Playing With Three Strings

By Rabbi Harold Schulwies

We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
who walks the stage with braces on both legs,
On two crutches.
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of his violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist didn't leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed, and recomposed the piece in his head.
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
turned them upward and downward.
The audience screamed delight,
applauded their appreciation.
Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,
The violinist answered -
It is my task t make music with what remains.
A legacy mightier than a concert.
Make music with what remains.
Complete the song left for us to sing,
transcend the loss,
Play it out with heart, soul, and might
with all remaining strength within us.

Leap

By Brian Doyler
In honor of the trade center victims

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows.

Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backward with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Jane Tedder saw people leaping. Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

I try to whisper a prayer for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness in them like seeds that open only under great fire.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other and held on tight.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold on to that.

Readings of November 12, 2006