Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

This was a small class, with no more than sixteen students, and mine was one of numerous RW1 sections offered. In this particular year, I had six students who were designated as “new media concentrators.” In addition to the lessons they had from me about the basics, they spent many, many hours supplying websites with video and audio reports. The gold standard that year was something called audio slideshows — a product akin to a talking photo album — that were proliferating like mad on news sites. Clearly these were the skills students needed to succeed.

I loved teaching RW1. I had taken the same course nearly forty years earlier and it had a major impact on how I practiced my craft. Now, as the teacher, I wanted the same for these young people. Many of our students came from excellent undergraduate colleges and some had worked for a year or two in a variety of jobs. Most of them were bright and all of them were educable. Like most good teachers, I demanded their full attention and insisted that they come to class on time.

Week after week, my six “new media concentrators” were late to class. They would enter each time with the same excuse: “We had a new media class.” After three weeks of this, I erupted: “Fuck new media,” I shouted. “You did not come to this school to learn new media. You came to learn the traditions and standards of journalism. New media will soon become old media. What you need to learn is journalism!”

A few weeks later, New York Magazine ran an article on a so-called battle being played out at Columbia Journalism over technology. The headline was COLUMBIA J-SCHOOL’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. And you don’t have to guess what side I was on. “‘Fuck new media,’ the coordinator of the RWL program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as ‘playing with toys,’ according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as ‘an experimentation in gadgetry.’ ”

Aside from factual errors — I did not say it on the first day of class and I don’t use words like gadgetry —I did say “Fuck new media,” and there was no living it down. The Web is an echo chamber and my comment was picked up by magazines, newspaper websites, and dozens of blogs. There were over seventy comments alone on the New York Magazine website, most of them condemning me and asking how Columbia University could continue to employ such an irrelevant professor. I was called a “dinosaur,” a Luddite, and worse. The embrace of the digital future was so complete that anyone who treasured the past was the enemy.

There was only one thing for me to do: I turned off my computer, went home, and played my cello.

There are many elements that go into a bar mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys as they turn thirteen. There are the essentials, like synagogue and food, and there are the singular themes that reflect the interests of the bar mitzvah boy. We knew Judah would play cello at his bar mitzvah; it is just a big part of who he is.

The challenge was how best to find a time for Judah to play. Judah was going to have his bar mitzvah on a weekend in June at our synagogue, an Orthodox shul in Manhattan. The bad news was that the Orthodox do not allow instruments to be played on the Sabbath. The good news was that since it was the summer, the Sabbath does not arrive until late in the evening. We asked our guests to arrive for a six-thirty cello recital followed by candle lighting to usher in the Sabbath at eight. Judah prepared five classical works for the occasion, among them short pieces by Beethoven, Lully, and Dvořák. When the guests arrived, Judah took the stage and played with confidence and a sense of ownership. For four of the pieces he was accompanied on keyboard by our friend Jay, a mathematician and Wall Street analyst, who is a musician at heart. Judah’s fifth piece, a solo, was an excerpt from one of Bach’s famous cello suites. He felt at home with the music, the shul, and his family.

We thought it would be nice to round out Judah’s concert with some additional cello playing. Judah’s teacher Laura was a fine performer but she had moved to New Haven to complete her master’s in music at Yale. Mr. J was sadly gone. I decided instead to invite a cellist named Noah who I had heard at another West Side synagogue, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, where instruments are played on the Sabbath. I asked Noah if he could think of something appropriate to play for a bar mitzvah. I wasn’t sure there was anything appropriate; the most famous Jewish piece for cello is Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre,” based on the somber atonement themes of Yom Kippur, hardly a bar mitzvah — friendly piece. Noah assured me that there was a lot of Jewish music for the cello. In fact, many composers used the cello to express Jewish themes because they were often trying to replicate the voice of the cantor. Among the possibilities he mentioned were two pieces by Ernest Bloch—“Schelomo” and “From Jewish Life.”

Noah came up with something even better. He composed a special “Musical Tribute to Judah” that included melodies from the Torah and Haftorah readings as well as songs from the Sabbath liturgy. Noah’s playing was inspired and helped transition our party from a concert to the Sabbath. Noah would soon help me with my own playing, too.

As the Sabbath arrived, we locked Judah’s cello and Jay’s keyboard in the synagogue office and returned to the Orthodox way of keeping the holy day. We prayed that night and the next morning and Judah was called to the Torah to read and officially become a Jewish man. There was a lot of singing and chanting but there were no instruments. The synagogue was packed to overflowing with the shul regulars plus our friends and relatives. Someone on the street asked me if it was a special Jewish holiday. “For my family, it is,” I responded.

JUDAH’S BAR MITZVAH CAME forty-six years after mine. Mine was marked not by the cello but by my voice. The theme of my bar mitzvah was not Bach or Mozart but the Jewish singer and songwriter Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Even as a boy I was deeply moved by the music of Carlebach, a German refugee who revolutionized Jewish music in the decades after the Holocaust. Shlomo, as I knew him, emigrated from Berlin as a teenager with his parents on the eve of the Second World War. While the understandable reaction to the Nazi horrors was mourning and sadness, Shlomo picked up a guitar and gave American Jews songs of hope, joy, and redemption. He produced some wonderful early LPs, which I listened to again and again in my youth. There were songs like “Od Yishama” (“May It Be Heard”), which became a standard at Jewish weddings, and “Am Yisrael Chai,” (“The People of Israel Live”), which was sung at rallies in support of Soviet Jewry and the young State of Israel. These were catchy anthem-like songs that were easy to learn. But Shlomo also wrote several intricate and majestic cantorial pieces. And I sang one of them, “Mimkomcha,” at my bar mitzvah. Soon after my bar mitzvah, which was held in Queens, my mother, my brothers, and I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was there that I finally got to meet my idol, whose father, Naftali Carlebach, was the rabbi of a synagogue just a few blocks from our apartment.

The older Rabbi Carlebach looked and acted like a proper European Torah scholar. He had a formal, distinguished manner about him and a wispy white beard that seemed to hang around his face like a cloud. By comparison, Shlomo was a rebel. He was warm and physical with all those he met. He favored vests over his white shirt but rarely wore a jacket. In California’s Bay Area he established The House of Love and Prayer, something of a hippie shul. He once quipped, “If I called it Temple Israel, no one would come.”