Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

I met Shlomo on his frequent trips to New York and, as a teenager, I became his part-time “roadie,” accompanying him to concerts, carrying his guitar, and trying to keep him moving toward the stage when he’d stop to hug and greet fans. For me as a teenager in the 1960s, Shlomo gave me a chance to grow my hair long and rebel without ever leaving the bosom of my traditional community. I was singing protest songs but they were from the liturgy of the synagogue and I was marching for causes like Soviet Jewry and Zionism that were part of my legacy.

I lost touch with Shlomo for many years, but his music and his spirit of Jewish activism deeply influenced me. Toward the end of his life, I had an opportunity to travel to Morocco with him and a group of American doctors who had arranged a tour “in the footsteps” of Judaism’s most famous doctor of the Middle Ages: Maimonides. The doctors engaged Shlomo to travel with us as a teacher and singer.

A master storyteller, Shlomo performed for the small Jewish communities of Fez and Casablanca as well as for our Muslim hosts. He was also featured at a banquet organized by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture. There he sang Hebrew songs with a twelve-piece Arab string and percussion band. It was a remarkable and hopeful moment.

I sat with him on the flight back from Casablanca to New York. He was exhausted and weak from the journey. In a moment of candor, he told me that he was not afraid of death. “When I die, I will go to heaven and there I will meet many wonderful people. I will meet my mother and my father. And I will meet Johann Sebastian Bach.”

“And what will you say to Bach?” I asked.

“Well, first I will finally find out if we are related. Bach and Carlebach. How could we not be?

“Then, I will tell him, ‘Mr. Bach, you wrote many wonderful symphonies and concertos, but I, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, wrote something great, too. I wrote “Mimkomcha.” ’ ”

“Mimkomcha” starts very low, down by the cello’s low C string, but then it settles for a sweet and soft lyrical section in the comfortable middle range of the male voice. The song suddenly becomes strident as the prayer gets louder and louder and asks of God: “When, oh when, will you rule again over Zion?” And then it climbs inexorably higher as it demands: “May our eyes see your kingdom, as is said in the songs of your splendor, written by David your righteous anointed one: ‘The Lord shall reign forever.’ ”

The last notes are confrontational yet so hopeful. The prayer holds God to a standard and yet embodies a faith that God will deliver his people. By using the full range of the human voice, Shlomo is expressing a vast range of human emotion. For me, the song was never just about Zion. It was about making demands of life, of fighting for what we need, even when it seems beyond our reach.

I told Shlomo that, given the musical range and intensity of “Mimkomcha,” it was the perfect song for the cello. “Yes, the cello,” he said with a smile. “It was a favorite instrument of Bach — and of Carlebach, too! How I love the cello. It must be the instrument that they play in heaven.”

After Judah’s bar mitzvah, I asked Noah to help prepare me for my birthday concert. We met sporadically at his studio on the West Side. After a year of lessons, I thought I was making progress, but Noah wasn’t convinced. That’s when he said that I had to practice harder and more often. Or he’d drop me. It was so out of character. I was shocked. Noah — tall and thin with his dark wavy hair pushed back high on his forehead — was a gentle soul. He had scented candles and pictures of yogis in his music studio. He made you take off your shoes before entering. It was like a shrine. Didn’t I already demonstrate my commitment by coming for lessons every week?

I promised him that I wouldn’t come back for the next lesson unless I practiced every day.

Practicing music is a strange art. You just don’t pick up your instrument and play a song. You have to begin by playing scales, like the most basic C scale.

When he was ninety-one, Casals was approached by a student who asked, “Maestro, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, “Because I am making progress.”

In my own way, I, too, am making progress. But it’s still strange. Casals’s daily routine would be the equivalent of Stephen King or John Grisham or Toni Morrison beginning each day by writing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMO NOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

But that’s not all. Then the great writer would have to type: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” that old typewriter formula that tests every letter of the alphabet. That’s roughly what musicians play after they run through the scales. They do exercises just to make sure every note is clear. Then, and only then, do they take on an actual piece of music. And they play it again and again and again. After Casals played the C scale, I am told, he played Bach’s cello suites. Every day. It would be like Philip Roth rereading Hamlet. Each day.

Somehow reading builds on itself so that what you did yesterday is still retained. When it comes to music, though, it is almost as if we are learning and relearning our art daily.

Of course, we carry our earlier lessons with us, but we bring them back each day and build on them, step by tiny step. And the longer we are away from it, even a day or two, the harder it is to recapture. Imagine being away for twenty-five years. That is why I was frustrating myself and my teachers. I needed to keep a steady momentum going to be sure I retained what I could and kept advancing.

Luckily, I had a geographical advantage. I enjoy the great luxury of working one block from my Manhattan apartment. If I had a free hour during the day, I went home and played cello. I no longer swam or jogged. I made music instead. Consistent practice — of scales, of technique, and of music — was good for my instrument, but not good for the waistline. I gained twenty pounds. I went from a thirty-five-inch waist to a thirty-eight. I had never been so heavy. I didn’t like what I was turning into but I reasoned that the trade-off was worthwhile. I could always lose the weight, but this felt like my last best shot at becoming proficient in making the music that I loved the most.

In addition to my regular teaching responsibilities, I occasionally do educational consulting for colleges and universities to help them develop new programs. I had been in touch for several years with Hadassah Academic College in Israel, a vocational college in Jerusalem that was interested in starting a journalism program. While most universities in the region cater to either Palestinian Arabs or Israeli Jews, Hadassah has managed to attract both. It takes advantage of its location right on the border between East and West Jerusalem and has classes for everyone from ultra-Orthodox women in wigs called sheitels to Arab women in head coverings called hijabs.

A few months before my birthday, I was granted a Fulbright scholarship to spend a month in Israel helping Hadassah. Shira and the kids were fully supportive, but I worried about my cello. Practicing was especially crucial and I did not want to fall behind. Taking my own cello was not practical; professional cellists will actually buy a seat for their instrument, but Hadassah was not about to pay for that. Storing a cello in baggage hold is a risky proposition. I’ve heard horror stories of splintered wood, collapsed bridges, and busted strings.

Through a musician friend in Israel, I managed to find an instrument rental business in Jerusalem and reserved a cello for the month. Before I had a chance to pick it up, I took a day trip to the city of Petra, in the south of Jordan, to see this ancient city, truly one of the wonders of the world. Petra was cut out of the desert rock more than two thousand years ago by a people known as the Nabataeans. It has been remarkably preserved and was not even known to the Western world until its discovery in 1812, although it gained real fame in 1989 when it was the setting for the adventure movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade starring Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.