Before Shabbat

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.