same time appreciates the music, follows the presenting narrative, and also picks up on the deeper references that underlie it all? The song ‘works’ without anyone knowing the story of the Pardes, but its depth and riches are out of reach for a student who does not hear its reverberations. (And all this is even before we start to digest the subversive connection between kids experimenting with hallucinogens, and iconic Rabbis’ mystical quests!)
Banai not only challenges our separations between sacred and secular, he also challenges our conceptions of time. The past is part of the continuous present in Banai’s world. His songs flow through us like modern soldiers pacing the stones of Jerusalem, embodying the ongoing encounter between ancient and modern in the State of Israel.
The first single of this new album starts off as a plodding blues song describing his daily evening walk. The prosaic gains some mystery as the chorus arrives, “The doctor said it’s good to walk a little every day – until you arrive…” and we continue walking with Banai through the streets, peeking into windows, smelling the cooking of others. Then he casually admits that he has been walking like this “for two thousand years.” A daily constitutional, pacing the streets of Tel Aviv, suddenly opens up onto a vast historical and geographical canvas, walking through biblical Jordan as well as modern Israel.
This is not some musical metaphysics, nor only a product of Banai’s history-drenched imagination. It is Israel of today. Banai’s genius is to reveal it to us. As a post-denominational Jew he finds himself saddened by his idiosyncratic isolation. “I stand on the bridge of Halakhah, searching for the way of Peace.” While Banai is of course bemoaning an existential position, he is also very firmly locating this issue in modern Israel: The Halakhah Bridge crosses the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv, less than a mile away from the junction for Derekh HaShalom (the Way of Peace).
This is the kind of creativity that Ahad Ha-Am dreamed of, and that Bialik aspired to when he pronounced: “We no longer admit a division of the body and the spirit, or a division of the man and the Jew. We hold neither with Beit Shammai, that the heavens were created first, nor with Beit Hillel, that the earth was created first, but with the sages that both were created simultaneously by one command so that neither can exist without the other.”
In order for this overwhelming renaissance of Jewish creativity to enrich the Jewish People the world over, the responsibility must fall to the educators to connect it to the learners.
We must take care to present arts with good sound equipment and in appropriate spaces. We need to provide our students with translations, both linguistic and cultural, so that the art may communicate. In this way we can allow the nuance of good art to work its interpretation-inducing magic, turning our students into sophisticated, active learners. And we must search out and work with the deep multi-layered dichotomy-busting inspiring art that Israel is producing in ever-increasing quantity.