February Newsletter: The Readiness Is All
“The Readiness Is All”
(keep reading for more info on the song)
Happy February!
Your free demo of the month is a brand-spanking-new song called “The Readiness Is All.” Sign up to receive the song! Read on for the story behind it.
News:
Join me on February 11th at 7:00 PM (Zoom link) for "Sparkbird: An Evening of Piano Pop with Russian Influences," presented by the University of Oregon department of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies — my alma mater.
The Look at the Harlequins! songbook (piano/vocals/chords) is here and it’s beautiful! A PDF version is also available.
“Minor Holiday” sheet music (piano/vocals/chords) is also available! (PDF = $1)
Reading Time: 6.5 minutes
If you’ve been following me on social media over the last year, you might have noticed an increase in Jewish content. That’s because I’ve been in the process of converting! “Converting” feels misleading, because it sounds like I’m going from one thing to another. Basically, like Ruth before me, I’ve chosen to become Jewish.
The process of becoming Jewish usually takes at least a year, and it’s something like getting a degree. It officially begins with an Introduction to Judaism course. Then you find a rabbi who will sponsor you and work with you. You take a year of Hebrew classes. You select and read a number of books from lists of required reading. There’s a page-long Jewish Experiential Checklist of all the important Jewish traditions you need to experience. The capstone involves writing an essay and going before a panel of rabbis who determine whether you are sincere, knowledgeable, and converting of your own free will.
I’m at the essay stage, and my rabbi suggested I write a song to accompany my essay.
If you told me two years ago that in the not-so-distant-future I’d have a rabbi, and he’d be suggesting I write a song to go with my conversion essay, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. Possibly with initial surprise, followed by, “Actually, that kind of makes sense.”
Growing up, I often felt at odds with religion. At church, I looked around in awe at how easily belief came to everyone but me. I remember years of secret terror, that my lack of faith would land me in hell or in trouble with my parents. The more I thought about the consequences of non-belief, the more anxious I felt. The more anxious I felt, the harder it was to believe.
Over time, I had a number of bad religious experiences. I won’t get into the details, but they largely stemmed from my being queer and my struggling with mental health issues. For the next 12 years or so, I identified as an atheist. I found ritual and tradition appealing, and I knew there was meaning to be found in spiritual practices. But I didn’t think any religion would be compatible with my apparent inability to Believe with every fiber of my being.
Then, a year ago, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. In it, circumstances lead Toby to live with an environmentalist religious group called God’s Gardeners. Time goes by, and eventually she is asked by Adam One to step into a leadership role. She confesses that she isn’t sure she believes “all of it,” and so surely this makes her unfit to lead. Adam One responds that in their religion, “actions precede faith,” and Toby has been acting as if she believes. “Belief will follow in time,” he says, adding, “Your doubts reassure me. They show how trustworthy you are.”
Later in the book, Adam One gives a sermon on “serpent wisdom”:
"Serpent Wisdom — I suppose — is the wisdom of feeling directly, as the Serpent feels vibrations in the Earth. The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is endlessly constructing for itself. For what is in us belief and faith, in other Creatures is inborn knowledge. […] We Humans must labor to believe, as the other Creatures do not.”
This was before I began pursuing conversion to Judaism, but even then it struck me. I read the chapter over and over and wrote down parts of it. Suddenly religion and faith made sense to me. All this time I thought people either believed or they didn’t, and that all religions required absolute, 100% confident belief. Now I encountered the idea that for humans, belief is necessarily a struggle.
I filed this idea away, thinking it had songwriting potential.
A few months later, on who knows what impulse, I went down a Google rabbit hole involving Judaism. I ended up listening to podcast episodes where converts shared their stories. They said things like, “I was always the one asking questions and doubting things,” and “I always felt inexplicably drawn to all things Jewish.”
It all resonated with me. I had always felt inexplicably drawn to all things Jewish. Maybe it’s because I was queer and redheaded and always felt Other, but Jewish stories tended to speak to me. As a teen I often gravitated towards Jewish historical fiction, and most of my book-nerd online friends were Jewish. I rented and watched Yentl — by myself — because of how Jewish it sounded. My biggest role model since 2005, Regina Spektor, is a Russian Jew. In college I took courses like Literature of the Jewish Diaspora, and eventually I became a Russian major. I ordered challah from the campus Hillel. I bought Hanukkah cookie cutters and used them every year.
Still, conversion had never occurred to me. I think I was under the impression that people only converted for marriage. Jews don’t actively recruit, so you don’t hear much about conversion. The first Jewish convert representation I ever saw must have been Cindy Hayes on Orange is the New Black.
With a lifetime of dots connected in my mind, I enrolled in my local Intro to Judaism class, thinking I could at least indulge my curiosity. Then I started observing Shabbat — baking challah, lighting candles, saying the blessings, attending services, doing no work for 25 hours. I read book after book about Judaism. I began reading the weekly Torah portion and commentaries. I started taking Hebrew classes. I fasted on Yom Kippur and spent the day learning how to fight for racial justice and dismantle white supremacy. I increased the frequency of my neighborhood trash clean-ups, with the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) in mind.
All of it brought more beauty and meaning to my life. It gave me ample opportunities to shift my focus away from how successful (or, more often, unsuccessful) I felt as a musician on a given day, to connect with myself and with something bigger than myself.
In her book Here All Along, Sarah Hurwitz (best known as Michelle Obama’s head speechwriter) grapples with her beliefs. She confides in a rabbi that “while my belief in the Divine felt true, it also felt ridiculous, and I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile that tension.” He responds, “Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the question isn’t whether believing in God is ridiculous or not. Maybe you should ask yourself: When I run this belief in God on my operating system, what happens? Am I more loving? More honest and courageous? More true to myself and present in my life?” Hurwitz concludes that “logic and spirituality have different languages and different purposes.”
Ultimately, Hurwitz determines that although her own beliefs feel contradictory, they do “gesture at some kind of truth.” She quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of faith… We do not have faith in deeds; we attain faith through deeds.”
When my rabbi asked me to write a song as part of my final conversion project, my mind immediately went to these ideas of action-based faith. It went back to The Year of the Flood, serpent wisdom, and laboring to believe.
“The readiness is all” is a reference to Hamlet. (I’ve been including Hamlet references in my songs for 10 years and I’m not about to stop!) For the chorus, I combined this allusion with yet another passage from Hurwitz's book: “[Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk] asks why the Shema prayer states that God's commandments to us should be 'on your heart' rather than 'in your heart.' His answer: Often, our hearts simply aren't open, but if we place these words on our hearts, then the moment our hearts do open, the words can fall in."
Thank you for letting me share this very personal song with you. And while it is inspired by my Jewish journey, it’s also open to your own interpretations. :)
I’ll be in touch in a couple weeks when the “Minor Holiday” lyric video is released!
Take care,
Stephan
a.k.a. Sparkbird