Reflection for Shabbat: The Heart of Music is Trust

I was 16 years old when I conducted an orchestra for the first time—a real orchestra, at any rate. I had conducted orchestras playing on the stereo in our living room since I was three years old, waving a baton given to me by my oldest brother’s junior high orchestra teacher. My brothers and I were all musicians. Growing up my dream was to be the next Leonard Bernstein.

My big moment finally came at Interlochen Music Camp. (I played the tuba in the orchestra and the euphonium in the band.) In a tradition that goes back a long time, every concert at Interlochen ends not with applause but with the “Interlochen Theme,” a melody composed by Howard Hanson at Interlochen one summer in the 1940s, which you can hear prominently in his Second Symphony. A student always conducts this, and it’s a big honor to be chosen. My chance came that summer.

As I walked up to the podium, I was tremendously excited: This was the moment I had been waiting for my whole life.

But then a thought arose: What if I raise my hands and my baton—and they don’t play?!

It had never occurred to me before, but in that moment it was terrifyingly obvious: I had absolutely no control. I was entirely dependent on the goodwill and trust of the hundred other teenagers with instruments arrayed in front of me.

It didn’t take long for my mind to work itself out: While I may not have had control, I had no reason to think that these friends and good people would want to embarrass me (or themselves, for that matter). I had played in many bands and orchestras by that point, and I had never witnessed a time when the group just refused to play when the conductor led them. And I remembered a concept my mother coined, which she called being an “inverse paranoid”: Think the world is out to do you good. (That kind of sums up my mother.) I took a breath, the thought passed, I went to the podium, I raised my arms and lowered them, and together we made the music of Howard Hanson come to life.

You may have heard this story from me before. It’s one I come back to frequently, not only because it was so memorable but also because its fundamental lessons about trust and relationship are ones I relearn time and time again. With the benefit of age and whatever modicum of wisdom I’ve developed, I can see now that at the heart of the story is a mindfulness practice of managing some really powerful emotions in the moment: anticipation, joy, hope on the one hand; fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of rejection on the other. For a split second on the way to fulfilling my childhood dream, I stood between these two emotional poles. Thankfully, as narrowness and constriction pressed in, I was able to acknowledge the reality of those emotions and then set them aside to enter a wider expanse—a space in which music could be made.

Parashat Beshallach brings us to the dramatic highpoint of the Exodus story. After 430 years, the people have finally left Egypt and are en route to the Promised Land. But, of course, it doesn’t take long before they find themselves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s army—between the promise of freedom and expanse on the other side, and the reality of narrowness and constriction they have known for so long. We can hear the existential angst in their voices as they cry to Moses: “It is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness’” (Ex. 14:12).

We know the rest of the story: They enter the narrow expanse (think on that term) that the Divine creates in the sea to reach the other side. “They trusted in YHVH and in Moses, YHVH’s servant” (14:31). The key word here, to me, is trust—my translation of emunah, often rendered as faith. I have found throughout my life and career that trust is the thing I pay the most attention to in just about any relationship or situation: Do I trust this person? Do I trust this pilot to fly the plane? Do I trust my children who say they’ll walk the dog (read last week’s reflection for the answer on that one)? Do I trust this leader? And, critically: Do others trust me? Do I trust myself?

Over and over again, with each breath and each beat of the heart, we quietly do this work of trusting—in our own bodies and minds, in the promises of others. When we suffer traumas, it’s often because trust has been broken, and the work of recovering that trust can be long and difficult. But that just underscores the reality: We are always at the edge of the sea, Pharaoh’s army—the forces of narrowness and constriction—approaching. We’re always confronted with this work of trust. A life of practice, a life of faith, is in large measure about developing our capacity to trust and be trusted.

When they reach the other side of the sea, the Israelites engage in one of the most remarkable moments in the entire Torah: They sing a song. Perhaps that’s a lesson of my own story and that of our ancestors: We are always confronted with the challenge, and the invitation, to trust. It is not always easy, and sometimes we may, sadly and painfully, misplace our trust. But when we do live with emunah, with faith and trust, and when that trust is reciprocated and shared—that’s when songs are sung and music is made. May we help one another to live with that trust and sing our songs together.

Shabbat shalom.