I am participating in 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes 2018 (all of my submissions can be found here).
Today’s prompt is: SONG
Let’s get this out of the way. I won’t subject you to having to hear me sing for the “song” prompt. (I have sung for the blog once — after 1000+ posts, there isn’t much that is legal that I haven’t done for the blog, it feels like (although skydiving will never happen!)).
As I have been watching coverage of vigils following yesterday’s horrific shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, I have been struck by the fact that music is such an intrinsic part of such times. Maybe because it is the only common language people can use to try to claw their way toward some type of unified expression. Maybe because, as I saw with my father-in-law when the hospice music therapist came to work with him, music reaches some primitive part of the brain that still holds memories, even after other faculties have long since departed.
In my hunt for a Hebrew song to share today, I came across something else that spoke to me, this recording of a musician in a coffee shop (a scene that undoubtedly plays out hundreds of times a day throughout the world) playing Matisyahu’s One Day.
What the musician didn’t realize was that the coffee shop patron who joined in WAS MATISYAHU HIMSELF!
This resonated with me today because it is almost impossible to wrap our heads around events like yesterday. The idea that any divine presence was there at all in such a moment of loss and pure evil is even more remote.
*** end of five minutes ***
I don’t, frankly, have any idea how to reconcile that — where G-d was in this.
I do know that, somehow, G-d is the great author. Just like Matisyahu, the author of One Day (a song also shared during at least one vigil in Pittsburgh), covertly entered into a shared moment with Clint “Kekoa” Alama and lent his voice to the song he himself wrote, this crime must somehow lead us as a nation to a place of more insight, not less. More unity, not further division.
One day this all will change
Treat people the same
Stop with the violence
Down with the hate~ Matisyahu
Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.
There is no reconciling such evil. I have learned that in this broken world God is still here holding back the degree of evil that could be happening. This is all temporary, but the sickening heart shattering reality of evil deeds are no less devastating. We ask why, but there is no answer except that evil got a foothold.
Yes, Jane. This is true. I empathize with this community in Pittsburgh so deeply.