A Love Letter to Spencer Krug

It’s easy to lose track of the fact that art still exists. Like real art. Not just the mass produced stuff that is imminently pleasurable to experience, requiring no reflection. And I’m not trashing today’s true pop art, either. I think that the uproar about Miley Cyrus over the past couple of months has been insane, and she’s legitimately creating excellent pop art. She’s just reflecting that uncomfortable, gender confused, sexual side of young adult culture that rubs those firmly seated in their understanding of what should and should not be the wrong way. But this isn’t what I want to talk about.

It’s rare and lucky when you can find an artist that grows and changes with you. It’s a strange experience, really, to have someone you’ve never met, and really probably never will meet, become an integral part of your life. And not just someone that plays a peripheral role. Someone who continually creates and releases art that matches your temporal and physical location perfectly, telling you that you’re not alone, that someone else out there actually understands the things you’re dealing with so well that they have created a magnificent piece of art that reflects and elucidates it for your perfectly. Spencer Krug has continually done this for me.

Now, I’m not going to deny being an obscurantist, but I will say outright that Spencer Krug deserves a place alongside Fiona Apple, Thom Yorke, Jack White, Beck, and whoever else you can name as the best songwriters and musicians of this era. He just doesn’t write easily digestible pop. He yelps when he sings and drags songs out beyond their proper pop song limits. He does this unapologetically. Somehow, beyond all rights, he knows that he can do this and continues to do it. I have no idea where this bravery and self confidence comes from, but he has it. This also seems to be why he unflinchingly moves his music to different places, incorporating and decorporating the least expected aspects whenever his projects become habitual. He mutates his habits and expectations so well that he named his first solo album “Organ Music, Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped.”

It’s easy to assume musicians like him are purposely oblique and hiding behind whatever smokescreen of effete culture they can throw up, but I’m convinced Krug doesn’t do this. His newest album, “Julia With Blue Jeans On,” proves this. Ignoring the title that I immediately found repellant, I gave it a listen. It is the kind of music that kept me awake because it would not leave my head. And not in the Raffi way, but in the way that my brain simply couldn’t let me ignore the importance of what I was being gifted. This is the nature of Krug’s music – you listen to it once or twice and your interest is piqued, and then after the tenth, twentieth listen, you realize you had never really heard it.

This most recent album is one that is unrelentingly simple. He did this on purpose – boiling down his complex musical past into just him and a piano. He sings about love, and Noah, and what it even means to be human, acknowledging every frailty that we all try to ignore. He makes it okay for me  to acknowledge this frailty in myself. He mourns it, he deprecates it, and he celebrates it.

Today we’re all constantly confronted with the complexity of the outside world. Our uninterrupted connection to the ceaseless flow of information from all around the world tears us away from our present, causing us to think of and focus on all of the things going on beyond us. Simultaneously, we must react by turning inside, trying to figure out how we can possibly, individually confront our own responses to these overwhelming stimuli. Spencer Krug’s new album invites us to forget all of this, invites us to look at where and who we are in our present circumstances, and to take it seriously. It invites us to look at those around us and to take them seriously as well, without relegating them to the same realm of outside as the war in Syria and the neverending financial crisis. Take the moment, the hour, to listen to and think about what he’s trying to tell us. It’s worth every penny, because it isn’t just an hour of music. It’s a well bored into our contemporary culture, releasing the pieces of our experience and humanity that there doesn’t seem to be time to visit anymore.

Moonface – Julia With Blue Jeans On

Vayeira: We Reflect God, and God Reflects Us

This week’s Torah portion, Vayeira, holds many well known and central stories of the Jewish people. The angels visiting Avraham and Sarah, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Binding of Yitzhak, are all in this one division of Genesis. Literal tomes have been written on each segment of each of the stories that comprise this portion. Usually, we talk about what we can learn from the behaviors of the characters in these stories. Avraham and Sarah’s hospitality for the angels, Avraham’s bravery in arguing for the lives of those in Sodom and Gomorrah, the many difficulties of the binding of Yitzhak – much ink has been spilled using these stories as examples for our own behavior.

Our sages of the past saw that these stories all have a very strong theme in common: God’s relationship to humankind. The human characters interact directly with divine beings, be they angels or God. This is a real rarity in the narratives of the Tanakh, and I’d imagine it was for this reason that our classical interpreters of the text focused on this so intently. Rashi, arguably the most important interpreter of Jewish sacred text, who lived in the first and second century of the second millennium CE in France, focused his interpretation of the story of Avraham’s hospitality towards the strangers (who turn out to be angels of God) on the way that God and the angels reacted to this behavior. His conclusions are quite striking.

In this story, three strangers are walking through the desert when Avraham spots them, runs over to them, and invites them to his tent to relax and eat. Lo and behold, these three strangers turn out to be messengers of God. According to Rashi, the angels and God saw Avraham’s behavior, and their immediate response was to mimic it. In Rashi’s understanding, God later mimics Avraham’s sending of water to them via a messenger, when God sends water via a miracle to the Israelites in the desert much later in the Exodus story.

If we assume that the writers of these texts were trying to reveal a truth about our place in the world and our relationship to God through a story, and that Rashi was also attempting to accomplish the same, we can come away with a very interesting and complex understanding of our relationship to the divine. Most conceptions of the divine are extraordinarily hierarchical. Divinity is above, and we are below. We are at the mercy of God or gods, mere mortals living out small lives. If, instead, we see the relationship carrying some mutuality, as it is apparent that Rashi did, the hierarchy gets turned on its Rashi isn’t just pointing out some similarities between Avraham’s hospitality and God’s. In his interpretation, Rashi is showing us something much more intrinsic to our relationship to the divine. Not only are we reliant upon the divine for what we need (for example, during this visit to Avraham, the angels announce the miraculous pregnancy of Sarah, and the imminent arrival of the new baby Yitzhak), but the divine reflects our own actions back to us. Avraham, consistently cited by those who came after him as the lifeline to God, affected the continuity of his offspring, and ultimately the successful formation of the people of Israel, by displaying his magnanimity to the angels. God reflected this behavior back to the Israelites by gifting them with water in their time of need, while wandering the desert during the formative stage of the newly free Israelite people.

Instead of looking at this text as a mythological narrative simply attempting to explain the roots of chosenness of the Jewish people, which this miraculous birth is so often cited as, maybe we should try to apply these lessons in our own lives. Throughout our liturgy and our history, and actually throughout the rest of the Tanakh from this point on, it has been the tradition to invoke God’s special relationship with Avraham whenever seeking something from God. Traditionally, the deeply troubling story of the binding of Yitzhak is even recited during Jewish morning worship as a way to attempt to convince God of our worth, based entirely on Avraham’s unflinching willingness to sacrifice his son to God. Maybe, instead of just citing Avraham’s deeds as rationale for our own worth, we should instead look at what the story is trying to tell us about his deeds, and why they are special at all.

Rashi’s interpretation of the story hints to us that human actions of kindness reverberate throughout time. By citing this one instance of Avraham’s kindness as the impetus behind God having provided the Israelites, the many generations later grandchildren of Avraham, with the miraculous water that sustained them in the desert, Rashi is telling us that our own acts are similarly important. Were it not for Avraham’s kindness, the Israelites never would have made it into the Promised Land, and we wouldn’t be here to discuss the outcomes. God’s reflection of Avraham’s behavior was the linchpin on which the Israelites’ future hung. By using this example to pattern our own behavior, by viewing our actions as reverberating throughout history as the mutual relationship between us and God, forged initially by Avraham and renewed by every one of us, we can be guided by our tradition towards lives of great meaning. Each action we take can be viewed as having endless consequences based on the value of our works. Rashi and our Torah beseech us to view Avraham not only as the pillar of righteousness that our tradition rests upon, but also as the exemplar for us all to follow to build our own lives into similar pillars of righteousness for the generations to come.

Everything Is Amazing and Nobody is Happy

This week’s Torah portion is easily one of the most famous. Everyone knows the general outline – God tells Noah that he’s going to destroy the world which has become corrupted beyond redemption, and Noah needs to build an ark to save himself, his family, and all of the animals of the world. When learning this story, from a young age on, we’re taught to identify with Noah, the most righteous of his generation. So what was so wrong with this generation that a guy like Noah, who didn’t even bother to warn his fellow humans of the impending doom, was the most righteous?

One of the explanations our ancient sages gave us in the Talmud was that this generation had become haughty because of the goodness that God showered upon them (Sanhedrin, 108b). Citing the book of Job to describe these wicked people the Talmudic baraita goes on to say that they enjoyed so much abundance and such great wealth that they came to believe that they didn’t need God for anything at all. This wicked generation enjoyed extremely long lives in which they were never lacking in food or pleasures, music was always readily at hand, and their children danced.

A few years ago, one of my favorite comedians, Louis C.K., was on Conan O’Brien’s talk show and pointed out some pretty clear truths about today’s generation. The general theme of his interview was that, today, everything is amazing and nobody is happy. His most clear elucidation of this theme is the fact that people complain about their cellphone reception not being strong enough to surf the internet, without considering the fact that the signal has to go all the way up to outer space and back. Similarly, a few generations ago, it would have been inconceivable to have a piece of equipment like a modern day smartphone be available for nearly everyone.

I’ll be the first to admit that I complain about these things; with modern conveniences come modern inconveniences. I also must admit that in comparison to the early rabbis of around 1800 years ago who wrote the baraita quoted above, my life has so far matched their description of the generation of the flood to a tee. I have certainly been quite lucky in my life, but I would also say that the majority of my friends in the Jewish world have had similar luck. If we are like Louis C.K. says and absurdly taking the wonders of our world for granted, are we then mirroring the generation of the flood? Are we similarly devoid of thanks to God, losing our ability to see the wonders in what is now our everyday life? In short, should someone start building an ark?

Well, I think an ark might be a bit much, but there’s another clear alternative: Let’s be more thankful. But thankful to whom? The second problem of the generation of the Flood according to the baraita, that of casting God off, is another struggle that we face today. One of the greatest issues in Modern Judaism is with the conception of God. We are so often confronted with ideas and conceptions of God that are inherently contradictory to a modern, scientific mindset that it is sometimes quite difficult to conceive of fully believing in a God. It is especially difficult to believe in one that has the power to flood the entire earth, but needs a human being to build an ark to save a remnant of inhabitants. This is not a reason to dismiss the whole concept of a higher power, though, but instead a challenge to the conception we have of our rational sensibilities to fully understand our reality. The critique of thanklessness found in both the Talmud and Louis C.K. is a similar challenge. Although we may have cast aside the idea of a man in the sky pulling strings and deciding upon punishment and reward, at the very least we can marvel at the wonders of nature, human ingenuity, and sheer beauty in the world around us. If just that spark of wonder can be fanned, thankfulness for these phenomena will surely follow. Luckily our tradition has a built in mechanism for reminding us of the wonders of our life. The Jewish practice of reciting blessings is designed specifically to orient us towards acknowledgment of the wondrous goings on around us. The morning prayer sequence in particular (shaharit) is designed to start our day by thanking God for returning our souls to a working body, along with giving us all of the things we need, from sight to physical flexibility to consciousness, to go about our day.

It seems unlikely that we are heading towards another great destruction akin to that of the story of Noah. Even if we don’t actually face a doom that necessitates an ark, we can certainly take something away from the commentary of our rabbinic tradition. If mere haughty thanklessness in a time of great plenty was thought of as enough to warrant utter destruction, we ought to take this into account. In fact, if we read Noah’s collection of all of the creatures of creation as an acknowledgment of the many various wonders of the world, instead of as a literal gathering of the species onto a boat, we even find the answer to the problem right in the story. Acknowledging the wonders of our daily life, and our lack of control or full understanding of these wonders, is something we can all benefit from. It brings a sense of awe to the everyday that can enrich even the most banal of moments when utilized correctly. If this is the way that Noah became the most righteous in his generation, let us all strive for such righteousness!