Rabbi Janet Marder

March 3, 2006

Making Beautiful Music Together

            When I was a kid, I took piano lessons for eight years – from the time I was seven until I was 15. I loved fooling around on the piano; playing songs by ear was easy for me. I didn’t even mind practicing too much. What really terrified me were the recitals. I used to be shy! I would get sick with dread before I had to get up in front of people and play – even when the room was filled with sympathetic parents and grandparents who were really only interested in watching their own kid play. Finally, sometime when I was in high school, it just started feeling like too much, and I gave up the lessons.

            I kept playing, but of course I didn’t progress any more. A few years later, when I left home and moved out, first to college and then grad school, I lived in a series of small apartments that never had room for a piano, so I pretty much stopped playing altogether. I kept missing it, though. Whenever I came across a piano, I still liked to sit down and noodle around, and I always longed for a piano of my own.

            Two weeks ago Shelly and I moved some furniture around and somehow created a new six-foot stretch of wall in the living room. And last week we installed there a gleaming black Yamaha upright piano. It has a beautiful tone – even my noodling sounds good – and every time I sit down at it I remember how much I love to play.

            One thing I know for sure is that I’m not going to be giving any recitals. But I have thought about taking some lessons, and recently I did some research into music education. I started reading about the Suzuki method, which has trained tens of thousands of children to play instruments and value music.

         The Suzuki method was invented by a Japanese educator and philosopher, Dr. Shin’ichi Suzuki.  As a young violinist in the 1920s he went to Germany . There he noticed how easily and naturally young children from Japan learned how to speak German, while adults struggled to master the vocabulary and accent.  Dr. Suzuki based his theory of music education on the principles of language acquisition. He had the radical idea that any child can learn to play music.

         He wrote: "Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which can be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability, just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited."

         The basic idea behind the Suzuki method is that children learn from their environment. Dr. Suzuki said, “Change the environment, don’t change the child.” The goal is to create an environment that promotes music, by immersing children in music from a very early age. Suzuki kids start listening to classical music when they’re toddlers – it’s part of their life from the beginning.

         In the Suzuki program practicing is not something children do alone, or something that is forced on them by parental nagging. It is done with the active help and support of their parents. Parents have to be involved in Suzuki education or it doesn’t work.

         What does “being involved” mean? It means that parents are present during all lessons, and are supposed to talk about each lesson in advance with their child; afterwards, they review it together. Encouragement and praise from parents are crucial. Parents also stay in the room for practice sessions, rather than sending the child off to practice alone.

         But that’s not all. The director of one Suzuki program says that parents are responsible for “creating an environment at home where music is respected and taken seriously. Parents have to commit themselves to playing good music in the home. And they have to commit themselves to taking their children to concerts frequently, too. Otherwise, there is no point in their enrolling their kids in a Suzuki program.”

         “And there is one more thing that parents need to do,” she says. “They need to make sure that their children get together with other Suzuki kids often to play music together and to share in practicing together. Otherwise, it just won’t work.”

         Parents have a huge responsibility for the success of this kind of music education. But it’s not just them. Suzuki is based on “the three P’s: parents, pedagogues and peers.” It’s a partnership of committed parents and well-trained teachers who are both focused on the same goals, in which kids are surrounded by other kids who are all pursuing those same goals.

         The peer component is important. A cornerstone of Suzuki thinking is that children learn from one another. Seeing an older child, whom they perceive as being “like them,” motivates young kids in a way that their parents and adult teachers cannot. Seeing other kids working and succeeding helps them believe that they, too, can succeed.  So Suzuki provides weekly group lessons as well as private lessons. There are a variety of music ensembles, regular monthly recitals and other performance opportunities. There are weekend retreats and Suzuki summer camp where kids spend up to four hours a day playing music together.

         Ari Goldman, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University , wrote about his experience when he took his ten year old son, Judah, to such a camp. He says that at home he and his wife had trouble getting Judah to practice his instrument, and he was worried about whether the environment of the camp would be too intense for his young son. Within a few days Ari discovered that the Suzuki method really works.

         “There was music everywhere. The practice rooms were always full. Music was pouring out of every classroom. Every night there was a concert, sometimes given by the teachers, sometimes by the students, sometimes by both. And [Ari] found that he did not have to nudge Judah – not with bribes and not with threats. He was stimulated by everything around him, and he felt challenged to do well. At nearly every session, he was the last kid to pack up his cello and quit.”

         You might think that Suzuki education is a recipe for neurosis, a stressful pressure-cooker of a program designed to produce either child prodigies or unhappy failed prodigies. In fact, the goal of Suzuki education, wrote Dr. Suzuki, is not to produce prodigies but to produce children with “noble hearts.”

         Ari Goldman asked the director of his son’s music camp what she considers a successful Suzuki grad. She said: “a young person who graduates from the Suzuki Institute and continues to want to play music after he or she graduates is a success. Our goal is not to turn out professional musicians, though sometimes we do. Our goal is to turn out human beings who will care about music.”

         I’m interested in music, as I said, but this is not a sermon about music. When Ari Goldman, who is a committed Jew, heard about the three P’s -- parents, pedagogues, peers – he said to himself, “where have I heard about this before?” Then he realized: these three are the basis of Jewish education, too. Jewish education requires committed parents, talented, dedicated teachers, and a community of students who care about the same things.

         This recipe for Jewish education wasn’t developed in the 1920s, the 1820s or even the 1520s. It goes back to the Torah, which says that parents are the most important teachers of their children, because kids remember best what they learn from the people they most love and respect.

         And it goes back to the Talmud, which has such respect for teachers that it calls schoolteachers the true guardians of a city. It goes back to an ancient tradition of peer education that says you shouldn’t study Torah in solitude. Jews learn best when they learn together, building friendships while stimulating one another’s minds.

          Why would parents invest significant money, time and energy in giving their child a Suzuki music education? Probably because they care about music themselves, and believe that music is a great gift that will enrich their child’s life. It makes no sense, according to the Suzuki way of thinking, for a parent, out of the blue, to start sending their child to a music lesson for an hour or two each week if nothing else in that child’s environment supports the value of music.

            It ‘s the same with parents who care about books, and who regularly read to their young children, tell them stories, buy them books, take them to the library, join parent-child book groups and read regularly for pleasure themselves. I don’t mean that they force books on their children. I mean that they share with them, in a friendly, loving and systematic way, an activity that they themselves value and cherish.

            We live in a culture today in which most people don’t listen to classical music and most people don’t read books for pleasure. But every year some lucky children learn to love music and books because parents, teachers and peers together create an environment in which music and books are respected and appreciated.

            You don’t need a strong three-way partnership of parents, teachers and peers to teach kids to buy consumer goods, be de-sensitized to violence or eat junk food. The culture will do that for us with no effort on our part.

            But that three-way partnership, that systematic effort, is what it takes to combat our cultural conditioning, to go in a different direction from what others are doing, to send a counter-cultural message. That’s what Jewish education has been about since the beginning.

            It’s about teaching honesty and justice even when lots of people lie and cheat. It’s about learning reverence for life in a society in which life is cheap. It teaches the imperative to care for the vulnerable in a society which ignores or despises the poor. It’s about respecting all people as made in the image of God, standing up against prejudice and bigotry and cruelty on the playground.

            Jewish education is about creating a deep sense of responsibility to others, defying a materialist, me-first mentality. It’s about inculcating respect for learning, questioning and rational debate in a world that is more and more about sound bites, dumbing-down and mass entertainment. It’s about pursuing peace in a culture saturated with violence.

            It’s about valuing rest and reflection as the essential partners of productivity. It’s about living with respect for the generations before and care for the generations that will come after us rather than living only for the moment. And it’s about preserving a sense of the holy, of gratitude, humility and openness to a God who calls us to do all these things.

            When I think about what a successful Jewish education would mean here at Beth Am, or at any synagogue, it seems to me that the Suzuki director’s answer makes a lot of sense, if we change just a few words: “A young person who graduates from a Jewish school and continues to want to be actively Jewish is a success. And we are not here to necessarily create professional Jews, though sometimes we do. Our goal is to turn out human beings who care about being Jewish.”

            We can best do that here at Beth Am if we have a strong three-way partnership, all of us focused on achieving that goal. One or two of the pillars alone won’t do it.  A steady diet of poorly-trained, indifferent teachers can turn off students from the most committed Jewish homes. Good teachers can’t compensate for uninvolved parents who don’t create a home environment where Judaism is respected and taken seriously, or who don’t invest time in coming together with other Jews to practice Judaism.

            If you’re a Jewishly committed parent sending your son or daughter to school with mostly kids who come from uncommitted homes, your kid is going to feel a bit like an oddball, no matter how much love and dedication parents and teachers pour into him or her. Involved, committed parents; trained, enthusiastic teachers; a vibrant peer community – that’s what it will take to make the next generation care about living Jewish lives.

            There’s a lot that’s at  stake. If the chain breaks in just one generation of a family, that’s the end of Judaism in that family.

             I’m grateful to my parents and my piano teacher for giving me the gift of music. For many years it was a big part of my life. In the years when it wasn’t, I missed it a lot. And now that I have a piano again, my life and my home feel complete.

            Imagine a whole generation of Beth Am kids who see their Jewish heritage as a gift -- something that enriches them, something they love, something that gives them joy. Imagine those kids growing up to feel that their life won’t be complete unless they’re living as a Jew. There’s no mystery about how to do that. All of us – students, teachers, parents, grandparents, the whole Beth Am community – all of us, like an orchestra playing together the same great score, have to do it together.

            Note: I thank Rabbi Jack Riemer for the inspiration for this sermon, and for sharing with me Ari Goldman’s article about Suzuki.