Music has always played a significant role in my life. I’ve never played a musical instrument, and I don’t pretend to be a gifted singer, but from a very young age I found great joy in singing. I still remember performing at a talent show in a hotel I visited with my parents when I was six. Apparently, I had no trace of stage fright! Later, as a teenager, I parodied a well-known Brazilian protest song to suit my then-rebellious worldview. Where the original called out, “Come, let’s go, for waiting is not knowing; those who know make the moment, they don’t wait for it to happen,” my version sang: “Come, let’s go, for studying is not knowing; those who study waste their time and don’t know what it is to live...”
Yes, I was once that teenager. Please don’t share this with your children, and especially not with mine!
Despite the questionable lyrics, I loved music. I still do. Music was, and remains, far more than entertainment. It has often served as a kind of emotional time machine. There are songs that instantly transport me to the back seat of my mother’s car in the early 1980s, to the burning passions and heartbreaks of adolescence, and to the tense political atmosphere of Brazil’s final years under military rule. Music has that power: to help us feel before we are ready to think; to reveal truths our minds may resist; to connect us with moments and people long gone.
I sometimes bristle when the Torah is described merely as a “book of law”. Of course, it contains laws, but for me, especially as a Progressive Jew, it is first and foremost our people’s sacred narrative. It tells the stories from which I’ve drawn so many of the values that shape my life. Chief among them is the image of humanity created in the Divine image, read on the second day of Rosh HaShanah and again on Simchat Torah. There’s no explicit law in that passage, but from it flows the profound Jewish commitment to the dignity of every single human being.
This week’s parashah, Vayelech, sets the stage for the powerful poem that will follow in next week’s parashah, Haazinu. Moshe is instructed to prepare a song that will be delivered on the last day of his life, summarising Israel’s relationship with God, past, present, and future. The text commands: “Now, therefore, write this song for yourselves, and teach it to the children of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be My witness against the children of Israel” (Devarim 31:19). Moshe's legacy is not just law; it is also music and memory, a testimony designed to be internalised emotionally and carried forever in our hearts.
On this Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return, may we allow the songs of our own lives to accompany us on our journey. May they bring us not only nostalgia but healing, connection, and the strength to keep walking towards the future we still long to compose.
Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah!
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