Good morning, Chaverim,
On this beautiful fall morning, gratitude bubbled up and this quote felt just right to share with you…
Here is today’s Gratitude Thought in the Middle of a Pandemic:
“Music…gives wings to the mind, a soul to the universe, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, a life to everything.”
Plato
Though music and music making have evolved quite a bit over the several thousand years since Plato wrote these words, they still seem profound today when music is literally everywhere. I couldn’t agree more with Plato’s proposition that music “gives life to everything”…I suppose that is why I am always humming the soundtrack playing in my head…but, I never thought of music as giving “a soul to the universe”. I guess that I have thought of it in the reverse, i.e., that music is a gift to us from G-d (or the universe) and that we must be oh so grateful that we humans have been able to discover and harness the power of music…to inspire us, to lift us, to soothe us, to seduce us, to frighten us (think of just those two simple notes in the Jaws soundtrack!), to unify us.
Would the universe be soulless without music? Maybe so. In any event, I cannot imagine living in a world without music. For me at least, music has always been a way to get in touch with my soul…it has always had the power to move me. It could easily go both ways…after all, energy flows in many directions.
So, what if our music making does indeed have the power to move the soul of the universe?
Hmmmmmmm….seems to me we had better do a whole lot of singing and music making together! And, there’s no better place than Kabbalat Shabbat at Beth Am to get the party started!
Shabbat Shalom to all,
Marci
