A Jew in Music

It’s ironic but this smallest state is blessed with a great symphony orchestra. Larry Rachleff wields the baton, in this his bar mitzvah year with the orchestra. We chatted a couple of weeks ago about being Jewish, about how being Jewish affects his work, his sensibilities, and about his decision, to play works by Richard Wagner.

As a boy in New London he grew up the son of a Conservative Jew who started attending minyan when his father-in-law died and then kept on going until his own death at age 82. “He was the minyan man and he would open up the synagogue.” During that time he developed a relationship with a rabbi with whom he studied Torah, especially what Rachleff calls the “integrity” of Torah which was passed on to him and which he is trying to imbue in his own child, a boy of 5. “We talk to him about his Jewishness and will continue to,” he reports.

Rachleff defines himself as “more spiritually oriented than religious.” His wife was raised Anglican but has Jewish roots on her father’s side and has lived in Israel so she has a wonderful component of both.” When I asked if he celebrated Christian holidays as well as Jewish ones, his answer again reflected his spiritual, non-denominational perspective. Yes Christmas, and yes, he’s gone to church on Easter. In all his travels he participates either directly or indirectly in what he feels is the deep spiritual faith of people. “I’ve always been moved by it. We’ve spent days in Assisi so we can sample the energy of St. Francis.” And does this spirituality influence his music? “It would be hard not to be who you are without all of the influences. It’s there; you can’t erase who you are.”

Inevitably the conversation turned to Wagner and his decision to perform him. First some background. Wagner, one of the 19th century’s most magnificent composers of magisterial music, was also one of the century’s outstanding anti-Semites who, by lending his name to the movement made Jew hatred culturally respectable. Judaism was inherently alien and inferior to European culture, he preached. In his notorious Das Judentum in der Musik (Jews in Music) Wagner denied the existence of any Jewish cultural creativity. Musical originality was totally inaccessible to the Jew. The Jew is the most heartless of all human beings, alien and pathetic in the midst of a society he cannot understand, whose history and evolution are foreign to him. There’s more, but you get the idea.

Rachleff has been quoted as saying that “it was important to do this,” to perform Wagner. But why, I asked? “Well, it’s been an enormous struggle for me. Mostly out of the deepest respect for my family and my family’s family. “So it wasn’t just Wagner I couldn’t bring myself to do. Some of the music of Richard Strauss—nearly a Nazi—I don’t know if he was a sympathizer or he was just protecting himself… And so I waited and waited and then I started to see some revered maestros—Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim bringing to Israel the music of Wagner and Strauss.” And while the reaction there was at best mixed, “the point they were making was ‘Listen, this is music of grand and great worth. And what others did with it, perhaps was not necessarily completely their own doing.’ To this day I’ve only conducted and performed one piece of Wagner. But I haven’t made a night of it. And I’m delighted that we did do it because the prelude of the Liebestod [from Tristan und Isolde] is enormously gratifying and deep and wonderful music. I guess the point is our message is to present all these issues and things with the fullest of our integrity.”

The rest of our conversation covered music and what it means and why we listen and how black notes on white pages are transformed into soul stirring glory by the skill of the musician who can take a piece written by Mozart (“Probably the single greatest creature who has ever lived on the planet,”) and bring it to life. But those remarks are for another time when more column inches are available.

Have you read the November 9 New Yorker article on Gaza yet? Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is the centerpiece, used as a metaphor by each side. For Israelis he represents the inhumane lawlessness of Hamas in Gaza, for Palestinian Arabs, he’s but one man isolated from his family, like all of Gaza is from the whole world. To me his kidnapping is another example of Arab response to nobody taking their case seriously. Yassir Arafat would order the hijacking of a commercial airplane. Now it’s Shalit upon whom all of Israel, and through Israel all the world, is focused. Hamas wants for his return fourteen hundred individuals, four hundred and fifty of whom have been convicted of terrorist killings. One Jew is equivalent to 1,400 Arabs? I’m surprised they admit it. The chief “negotiator” between Hamas and Israel is Osama Mozini, a professor of education at the Islamic University. The New Yorker reporter “asked him why he could not be more flexible in his negotiations for Shalit.”

Mozini began reciting the names of Gazan prisoners. Hassan Salameh, is serving forty-eight consecutive life sentences for recruiting suicide bombers. Walid Anjes helped plan the bombing of at least three devastating attacks. He has twenty-six life sentences. Abdel Hadi Suleiman Ghneim’s name came up. According to Mozini all he was doing was riding in a bus when he grabbed the steering wheel and took it over a cliff. (Mozini laughed at this point, apparently seeing the humor in the situation.) Sixteen people died, many others were wounded—including Ghneim who received a life sentence for every person who died on the bus. “These punishments struck Mozini as ludicrous.”

With such people Israel is supposed to negotiate? With Hamas whose charter maintains that “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad”? The last time Israel bargained with kidnappers, it turned over a mass murderer and received in compensation the corpses of two Israeli soldiers. Israeli families, wanted their sons back for a decent Jewish burial, but from an objective viewpoint it’s lunacy to trade murderers for the bodies of people murdered. It can only encourage more cross-border kidnappings. Relatives of Palestinian prisoners have gone on record that more Israelis should be kidnapped to exchange for those in Israel’s jails. “Just outside Rafah, the smuggling capital of Gaza,” reports the New Yorker, “there is a billboard with a portrait of Shalit, behind bars, juxtaposed with a photograph of a masked Hamas fighter. The Arabic text declares, ‘Your prisoner will not have safety and security until our prisoners have safety and security.’”

In fact, the Arabs who say, as does Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister “We are all Shalits” are right. They are prisoners, but not of Israel, but of their own rage. Rockets raining down on Israeli towns, suicide bombers blowing up pizzerias are actions met with incarceration. Israel is also prisoner of Arab extremists. It’s like the cancer patient whose disease is being treated as chronic. It’s not too bad today, but what will tomorrow’s test results indicate? When will the next plane explode, the next suicide murderer detonate himself killing innocents who are merely riding a bus or crossing a street. To the bomber there are no innocents. Like Shalit everyone in Israel, whether citizen or tourist is part of the occupiers who must be driven into the sea and if the world will not provide us with warplanes and tanks, we’ll do it our way.

The paranoids who control the Muslim world in their grip with their grudges, imposing their fundamentalist religious beliefs, would rather die than concede that Allah has returned Israel to the Jews. They talk of al-Nakba, the calamity. But the real calamity is war and grudges and kidnappings and rockets and suicide bombings all for nothing, for nothing except more blood, Jewish and Arab. Tom Friedman was right in last week’s Times. Nobody over there wants peace; it’s all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Yousuf, the Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister says, “we are all Shalits,” to which I add, “caught in a world of madness unimagined even by Kafka.”