The Soul Seeks its Melodies
A Review of "The Soul Seeks its Melodies: Music in Jewish Thought" by Dov Schwartz
“[Music is] an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind is unaware that it is philosophizing.” - Arnold Schopenhauer
I love studying music. For me, it is a window into so many other parts of life: sociology, theology, history, politics, food, culture, philosophy, psychology, and art. It is this experience of study that has given rise to a personal adage of mine: Everything is about everything.
Here’s an example — a mishnah that you will rarely find taught in Hebrew school:
R. Joshua says: This is what is meant when they said: “While a beast lives it has but one voice; after it is dead its voice is multiplied sevenfold.” How is its voice multiplied sevenfold? Its two horns become two trumpets, its hide becomes a drum, its entrails are used for lyres, and its chitterlings for harps. -Mishnah Kinnim 3:6
I’m not sure what my teachers would have done with this one.
What I love about sources like this is how they point to a vast array of potential insights, questions, and areas of inquiry:
Anthropology: This mishnah reveals the originally violent source of the making of musical instruments, in which the tools of the hunt—and its victims—are transformed into vessels of music. This source is thus continuous with a world in which the hunter’s bow is strung with entrails to become a lyre. What does this tell us about music? And what does our contemporary distance from the processes of instrument making, like we are from from our food sources, mean about our society and its music culture?
Poetry: The scene presented is an ancient echo of the words of Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai: “Don't stop after beating the swords into plowshares, don't stop! Go on beating and make musical instruments out of them. Whoever wants to make war again will have to turn them into plowshares first.”1
Psychology: The source further relates to the topics of Freudian drives and sublimation, and perhaps how music mediates the impulses of the id.
Biblical Studies: This source connects to the origins of music in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 4), during which the Generations of Cain develop the hallmarks of civilization: city building, musical instruments, metal tools, and animal husbandry, and also end up with a profoundly unethical society which originates epic boasting and polygamy. This implicates music in the broader context of the Torah’s critique of civilization.
Art: How has the connection between musical instruments and violence been depicted iconographically?
Rabbinics: Rabbi Joshua’s saying is offered as an example of what happens when a person makes a vow to offer two birds to God, and by consequence has to end up offering seven or eight. Where else in rabbinic literature are musical instruments and processes used as metaphors for other situations in life?
Historical Organology: How does this source align with what we know about instrument production in the second-century Ancient Near East?
Biography: Rabbi Joshua was a levitical singer in the Temple before its destruction. Is his a Jewish proverb, recounted from his life as a sacred musician? Or is this a Greek proverb with parallels in the Hellenistic world?
Studying music in such a way beckons new worlds of understanding and new questions in pursuit of truth. So when I come across a book that explores music in this broad way, I am eager to pick it up.
Dov Schwartz’s “The Soul Seeks its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is one such book. It is perhaps the first comprehensive analysis of the place of music in Jewish thought. Whereas Jewish musicology focuses largely on sounds, practices, and/or cultural boundaries, Schwartz’s formidable volume tracks the evolution of music as an idea which shaped, and was shaped by, the writings of great Jewish thinkers, including philosophers, theologians, and mystics. Transcending the historical soundscape of the Jewish people (though not without rich reference to it), Schwartz instead maps the Jewish musical mindscape of the past two millennia. As former head of both the Philosophy and Music Departments at Bar-Ilan University, he stands uniquely positioned to offer this wide-ranging and groundbreaking perspective.
The book’s introductory chapter explores its methodology, defining the parameters of Jewish thought and how ideas about music, which are often on the margins of philosophical discourse, nevertheless both reflect and mold it. The legend of David’s self-playing lyre (BT Berachot 3b) thus intrigued Jewish thinkers as a meditation on broader subjects: the nature of miracles, the mystical dispelling of negative forces, and the symbolism of lyre-playing in their own respective environments. Weaving together the many aspects of Jewish thought through which a musical thread might pass, Schwartz defines his task as outlining a history of how music formed — and was formed by —Jewish ideas and religious consciousness.
The core chapters of the book take many approaches to realize its ambitious goals. Chapter Two (“Assessing the Role of Music”) deals with how Jews classified music throughout history — as a metaphysical science, a source of temptation, a form of culture, an aesthetic art, or even as a mythical force. Chapter Three (“Music and the Jewish People”) addresses how music has been deployed in asserting the uniqueness or “advantage” of the Jewish people, presenting widely through the history of Jewish apologetics.
Chapter Four (“Music as a Tool”) begins to outline a conceptual history of Jewish practices and uses for music. This is the first of Schwartz’s tripartite taxonomy of Jewish approaches to the value of music, which exist both as a continuum and concurrently across Jewish thought:
functional or instrumental standing: music is a means for the attainment of utilitarian aims—religious (such as prophecy and communion) or “secular” (such as healing or peace of mind).
representative or metaphorical standing: music represents sublime values at the cosmic and religious level (musical harmony represents cosmic harmony, music’s earthly dimensions reflect the musical dimensions of the kabbalistic divine sefirot, and so forth).
essential and independent standing: music is intrinsically important, and therefore, it is also a form of dialogue with God and with others.2
Chapter Five (“Towards Music as an Independent Field: Representation, Language, Dialogue”) takes up these latter two categories, showing how music went from representing various forms of order (cosmic, mystical, human, and theological) towards having independent revelatory value, as in the modern writings of Franz Rosenzsweig, Andre Hajdu, and even Professor Jacob Neusner.3 Chapter Six (“Music, Zionism, Religion”) goes on to describe with the broad role of music as a motif in religious-Zionist texts, especially its expansive place in the thought of Rav Kook and his disciples.
Magic, political theory, philosophy, art, psychology, — these are just a few of the areas of Jewish thought in which Schwartz maps the motif of music. His book is incredibly exciting in its thoroughness, digging into myriads of primary sources hitherto unexamined in the established canons of Jewish musicology, as well as with delicious footnotes witnessing many Hebrew-language dissertations and studies in this field over the past several decades that are lesser known in English-speaking scholarship.
Like a musicological superfood, Schwartz’s volume provides prodigiously rich intellectual nutrients in an incredibly concentrated form. At 6”x9” and just over three-hundred pages, the book is deceivingly light, yet with precise organization and scholarly girth that make it punch far above its physical weight. This makes the book ideal for assigning in the classroom - each chapter is clearly structured with headings and subheadings, along with a helpful summary at the end of each one. The hefty price tag ($139) clearly means that it is intended for university classrooms and libraries with commensurate budgets.4 But I think that any intellectually-engaged Jew interested in music should put it on their Hanukkah list, or at least submit it for acquisition by their local library.
The book was originally published in Hebrew in 2013 with the title Kinnor Nishmati: HaMuiskah BaHagut HaYehudit (“Violin of My Soul: Music in Jewish Thought”). Batya Stein’s translation is superb, giving Schwartz’s prose the sharp, weighty precision required to corral the wide-ranging issues of Jewish thought into one musical pasture. One laments the omission of a full chapter from the original Hebrew volume — “Chapter 8: Religious Consciousness and Creation: Composers & Thinkers.” This chapter allows Schwartz to complete the continuum of Jewish musical thought, analyzing how composers themselves analyzed Jewish ideas, rather than the other way around. This is giving me major intellectual FOMO; perhaps Dov or Batya will oblige English speakers one day with this missing piece of the puzzle.
The book’s epilogue shows Schwartz at his most personal, and it is here that the reader will appreciate the tensions created by a love of music within a religious personality. Schwartz became passionate about music as a young man while also living an observant life, and he brings a number of vignettes highlighting the tensions between music and the conservative exigencies of religion and fatherhood. “Music is a way of life, as is also Halakhah [Jewish law],” writes Schwartz. “They can be reconciled, but those who think that they coalesce delude themselves.” He concludes the volume thus:
“This book was born out of deep appreciation and love of music and its messengers and, possibly, also from the initial blooms of my reconciliation with the choice of an academic, non-musical path. It is my prayer that my love will not upset my judgment.”
The journey towards reconciliation with music in religious life is an arduous one. As I wrote previously, it is in the nature of mitzvah — which limits freedom — and music — which expands freedom — to conflict. But if anyone has created a worthy map for this journey through the many islands of thought to which music lays claim, it is Dov Schwartz. For to he for whom music is everything, everything is about everything.
A Note from the Author: Thank you for reading Beyond the Music. This month, I began to offer an option for paid subscriptions. This is encouraged but not required — Beyond the Music will remain fully-accessible and free to all who want to read it. Taking a paid subscription supports me in my unfolding journey of writing about Jewish music. For those of you who are moved to take a paid subscription — thank you so much for supporting me in this special way. For those who are or who remain free subscribers — thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work. I appreciate you all.
This poem was included in the Reconstructionist prayer book, Kol Haneshemah (Wyncote, PA: The Reconstructionist Press, 1996): 777.
Dov Schwartz, The Soul Seeks its Melodies, 286.
This last approach is the one taken in Joey Weisenberg’s The Torah of Music, in which the musical forms celebrated by the book are seen to model and teach ethics and sensitivity in a therapeutic religious context. I wrote about this at length in my review of the book earlier this month.
Prices like this make me believe in Ted Gioia’s recent assessment of the deathwish within academic publishing.