Before Shabbat

The older I get, the more firmly I believe in the philosophical concept of duality. Light and dark, mind and body, love and hate. In its most basic form, duality describes how we often experience the world in terms of opposites or complementary pairs. Things exist in relation to their opposite—we understand warmth because we know cold, joy because we know sorrow.

But duality isn’t merely about recognizing that opposites exist. It’s far more transformative than that. It’s also about how understanding the relationship between opposites actually can transform us. Duality creates change and possibility rather than static opposition.

Put another way, it’s not about life or death: it’s instead about life and death. It’s all things wrapped up in one incredibly messy bundle. As Yossi Klein Halevi taught on a podcast, don’t trust a Jew who is not ambivalent. Leaning into a single perspective does not create understanding. A yin without a yang is dogma.

I mulled over these thoughts as I sat on the third floor of the Beth Israel Shapiro building in the waiting area for the urology department. It’s a big area, a ring of chairs that surrounds a wide-open center from the lobby to the floors above. My fellow patients and I wait to hear our names called. It’s like an old WWII movie: Smith! Sanchez! Chou! Fitzpatrick! Stern! All nationalities. And all ages in all phases of treatment. Some of us are in wheelchairs. Others are mobile. No one is happy about whatever treatment is waiting for us. But a glance around the circle spots no one running away. We know we have to be here.

Spend enough time in a waiting room and you learn its rhythms, how it hums. Most of the time, the third-floor waiting area is very mellow. Everyone sits quietly, phone in hand. We mind our own business. But yesterday, it was wild and crazy. Twice as many patients waiting our turns, staff scurrying a little more frantically than usual. Of course, we don’t know why, not that it matters. But it does redirect my thoughts in a different way.

Which, I suppose, is how I ended up here, pondering duality. Happy to be done with my treatment. Sad to contemplate how I ended up sitting here in the first place. So excited to be gathering for Thanksgiving. So sad remembering my sister, Marta, now gone. So thankful that a Canadian urologist, Alvaro Morales, figured out that the tuberculosis vaccine BCG had significant anti-tumor effects in bladder cancer. No one knows why, but it most definitely works. A bit muted, because bladder cancer has a high recurrence rate. So happy when they call my name. So disappointed that my very last round of BCG will not be done by Brian, the guy who’s given me all eight previous treatments, but instead will be administered by a new person. Oh well, I sigh as I get up from my chair, it’s the mess of life delivered to my door.

Thanksgiving underscores the essence of duality. In my joy for all the great moments in my life lived to this moment and the promise of unbridled simchas to come—including my son’s upcoming wedding and my grandson’s upcoming bar mitzvah—there is a running tally of loss and separation.

That’s not happiness or sadness; it’s happiness AND sadness. Which is what duality and life are all about. The relationship between my opposites actually continues to challenge and transform me.

This Thanksgiving, I’m learning to hold both the joy and the ache, the gratitude and the grief. That’s the wisdom point—it’s the mess of life, and it’s teaching me how to live.

The Stern Gang joins me in wishing you a beautiful Thanksgiving.

Every time it rains/It rains pennies from heaven
Don’t you know each cloud contains/Pennies from heaven?

The U.S. Treasury Department announced that the last, the very last penny, was minted in Philadelphia last Monday. There will be no more fresh pennies. Ever. A penny costs 3 cents to produce, making it a losing bargain for the Treasury. According to CNN, “Its current form arrived in 1909 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, when it became the first American coin to feature a president. But it has declined in both use and popularity ever since. The Treasury Department now estimates that there are approximately 300 billion pennies in circulation. That comes to a bit less than $9 for every person in the United States. But most of those coins are “severely underutilized.”
I can’t argue the logic of phasing out the penny. From a macroeconomic level, it’s a sound decision. In various random spots around my home are jars filled with marbles, dry pens, paper clips, rubber bands, and pennies that have been stored in those jars for years. So I get their “underutilization.” But from a personal perspective, it’s very sad, this slow extinction event, and indicative of the passage of time and the things that slowly fade away.
You’ll find your fortune’s fallin’/All over the town
Be sure that your umbrella/Is upside down

For we children of the baby boomer generation, pennies were our primary currency. We saved them in piggy banks and smelly Dutch Masters cigar boxes. We could buy penny candy that cost one cent. Five pennies got us a pack of baseball cards, which included a piece of stale pink bubble gum inside. We felt flush having a pocket full of pennies. It dragged our pants down, but the extra-tight belt was worth it.
Change has a way of thoroughly erasing the past. Things that were precious to us become curios or punchlines. Rotary phones. Betamax. VHS tapes. Record players. Answering machines. Typewriters. Card catalogs. None of these things are, in and of themselves, culturally iconic. They are not lynch pins holding our way of life together. But they do represent things we never imagined would evaporate.
The end of the penny is a poignant reminder to everyone: all things must pass. We can protest and shake our heads, vehemently refusing to accept this fundamental truth. But the way of the world will not respectfully pull over and wait for our sadness and anxiety about change to resolve.
So when you hear it thunder/Don’t run under a tree
There’ll be pennies from heaven/For you and me
I understand that we’ll all have to round up or down whenever we pay a bill with cash (which is another endangered practice)—no big deal. Nickels will replace pennies in the cash drawer.. And when our great-grandchildren hear this old tune, Pennies From Heaven, will they ask, “What’s a penny?” Of course they will.
I hate losing one of the few objects of good luck from my childhood. What will take the place of lucky pennies?
Don’t we need luck more than ever right now?

A Pink Guitar

On Instagram, there is a man known as Plumes. He wears a jaunty cap, carries a pink Epiphone guitar, and travels to farms, zoos, and wildlife reserves worldwide to sing for animals. Horses, foxes, cows, lemurs, meerkats, tigers, and seals become his audience. He performs no screaming solos or rock covers. Instead, he plays quiet melodies—oldies and gentle songs—in a calm, cool voice while sitting in very close proximity to creatures who cannot possibly understand his words. And yet, they listen. They are mesmerized. Somehow, across the barrier of species, a man with a pink guitar communicates something profound.

I confess that I am not naturally an animal person. The dynamics of how creatures experience the world has never been a category of particular curiosity for me. But watching Plumes strum for a tiger—sitting peacefully behind a fence, making no demands, simply offering music—I found myself arrested by a larger question: What do these animals hear? What language are they receiving? Every species apprehends sound differently. Many creatures can hear frequencies that are entirely beyond the human range. And yet they all listen, transfixed by the same vibrations that move us.

Several years ago, a colleague shared a story that crystallized this truth. He visited someone on a memory unit—a resident in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease who had become almost entirely mute. The disease had stolen her words, her recognition, her ability to engage with the world through language. Faced with this profound wall of silence, my colleague made an intuitive choice. He decided to sing the Shema and V’ahavta.

As he chanted those sacred prayers, something extraordinary happened. The resident’s eyes opened wide. She began singing. For nearly two years, until her death, they sang together at every visit—prayers, melodies, songs from her past—creating islands of connection in an ocean of cognitive loss.

This woman was not cured by music. Her Alzheimer’s did not disappear. But this use of music is now a standard of Alzheimer’s treatment. Neuroscience explains what happens: music accesses memory and emotion through entirely different neural pathways than verbal communication. Even as the disease devastates the brain regions responsible for language and factual memory, the areas that process music remain relatively intact far longer. Patients who cannot recognize their own children sometimes weep at the sound of a beloved song. We are quite literally wired for music at the deepest level of our being.

My colleague recognized something profound: when language fails, music remains. When the mind fragments, melody holds. In the Jewish tradition, we understand this instinctively. We do not merely recite our prayers—we chant them, sing them, give them music. The Shema is not just words; it is an experience of sound and soul joined together.

What Plumes offers to animals and what my colleague offered to a woman with Alzheimer’s are expressions of the same fundamental truth: music transcends boundaries. It does not require shared language, shared cognition, or even shared species. It requires only the willingness to offer it and the capacity to receive it—capacities both far more universal than we typically imagine.

Think of what this means. In the presence of music, a tiger and a man sit together in peaceful attention. In the presence of song, a mind shattered by disease recognizes itself again. In the presence of melody, we remember that we are not alone, that our experience of beauty and longing and joy can be shared, that something in us resonates with something beyond ourselves.

This is not sentiment. This is neurology, biology, and spirit converging to tell us the same story: we are creatures made for connection. Music is one of the primary languages through which that connection speaks.

As we gather today to celebrate the installation of our new cantor, Gabe Snyder, we are not simply welcoming a skilled musician; we are also welcoming a dedicated leader. We acknowledge that Cantor Snyder does what Plumes does and what my colleague’s voice did: opens a channel through which the human spirit can speak and be heard.

In our tradition, music is not an accompaniment to prayer. It is not filler or pleasant background. It is part of the very substance of our spiritual life. When we sing Shabbat prayers together, we are participating in something that transcends the merely intellectual. We are vibrating together, remembering together, hoping together.

Gabe brings to this sacred work not only technical excellence but also his gutte neshumah—a good soul. And it is the soul that music truly conveys. It is the soul that moves across all boundaries: between human and animal, between the intact mind and the fractured one, between strangers who suddenly find themselves singing in unison.

We do not know what the seal heard when Plumes played the pink guitar. We do not fully understand what language passed between them. But we know something essential occurred—a moment of connection, of openness, of one being offering itself peacefully to another. This is what music does. This is what our cantor will continue to do, week after week, bringing the vibrations of our tradition into our sanctuary and into our souls.

I don’t know if he plays for his cat, but we’re all ears.