Recording Bible Raps With My Teachers at Sinai
Hey there teachers. Two qualifications:
First off, I very well recognize I might be transposing a narrative on a reality with no plot-line - the Mystic's trapdoor.
Secondly, I intentionally use language that disorients and plays with shadows in an attempt to transmit the rhythm of the mystical experience. So the piece may not make sense.
A brief introduction: When you record songs you've written, you are forced to marshall your ego into specific personas - if i'm singing a love song, in order to do the song justice, i need to be in love when i sing it. Such intensive corralling of your ego from this persona to that persona in the "temple" of the studio (its an intense place), shakes up your ego and sometimes allows a view underneath it - a frontrow seat to your soul. This is what happened when i was recording bible raps - the tension between the necessity of being Torah in order to do the Bible raps justice and the feelings of holy unworthiness of even tieing a Midrashist's shoes, let alone standing in them, created a window through which an intimate portrait of my “soul” appeared...
And there you were (some of my teachers). Tiny Fragments of your souls embedded in mine. Active.
This taught me alot and also made me curious about other things. It also gave me a literal rendering of the concept of Torah Mi Sinai, and the midrash that says every jewish soul born and unborn was at sinai - The golden thread of the rebbe/pupil relationship.
So here you go. It's likely not to make much sense without my verbal introduction, but nevertheless i thought i'd send it along in its unadulterated form.
Recording Bible Raps With My Teachers at Sinai
The studio lights are dimmed like a dying diamond. Incense smoke snakes to heaven as if a hypnotic pipe is played above or smoked below. Dots and feathers respectively. I put the headphones on and stare down the familiar idols of anxiety. They think I’m wack. I raise my upper lip like an eyebrow growling and focus on the mountain-chain challenge of “putting down the vocals”: To feel each word, to be each word. All insecure thoughts that deny my total presence in each line must be slaughtered. The altars will drip with the blood of my insecurities or the God of flow will not be appeased.
“Drop the beat.” I tell my Producer Jamo.
My verse is 15 seconds away.
“Yeah…yeah…” I find the beat.
10 seconds til take off.
“Let’s go.” My voice entreats my mind to meet in the beat.
5 seconds…
In the remaining 5 seconds the following occurs:
I am used to recording my love songs and my battle raps - embodying those sentiments, but as I position my soul to embody Torah I am lung for a floop. It’s weird to consciously attempt to be Torah! Enormous doubts about the disingenuousness of my orating Judaism as if I had a clue; creep, skidaddle and menace from the dirty shadows like pestiferous insects. Stink-bombs with eyeballs and wings zip from the eye sockets of the idols I had previously tore down. Pestiferous is a word.
The beat bumps, the verse approaches, 4 seconds...
Hairy and horned legs climb upon my toes and brush past my heels and earlobes. My knees buckle. My belt moves.
Eyes closed, I contemplate rapping Torah, I don’t even wrap Tfellin. My words are small, the stage is the cosmos, the audience is a classroom. I’m disoriented.
3 seconds…
Scanning the landscape of my being I am radically surprised to encounter alien elements that have infiltrated my soul. They are allies. They are slivers of the souls of my teachers.
Bits of their being, their energy, their whathaveyous, in different magnitudes, now exist in me.
Just chilling (well, slivers of souls don’t exactly chill, they kind of vibrate to a foreign rhythm).
winking stars on the horizon of my consciousness,
little vibrating ripples on the pool of my being, embedded in the tapestry of my Jewish soul.
Psychic existents in my consciousness as individual and identifiable as the teacher.
They don’t push, their presence simply supports.
2 seconds….
Doubts of unworthiness scatter at this teacher’s quiet harangue, insecurities of inauthenticity retreat at that teacher’s resounding whisper, and others, when needed, would each, in their own way, say essentially the same thing: “BE!”
1 second…
“Every Jew was at Sinai,” is no longer a poetic device. I have a reality to hang its hat upon. Each sliver of my teacher’s soul that has embedded itself as a vibrating node in the fabric of my being is composed of a bit of their total being. I presume, in their total being, slivers of their teacher’s souls are likewise inextricably bound. Thus, in my being is a bit of my teacher’s teacher’s soul. The moment I carry this reality to its logical end is the moment my verse begins at Sinai.
Holler.