Music is Power

Long before Vincent van Gogh decided to give the most awkward gift in the history of Valentine’s Day, one third-century rabbi became so disturbed by music that he considered the very same act:

This music-allergic sage, Rav, was a monumental figure in Talmudic history. Known also as “abba arikha,” which roughly translates as “Big Daddy,” he was born in Babylon and studied the oral law in Israel with Rabbi Judah the Prince, the famous codifier of the Mishnah. The Talmudic period opened with Rav’s return to Babylon, where he founded an academy at Sura and became one of the Babylonian Jewry’s most formative teachers.

He also wrote the text of Aleinu, originally for Rosh Hashanah, but it got so darn popular that now Jews worldwide recite it three times per day.

What should we make of Rav’s revulsion at such a basic human good as music?

The traditional answer focuses on one terrible event — the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. This cataclysmic rupture in Jewish life was accompanied not only by mourning and dissociation from the Temple’s musical activities, but rabbinic invocation of the biblical prophets, whose indictments against musical indulgence heralded harsh judgments (as in Rava’s quotation above).

But were the rabbis’ polemics merely theological hauntings from their musical past? Or did they point to real, practical issues in their musical present?

To understand the anti-musical attitudes of the Talmudic rabbis, we must give ear (ha) to the social, political, and musical conditions of Jewish life in Roman-occupied Judea and Sasanian Persia — soundscapes in which the Talmud itself was generated.

The rabbis of the Mishnah denigrated the playing of music as part of a long decay of Jewish ritual norms, political institutions, and trusted sources of authority — the suppression of music being just one stop on the long road to perdition:

This mishnah invites a question: how did the retreat of the judicial system lead to the silencing of music?

The Jerusalem Talmud Sotah (9:12) records Rav’s student, Rav Hisda, as connecting the fear of the Sanhedrin to the preservation of musical modesty. But without the threat of the Sanhedrin’s judgment, lewdness crept back into the songs of Israel. Heinrich Guggenheimer has suggested that this “lewd music” was specifically related to the Greco-Roman practice of epithalamium - a song genre celebrating the bride on the way to her marriage bed, often with lecherous lyrics. Such a case would convey that Roman influence overtook both law and music, leading to practices which Jews were quick to suppress.

Yet this moral panic also belied a general social malaise among Jews, as the Jerusalem Talmud (ibid.) depicts a time of declining optimism. Rav Ḥuna recounts:

In earlier times, for every trouble that came over the community they have a joyous occasion to make up for it. But after the Sanhedrin was abolished, song disappeared from wedding feasts. After both disappeared, “our heart’s joy stopped, our dance turned into mourning (Lam. 5:15).”

In rabbinic eyes, the seductive power of song grew beyond the control of communal will; only the court’s threat of capital punishment could keep music in check. The Jerusalem Talmud concludes the matter by comparing this sorry situation to other tales in which a crime went unpunished except by the harshest means: first, to God’s judgment when Israelite society looked askance at child sacrifice (cf. Lev. 20:4-5), and then to the parable of a super-strong criminal who was unaffected by corporal punishment, the sting of death being his only meaningful consequence.

Thus the loss of the Sanhedrin —and of the fear of punishment—meant that there was no governing the strongman of music in Roman Judea; it had to be cancelled totally for fear of spreading a pandemic of immorality.

It is difficult for us moderns to appreciate music as a “threat” to religion and culture. Time has gentrified our music history, transforming one generation’s rebels into the next generation’s establishment, offering knighthoods to Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and bougie cookbook deals to Snoop Dogg.

We are also living through a period of cultural stagnation where in lieu of new stories, pop culture from the late twentieth-century is repeatedly repackaged and resold to its devoted fans, sequel after sequel, a capitalist mummification of what was once edgy.

Peering into the ancient, alternative universe of rabbinic musical fears, we need to remember how much was on the line. Music in antiquity was a source of enchantment, magic, healing, worship, trance, social organization, religious identity, amorous bonding, celebration, entertainment, and yes, even licentiousness. It is because music contained these many powers that the rabbis were very cautious in its deployment, not assuming its beauty or power to be implicitly synonymous with Torah, mitzvot, or righteousness.

It is here that we depart the mishnaic milieu of Roman Judea and return to third-century Iran and the sages of the Babylonian Talmud.

Following Rav’s ear problems, the suyga in Tractate Sotah (48a) goes on to describe rabbinic efforts to rein in music. Rav Huna, the next head of the Academy at Sura, first tried to make distinctions between good and bad music. The Babylonian Talmud reports that he permitted the rhythmic songs of shepherds and sailors, which facilitated their work, but banned those of weavers, which were purely for enjoyment.

Yet ultimately he banned all music — a decision which had profound effects on the economy:

When I first encountered this text as a yeshiva student twenty years ago, I was flabbergasted. Rav Huna’s ban caused wheat and duck prices to crater; Rav Ḥisda’s reversal, on the other hand, led to rapid inflation. What was going on?

The first issue, to my mind, is one of basic economics — was this a demand-side or a supply-side problem?

The famed scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (whose commentary forms the unbolded text in the Sefaria’s Talmud translation) leaned towards the latter, indicating that the cancellation of song “led to a general blessing,” and that the deflation of wheat and goose prices was “due to their great abundance.”

Such a reading renders the music ban as causing a divinely-directed market surplus in which a dramatic oversupply tanks prices. In Rav Ḥisda’s reversal, the pendulum swings back the other way, as scarcity rules the day.

I want to give due credit to my wife, Rabbi Elyssa Austerklein, for suggesting what I believe to be the more convincing argument: that the Talmud is instead describing a demand-side economic issue, and that the cancellation of music precipitated changes in human behavior, not in divine activity.

This argument comes with the recognition that music regularly accompanies feasting in the ancient world. Shut down music, and the entire Sasanian Jewish entertainment industry begins to collapse, including food prices. Bring music back, and demand goes sky-high for the long-awaited festivities (think of the first party you hosted after pandemic restrictions eased).

It’s also important to note that the very food items whose prices were rocked by this third-century music ban were also related to the Sasanian party scene. Wheat, a relatively latecomer in Persian agriculture, was the choice source for bread, and geese in particular were luxury items in the eyes of third-century Iranian Jews. To this end, the Talmud records an admonition against goose consumption as a sign of indulgence (Pesachim 114a)1 :

Rabba bar bar Ḥana said that Rabbi Yoḥanan said, citing Rabbi Yehuda, son of Rabbi Elai: “Eat an onion [batzal] and sit in the shade [batzel], but do not eat geese and chickens, as your heart will pursue you, i.e., you will develop a taste for luxuries. Devote less to your food and your drink and spend more on your house.”

This second reading views music and feasting as part of the same Persian economic engine — one whose delights the rabbis must admonish against, even prior to more categorical prohibitions.

Can such a reading of a musical feasting culture among third-century Sasanian Jews be legitimated in light of the historical record?

Such are the rich questions of comparative musicology, in which little explored depths of Jewish music history illuminate the majority cultures in which Jews lived and thrived — and vice-versa. In this case, the Talmud beckons us to envision the musical world of pre-Islamic Iran.

The Sasanian court and people inherited a rich musical culture from the Parthian empire which preceded it.2 With that came the tradition of the gōsān minstrels, who carried the epic poetry of the Persians and participated in rituals and feasts. While it is difficult to register such figures in the Talmud, contemporaneous Byzantine and Armenian Christian writers would describe gōsān with biblically-laden antipathy as “dissolute and gusan-mad drunkards, who give themselves up to debauchery and lechery” as those whose arts were invented by “the grandsons of Cain.”3

Yet to be more than speculative is to recognize both the limits and potentials of Talmudic and Iranian sources. Shai Secunda, in his fascinating and detailed book, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Talmud in its Sasanian Context (2014), points out the problematic nature of taking textual parallels at face value, identifying the perennial subjectivity through which both Talmudic and Zoroastrian sources envisioned the “others” in their midst.4 Yet this does not allow us to read either as isolated documents: “Despite the fact that they possessed separate textual heritages,” Secunda writes, “both the Bavli and Middle Persian Literature produced meaning in the same discursive space and across the shared “text-scape” of Sasanian Iran. The practical result is that even at its most insular, the Bavli can and should be read contextually in Iran alongside Middle Persian literature.”

Secunda’s research and detailed scholarship invites future readers to see the Talmudic rabbis as marked by significant encounters with the culture, literature, and even leadership of Sasanian Persia. A Secunda-style reading of music-related sources in the Bavli and Zoroastrian texts would be fruitful indeed, perhaps yielding that rabbinic musical practices and even attitudes are “profoundly indebted to the great cultures and traditions of [pre-Islamic] Iran.”

The Talmudic rabbis acutely felt the power of music — not only as the stinging spectre of sin and the loss of sovereignty, but as an immense force that transformed the social, economic, and moral foundations of society. Such a power, many came to believe, could only be governed by the fear of death — or by getting rid of your ear.

These worries sound almost unfathomable today. On the contrary, the prospect of more people making music strikes one as profoundly redemptive. Yet we should remember what the rabbis knew well — music is power, and we should be intentional and watchful of how we use it.