There is one line from a New York Times Opinion column that I have found myself returning to again and again in the past year and a half since I first read it. “Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.” (1)

These words were penned by the indomitable M. Gessen in February 2025, in a column for which they eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing. Other people were struck by these words too.

I have walked around musing about how terrifying it would be to have to live in a world with bad art. Music and movies and books and great journalism make life worth living! Music and singing with other people is the fastest way for me to access HaShem and to truly feel the interconnected cosmos of God’s universe.

But what if what M. Gessen wrote is true? They should know about authoritarianism, having grown up in the Soviet Union, immigrating to the United States in 1981 as a young teen, and then returning to Russia in 1996 to live and work as an adult for 17 years. They returned to Russia as a rabble-rousing queer Jew.

If what M. Gessen posits is true, then what does that mean for how I am to live my life? This question has deep resonance, especially at Rosh Hashanah when we take stock of the past year and think about who we want to be in the year to come. How am I to fully live my life in the coming year?

Somehow, despite my commitments to the dignity of all human beings and care for the creatures, plants, mountains, oceans and forests of our Earth, the idea that I have continuously returned to in the past year is this: What will I do if I must live surrounded by bad ideas and cannot escape into good books?

At first I rationalized. There is enough good TV to keep me busy into old age. How many classics are there that I still haven’t read, or must reread because I cannot remember them from high school English class? But on a deeper level, I want to be able to read good books that are simultaneously about the historical period in which they are set and about today, the moment in which they are written. I want to delve into a great movie that is not only fluff and escapism, but also speaks to our current moment.

It was with all these thoughts and feelings swirling that I decided to bring a group of congregants from Kalamazoo with me to the “Song is Prayer” retreat led by Joey Weisenberg in Chicago this past June. Over the course of three days we sang, learned Jewish texts, discussed music theory, and generally enjoyed each other’s company. As an aside, if this is something that you would like to do in the future please let me know. It will happen again, or there'll be something like it, and I’d love to take you with me next time.

If the institutions of the country are crumbling, then it is the job of the people who make up synagogues (and churches and other civic associations) to practice what a living democracy looks like. It is here that we sit with people across difference. It is here that we daven and nosh at kiddish with people who we love but do not necessarily agree with. It is here that we can sing our hearts out and through the process of singing, learn to listen. It is impossible to sing together well if you are not sitting close to each other and listening to each other.

This summer I read and loved, Ayelet Tsabari’s 2024 novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted. Near the end of her extended meditation on nation building, family and the immigrant experience, she writes about participating in Israeli-Yemenite women’s song circles. The traditional songs are sung in Arabic, which she does not know.

“Singing together, I read, released positive neurochemicals in your brain, improved immune response, lowered stress. Cheaper than therapy, healthier than drugs and alcohol. I thought of that while I was singing with the women. When I sang, I forgot. And that feeling manifested in my body too. It was a feeling I remembered from when I used to sing with Mika, how, for a moment, the awkwardness of my teenaged body with its long, skinny limbs had disappeared, and I was just voice. When I sang with the women, I felt lighter, carried away with the sounds my vocal box produced even though I didn’t know the meaning of the words. It was as if my body knew the songs, as if they’d been folded in there, imprinted, as if other voices, my ancestor’s voices, became my own. I opened my mouth, and they flowed through me.” (2)

These words, spoken by the character Zohara, struck me because I experience a taste of this feeling when I am singing with my fellow Jews on Friday nights. I have always loved singing, from my days as a child in choirs in suburban Chicago to my three different stints living in Jerusalem and getting to “shul hop” each week–each Shabbat finding a different community within which to immerse myself and sing my heart out. For many years I did not know the meaning of the words of the Siddur, but I sang anyway. For the melodies, almost always new to me, carried me along. And at a certain point I knew enough of the words to easily integrate a new tune into my prayer.

I did not intend it, but the theme of my summer has been singing, music and song. At the same time as I was singing at the “Song is Prayer” retreat and reading Songs for the Brokenhearted, I found myself listening to Jad Abumrad’s 13 episode podcast on Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician and founder of the Afrobeat genre of music. His music pushed boundaries and has been described as African counterpoint, the style of music where two or more melody lines play at the same time and fit together, epitomized by Bach in classical music. Kuti was also a trickster and a great thorn in the side of the repressive regimes that arose in the wake of colonialism in Nigeria.

When speaking about Kuti’s music, the famed David Byrne said: “You have this sense that there is a whole community of musicians that it takes to make the music. It’s not something that one person can sit and play guitar, strum through the whole thing and do it. This is music where no one part is more important than the others. The whole thing exists by all these cogs in the wheels working together. And if you take out some parts then it stops working. This is kind of an acoustic model, a sonic model for a kind of more perfect community. Where everybody’s got their place and they do their part and when everybody does that then you get this wonderful thing that emerges. And it actually feels good, when you play that kind of music. It feels transcendent. It takes you to a different place. In some ways [Fela’s music is] telling you this kind of cooperation amongst people can exist. It is possible. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get it… but it means that as human beings, this is possible.” (3)

I know that it is ambitious and perhaps a little crazy to think that what we do together once a month at services on a Friday night can approach the genius of Fela Kuti, but I take inspiration from these words. When we are singing, speaking to God and working together to give voice to our longings, we are creating prayers that are so much more powerful than if we were davening alone.

In fact, the Alter Rebbe (4), the founding rabbi of the Chabad branch of Hasidic Judaism taught that “There are gates in heaven that cannot be opened except by melody and song.” The Piaseczner Rebbe (5) of the Warsaw Ghetto said that “The niggun is one of the keys to the soul that will awaken it and its feelings; through it, one can open one’s soul, letting some of it emerge.” As Joey Weisenberg writes in his book The Torah of Music, “The Tanakh, the Talmud, and the Midrash refer many hundreds of times to music, the Zohar writes of music over and over, and the Hasidic Masters were awash in song, writing about music frequently and singing all the time. Indeed, the Torah and its commentaries are nothing but an attempt to articulate in words what the divine Song says directly to our hearts, and that’s why the Torah itself is called a Song." (6)

Weisenberg continues, “Music is a fundamental sign of life. To sing is to be fully alive. The Talmud describes the prophet Ezekiel coming to a valley full of dry bones. He saw that the bones joined back into the shape of a human skeleton, and that the sinews and muscles reappeared, and skin covered them, and they lay there waiting for his next vision (7)." What happens next? The Talmud picks up the story there, explaining: “The dead revived by Ezekiel stood on their feet, sang a song, and died (8).” Ezekiel was witnessing a mass resurrection, but how did he know that the bones had actually returned to life? What was the sign that they had come back to life? It was song!" Music, it seems from this story, was a “proof” that life had occurred. Hilariously, the only uncertainty, according to the Talmud, is not whether they sang, but “which song did they sing?!” Thus, music is fundamental to life. As soon as one breathes, one sings (9).”

Over the summer, I introduced two new service formats. Once a month on Friday nights we now have Nefesh: Songs for the Soul and on select Shabbat mornings we have Ruach: A Mini-Minyan. I hope that you will come and check them out in the weeks and months ahead. Each in its own way is an attempt to approach Fela Kuti’s vision of people working together to create good music and practice the hard work of being in community, truly being together in this world.

As Joey Weisenberg reminded us while we were in Chicago, throughout history rooms of Jews have looked a lot more like this one than the polished productions we see in the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem or on the livestreams from Central Synagogue or the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. Throughout time and space there have been small groups of Jews in relatively small rooms making music with the other people who also live in this time and this place. “Sing Unto God A New Song” as Debbie Friedman and our Friday night prayers put it.

Just as powerfully as the argument made for music by groups of Yemeni-Jewish women singing together in Arabic or Fela Kuti’s 30 piece bands from West Africa, or our traditional Jewish sources, the public intellectual Rebecca Solnit argues for cinema. She argues for going to the movies in public! She writes: "Something sublime happens when we, the congregation, come into a temple of cinema and see the literally larger than life unfold. [There is something profound about] committing yourself to sitting in the dark - no fast forward, no rewind, no choosing another film unless you’re prowling the multiplex. There is something profound about sitting in the dark with strangers for an extended period, about all the beloved rituals of standing in line, the little colored tickets from the ticket booth. The alluring smell of popcorn and the concession stand, the trailers before the feature, and all the rest. The everyday habit of coexisting with others is, I think, foundational to democracy, because democracy is itself based on having a sense of connection to and something in common with people who are not like you, not known to you." (10)

The recently deceased poet laureate of Colorado, Andrea Gibson wrote: "Even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is." (11) As we confront the profound changes in our world, as we meditate on the one small change, the one small loss, of going to the movies not being what it once was, it is hopeful to tell the truth about this fact. For the High Holy Days are about telling the truth. Seeing the truth of who you are, hopefully engaging in the process of t'shuvah to make amends where you have missed the mark and resolving to do better. And, in this case, thinking about what structures, what services, what associations we want to engage with in the year to come to make our lives a little better, and our synagogue, our society, our democracy a little better. And a little more fun as my dad is always quick to remind me!

At the end of her newsletter Solnit brings lines from the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times." Solnit adds: "And maybe about hope, love, beauty, forests, rivers, light and darkness, summer and winter, apple blossom time, about flowers on graves and foxes in the snow and birds of a feather, about fast cars, and the Old Town road, about who we have been and who we can be." (12)

Shana Tovah. May you be Inscribed in The Book of Life.

End Notes

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/opinion/trump-autocracy-bad-ideas.html?searchResultPosition=1
2. Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari, page 328.
3. Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Podcast by Jad Abumrad. Higher Ground and Audible Originals. 2025. Bonus Episode. “African Counterpoint,” released January 30, 2026.
4. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745-1812)
5. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943)
6. The Torah of Music by Joey Weisenberg, page 2.
7. Ezekiel 37:1-14
8. Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 92b
9. The Torah of Music by Joey Weisenberg, page 3.
10. Meditations in an Emergency. In the Dark Times Will There Also Be Singing, Substack newsletter #100. By Rebecca Solnit. June 14, 2026.
11. Take Me With You by Andrea Gibson, page 107.
12. Solnit, Rebecca. Meditations in an Emergency. June 14, 2026.