The Kibbitz
“I think every artist has his
talmudic mind. There’s such a tre- mendous affinity between the Jewish mind and baseball. The lack of time limit tells you that you can always do t’shuvah . You’re behind in the game; you have two in- nings — but there’s still lots of time. A lot of your songs are an exten- sion of your teaching. There’s a constraint on what writing can do when you’re looking to educate and inspire. Are there times when you just want to write a song because it’s a beautiful story, without it need- ing a specific message? I’ve always written songs for the Jewish market. Recently, I’ve been writing some songs with the hope of possibly making some income through the secular market, which is much more accessible today because of the internet. And I’m having a blast. I have a song called “Gibberish” — a totally meaningless song. And it’s such a weight off my shoulders. I’ve been writing my whole life and every song had to mean something, had to say something. What a mechayeh it is to write something totally inane. People ask me, What is it like to be a Jewish entertainer? I tell them, I’m not a Jewish entertainer; I’m an edu- cator. I view myself as having tried to do that with my music. Are there any songs that are more personal? I was teaching in LA. We had a stu- dent in our high school who passed away, and I was tremendously affect- ed by it. We didn’t realize how ill she was. She suffered; she missed a lot of school. We always thought she was taking advantage of having a minor ailment, and it turns out it wasn’t so minor. I remember feeling devastat- ed that she passed, and second, dev- astated by guilt for having questioned
I’m old, but I needed an ending that was at least a little bit encouraging. Sometimes it takes years to find the simplest thing. Finally, it came to me: there is someone who does not forget. [The song is about an old man facing his mortality and the realization that the memories of those he lost will die with him. In the last line, he is com- forted by the knowledge that God will still remember.] People think the song is all about, Remember the Holocaust. That’s not what the song is about. The song is not, Build another Holocaust muse- um. It is about memories that nobody has, because the people are gone, their children are gone. There are so many who have no one to remember them. We have no pictures of them. We just have a name in a book. That’s all we have. Someone told me once that every- body dies two times. The first time you die is when you actually die and they bury you. The second time you die is the last time someone mentions your name. That’s right. The Talmud tells us that “the righteous are called alive even in death,” because people men- tion their names. That’s a great song idea right there. Is the next project a book or is it music-based? I was actually thinking of doing an album called Upon Further Review. In football, when they go to video review, the coach can throw a red flag onto the field. I thought of doing the same: going back and reconsidering songs that didn’t make the cut. Be- cause I have so many songs that didn’t make it. But with a different arrange- ment, maybe a different vocalist, a different style, a little bit of a more nuanced approach...
decade, maybe two decades if you’re lucky, where he’s really creative. The mind gets slower as time passes.”
her. That night I sat down and wrote “Neshomele.” I also wrote “Who Am I” within one night. Some songs took me many, many years — a few lines here and a few lines there; it took time to finally put them together. But with “Who Am I,” I received a video someone took walking around Camp Tikva, pictures of the struggle and the dif- ficulty those kids were going through, and how devoted the counsellors were to helping them. I was blown away. There’s a story about Leonard Co- hen and Bob Dylan chatting about each other’s songs. Dylan asked Co- hen how long it took to write “Hal- lelujah.” Cohen responded: A few years. Then Cohen asked, What about “Just Like a Woman”? Dylan replied: Fifteen minutes. “Memories” took me many years. I wanted to write this song, but I didn’t know how to end it. I had the lines about the numbers on the arm, about how I could never forget even though
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