Q:
What place does music have in the life of a frum Jew?
A:
And the answer is no place at all.
Now, let’s understand this. Once and for all let’s get rid of the American meshugas. It’s all assimilation.
The Chafetz Chaim zichrono levrachah, if you look in his sefarim – here is a pretty good picture of a life of a frum Jew – you won’t find the word music once. The word nigunim you never find once. It’s not there at all. If you look in the gemara you’ll find the levi’im b’shiram but if you look in the Chafetz Chaim’s sefarim – after all we’re living in our age and he wrote sefarim that covered the whole spectrum of Jewish life – and nothing is mentioned about music at all.
Now to say music is ossur, it’s not for me to say. I’m not a posek to say such things. But what place does it occupy? No place at all.
If you want to be mesameach, if you want to use some music to be mesameach, singing let’s say a zemer on Yom Tov, zemiros on Shabbos, go ahead. Why not? It has a place. But music, recorded music that comes from musicians? Unless at a chasunah. Otherwise, it has no place at all. If you need it for a chasunah so you hire musicians and get it over with and that’s all. You sing zemiros Shabbos. And we wait for the Beis Hamikdash to be rebuilt and then we’ll have kosher music as avodas Hashem.
But the ideas that American people have today all come from the outside world. There’s nothing noble in music. Intrinsically it’s nothing at all. Somebody is tickling a piece of catgut that was dried and became a fiddle string and it causes sound waves that tickle your eardrums and excite your nerves and that’s all there is to music.
Now I know it’s going to sound harsh to people who were brought up with American ideas but I have already been conditioned to seeing what music is. I walk in the street. Here is a music store. Outside there is a middle-aged man. I’m sure he’s a Jew. A gentile wouldn’t be so silly. He’s a Jew and he’s dancing a jig to the music on the street. What’s he doing it for? If nobody was around he wouldn’t bother doing it. He wants to demonstrate he’s a lover of music. Now, an Italian wouldn’t be that dumb to do such a thing. Maybe a colored man might do it, a black might do it, but a white man? You can be sure he’s a Jew, a liberal, a shoteh, and he wants to show off that he’s a music lover so he’s dancing all by himself in front of a music store. It’s disgusting as could be.
And all the people who crowd the music stores to buy tapes and who buy records are people whose heads have become vacant. The worst place in the world for the intelligence is a music store.
The world used to say a chazan is a na’ar. They used to say that, a chazan is a naar. What does that mean? Because a chazan likes music and you cannot have in your head two things, intelligence and music. So if you have music in your head then you don’t have any seichel in your head. The space it takes to put in music cannot be occupied by something else.
Now it’s an important point. Think it over. Maybe someday you’ll realize how true it is.
Q:
But what about classical music? Isn’t it true that chashuve people listen to classical music?
A:
Now this is an affectation. It’s a bluff. There’s no such thing as classical music. Classical music was written by people who in their times were hefkeryungen, mufkarim, low people. The fact that it was a hundred years ago doesn’t make it classical. All music – you can quote me as saying that it’s garbage.
TAPE # 428 (September 1982)
