Jews with Horns @ Aish Arts - Part 1: Greg Wall

thank you good evening wow it's it's great to be here uh when I became a rabbi in 2006 it was not an intention no intention to be a congregational Rabbi at all I had this perverse habit a little hobby of studying medeval rinic texts uh cuz I had seen all the Seinfeld reruns there was nothing else to do in my spare time except get car lug these books around and read and after doing that for quite a few years someone said you know you should really take your your examinations for SM you should try to get uh rinic ordination so I did it more or less just as a some type of um gate poost you know just to acknowledge the work that I put in with with absolutely no intention of being a congregational Rabbi and then uh as fate would have it I got a phone call uh in early 2009 from a friend saying Greg I have a sh for you and I said I'm not interested I'm playing music I don't want to be a congregational Rabbi and he said it's in the East Village you should check it out I said all right I mean I spent a lot of time in East Village met my wife there anyway I didn't think too much of it but I went to the interview with the search committee and uh a couple months later I was the rabbi of the six Street Community synagogue in the East Village um but I only did it full-time because I was already doing music full-time so I kept that going together and it was really hard it was not a a lot of uh not a high membership at the time and I couldn't really make a living as a rabbi luckily I had something safe to fall back on playing the saxophone but we did uh start the Center for Jewish arts and literacy and every night of the week we had an opportunity for people to explore Judaism in a comfortable non-threatening very open way followed by uh either a concert with worldclass musicians or a poetry reading or original avangard Jewish theater all sorts of really cool things the kind of place that I would want to hang out at and uh it became pretty successful and uh I I did that until uh about 2012 and I realized I would never be able to afford to live in that neighborhood but anyway we had a great time and we really proved that there is a connection between the Arts and spirituality and specifically Jewish spirituality and that they made great partners and by looking at Judaism through the lens of a creative artist or looking at the Arts through the the TR tradition and inside of Judaism you could probably have a more fulfilling life I always knew that music was the most spiritual thing I could possibly do I grew up going to a a reformed synagogue at least until my bar mitzvah after that I was out of there uh and I never thought I would return U when I was in college if someone had asked me if I was Jewish I would have said I'm not but my parents are maybe some of you could relate to that um and through unbelievable mechanisms of the cosmos I ended up um playing actually doing what I call mercenary work my mercenary phase in the early 80s I was playing cidic weddings on Monday and Tuesday nights deep in the bowels of Brooklyn that's before Brooklyn was Brooklyn back then Brooklyn was just Brooklyn and um Williamsburg was was either uh all Spanish speaking or all Yiddish speaking and there was uh nothing else happening there and one night I was playing at this greasy catering hall in Williamsburg not a Spanish-speaking venue and it was one of those weddings where maybe 700 people 800 people were there unbelievable uh collection of people and I was playing in this band that would play music for the dancing and the way it works in those circles is it's all one big song it's one big medley you start playing o o and you go until they tell you to stop usually about 45 minutes for 45 minutes they would dance without stopping all right would we call this an endurance gig it's good for your chops you know you play for 45 minutes without stopping and you know you can uh you feel like you had a pretty good workout on this night after 45 minutes we're looking at the band leader who was a a very nice uh bub ofid uh and we're looking at him time for a break just keep playing all right we liked him he was a nice guy so after another 15 minutes we've been playing one hour Non-Stop and we're looking at him again no don't get me play and he says no keep playing so we you musicians are looking at each other after another 5 minutes we started going like this you know we're going to throttle him we're going to choke him he said no keep going keep going keep going we went for an hour and a half finally we stopped after an hour and a half we stopped theum didn't stop they were still dancing and singing but they were singing another song they weren't even listening to us I said man they're not they were transported that's what I wanted CU that's what I wanted to do when I play music I wanted to be transported into just another Zone and I realized that night the power of music and I was intrigued I wanted to be able to know music that way and just be a conduit and you know all the preparation and all the the scales and arpeggios and learning tunes and jam sessions playing all this really was just preparation to be sort of a blank slate and let everything come together and around the same time I was getting interested in studying classic texts and finding out something about being Jewish cuz I realized being in these environs that I knew nothing about my Jewish Heritage at all nothing and I'm with people who you know whose Judaism is important part of their life but also who are living the kind of spiritual life that I thought you needed to you know go to Tibet or uh or or someplace in Siberia you know to and study all this other U mystical literature I realized that we had it right here in our tradition so I started studying and I realized the connection that there is a phenomenon almost unique to Judaism phenomenon is prophecy it's prophecy being able to cultivate your inner listening to such an extent that you hear things that most people can't hear and realize that's what music is really you know I mean these days the music schools are turning out very very accomplished technicians who can play play faster than any human being has ever played faster before and they know this but most of the time they don't really sound any different but you can tell in a couple of notes of somebody who's really being a channel for some higher power through their music and I started to find ways to find out how I could translate this whole concept of Prophecy into my music now those of you that have been U fortunate enough to go to a a synagogue over the past month or so and hear the story of The Exodus from Egypt very famous story and of course you know even if the only thing you do Jewish all year is go to a Passover seder you hear about this story and sometimes the the leaving of Egypt gets the most attention but if you really look and you read between the lines you realize that there's introduction of Prophecy to the Jewish people and the moment that introduced Prophet to prophecy to the Jewish people was a musical moment it was at the splitting of the Red Sea and after the Red Sea split and they were saved what did they do they sang and the Talma talks about the nature of this song that it was a prophetic song that every single person had a prophetic experience and of course it's from there the potential was there and we see we had great figures in our history all of the people that you read about in the Bible from Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca and Rachel and Leia Jacob they were all prophets they heard voices it was the voice of God and later on we see the books of the prophets you the Tama tells us though that from most of the prophets had to have music in order to have a prophecy there was a connection between music and prophecy but what is what's the nature of this prophecy so there's a clue to the nature of this prophecy in in in a section one of my favorite sections luckily you know being a robab I can say that actually about any section and and and and be speaking the truth because it's such a great book but uh some of you might be familiar with this famous story and it comes from the uh the the par and in this Moses's brother and sister Aaron and Miriam are talking about Moses behind his back God doesn't like that too much gives him a little punishment but in addition to that gives what we call in the Yeshiva muser gives some some very harsh language pointing out that they have got a serious character flaw that they have to take care of and God tells Aaron and Miriam they cannot compare themselves to Moses and the way that God tells them that is very interesting and I think to me this is the key to understanding prophecy and the connection with music Torah says I speak to Moses face to face in in some type of vision below and not in a riddle not in a puzzle not in an allegorical way which implies if Moses is the only person in the history of the Jewish people that had that relation that everybody else that had prophecy had it in the form of an allegory had it in a form of something that they had to work to figure out I said wow as a jazz musician that's really what I try to do is try to react and figure out what these combinations of notes represent allegorically is it just a B flat and an FP no it's a lot more than that it's a lot more than that each combination of notes represents great ideas same thing about this book one of the unique things about Judaism especially the Torah is that it's unlike any other fundamental text ever written before because it's an auditory language it's meant to be listened and each word has so many levels that it can be interpreted it's not like reading Aristotle or Plato or or uh or or any classic religious text at all it's the only system where you can get three or four words and go on and get layers and layers of meaning it's not surprising you can go to a group of jazz musicians we've never played together we're going to just go up and and and start playing because we realize that no matter how many times we play a 12 Bar Blues there's always more there's more meaning I can get of of playing Jerome Kerns all the things you are or playing any of these things that become really vehicles for prophecy in a certain way um anyway I'm I'm very very grateful to be able to live my life being informed by this because it really gives a great meaning in into everything that I choose to do and for those of you that haven't seriously checked out the multi-layered aspect of our principal text I urge you to check it out it's worth your time it's definitely worth your time the stories are nice that's the beautiful thing about you get a good story at the very least but it's a lot more than that and uh I think that's it I want to thank thank you for giving me the opportunity it's it's so therapeutic for me to be able to verbalize you know my relationship with the two passions in my life and um I uh bless all of you that you should be able to get as much satisfaction from music and spirituality as I do and uh thank you very much and