“Thank you for this holy work,” my Rabbi said, grinning his friendly grin from behind thick glasses. I’d never thought of cataloguing books in the synagogue library as “holy” work. I looked down at my shoes.
“You’re welcome,” I stammered, shifting in my plastic chair. “I guess I just thought of it as helping out, something I can do.”
“It’s really important work, and you’ve chosen to do it, in fact, to return to doing it for the third time. It’s holy work,” he nodded.
What is holy work? What is holy?
I’d thought of holy work as being what he does: visiting the sick, comforting the families of people who’ve died, saving a life. But never did I see myself as the giver of holiness. A mitzvah now and then maybe, like paying a bit for the woman in front of me in the grocery line, so she didn’t have to put her cheese back. She really wanted that cheese. I’m a cheese lover, I understand.
But it’s almost embarrassing, doing these small mitzvahs, when the whole world needs saving, when our synagogue’s Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World) committee isn’t even meeting because there are too many places that need our help since October 7.
What is holy?
I’ve been learning about it from Karen Stiller’s latest book, Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life, which I read in delectable doses, like picking my favourite chocolates from the box. It’s written from a Christian point of view (she’s Christian, after all), but it doesn’t ring false to my Jewish neshamah. She dares to name holy acts. She dares to call herself, and all of us, a saint. She dares to name the divine spark which sometimes flames and sometimes sputters, but hopefully is never extinguished.
Karen and I have never met, yet she’s a kindred spirit, even though her beloved husband was a priest, and mine’s a cellist. Even though she’s a much more accomplished and published writer. Even though she has three kids, and I have two.
We both did the King’s MFA program. She’s a Dartmouth girl too. She loves vintage and agonizes over wanting those really cute little plates in the antique store (I’ve given in more to the plates than she has…). And she writes about things that are important to me, like trying again when you’ve missed the mark (Teshuvah), prayer (Tefillah) and repairing the world (Tikkun Olam). I had a funny dream about visiting her, and I told her about it, and she told her husband, and they both laughed. I liked that.
And I love that she’s taken on the topic of holiness, because it’s a word I think we’re too afraid to say these days, the days some call “post-religious.”
All my working life, I’ve worked with artists, especially performers; backstage, in the audience, on Zoom, in the recording studio. It’s never easy, for them or me. What seems so effortless hides the effort, the practicing, the boring repetition. Making it alive and sparkling, meaningful, making each person feel like this art is coming just to you, that’s all part of the artistry that I so respect and admire.
This week we had a bunch of concerts in long-term care homes and hospitals. Sometimes, those audiences can be shy, confused, asleep or disengaged. Mainly though, they are participatory, full of joy and receptive. But there’s always at least one in each crowd, like the man who was restrained in his wheelchair in Kentville, spending all his energy during the entire performance trying to kick the woman sitting in front of him. Did he like Silver Bells, the cello echoing the singer in the words of the chorus? Did Dashing Through the Snow bring up a snow globe glimmer from his childhood? Did any of it wash over him like a balm, as it did to the woman in the front row, swaying, smiling and singing her heart out, even if she couldn’t always remember the words?
The final concert was in a psychiatric hospital ward, our first time there. The musicians had to mask, and it was hot in the small room, chairs and wheelchairs facing the players cramped up against a wall full of supplies, a hospital toilet behind the pianist. Each window was crammed with plants reaching to the outside world, all in need of repotting. Machines beeped, residents checked pagers and dashed in and out, light on their sneakered feet.
A man wearing a Canadian Veterans t-shirt and ballcap stared ahead, his back ramrod straight, no part of him visibly moving to the familiar Christmas carols. After a few numbers, he stood, pacing towards the musicians, but as if he couldn’t really see them. A staff member gently took his hand, leading him to a walk in the hall. Later he returned with a woman who crouched in front of him, feeding him yoghurt as she tossed her long dreadlocks over her shoulder. He opened his mouth, anticipating her hand, pointing to his tongue with his index finger as she patiently raised the spoon.
Another man, one who’d loved music and raised a house full of musicians, rearranged the plaid blanket on his lap as Deck the Halls rang out. In my corner, perched on a stool between a wall and a desk, I attempted to sing harmony, and he heard it and looked at me and smiled.
Our singer had been inviting me up to join in with the musicians, and I really hoped she wasn’t going to do it again on this day, in that place. I felt unprepared, sweaty, still recovering from a month-long Covid cough. I couldn’t get my breath properly behind a mask to match her languid jazzy tones. But still she called on me. Let me do my best, I prayed silently.
This time, I found the melody to Silent Night right away, the “real” singer a third below me, my usual landing spot as a lifelong Alto. I tried to blend with her voice, to match her cut-offs, to be the best I could be. A woman with spiky grey hair in a wheelchair, who’d held and worried her husband’s hand all during the concert, was suddenly singing, staring at the ceiling. After thirty minutes of agitated stillness, she was mouthing all the words, a hand fluttering upwards.
“All is calm. All is bright,” we sang in harmony, our warm voices pushing through the masks and into the hearts. The room was silent too, save for our melodies hugging them, the cello and the piano supporting us, soaring around us like doves. A holy moment.
When it was time to go, the husband lingered shyly, like he wanted to say something. Finally, he looked down, saying we’d never met, but had talked in the past. That he played the viola (“But nothing like him,” he said, pointing to Shimon), and that we had dear mutual friends. I’d been the one who’d told him about one of them dying. The voice behind the mask was unmistakeably New York Jewish. His wife stared ahead as he patted her shoulder.
The staff released each person’s brakes and wheeled them one by one back to their rooms while the musicians packed up. “I loved it so much,” a woman with silver hair said, touching my arm. “Bless you all.”
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei, Jacob dreams about the ladder and angels going up and down it. G-d is with him, giving him an important message about the Covenant. He wakes up, takes the stone he’s used for a pillow and makes it into an altar, because he realizes he’s in a holy place.
Holiness happening when we’re not looking for it, when our ordinary becomes someone else’s unforgettable.
It wasn’t the mall. Nor Christmas Eve in our childhood church. Our shared breath, a twining melody remembered. Joy created by holy hands in an unlikely place, respite. I’m calling it holy.
Comments