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Spiritual Harmony

You can use Kabbalist tunes to connect to the spiritual roots from which they were written without having to work hard. Just relax and listen to the music. Yet there is information in the notes themselves. The notes in Kabbalah are not random or “free form.” Their harmony is built on Kabbalistic rules and notes are chosen according to the way a soul is built. They are a way to climb the ladder. You (the listener) feel them penetrating deep within your soul, unobstructed. This happens because of the direct connection between your soul and the roots of the notes. Go back to Chapter 10 and think of the spiritual nature of Hebrew letters and their representation of numbers. The most important thing in Kabbalistic music is not the notes themselves, but all the fine nuances that exist between them. Just to give you a sense of it, in Chapter 10 we said that there are Taamim (flavors), Nekudot (dots under, within, and above the letters), Tagin (tags on top of the letters), and Otiot (letters). These represent nuances formed by the impression from the Light— impressions, for instance, of Reshimot leaving and reentering the spiritual vessel It is the same with melodies. Musicians who understand how to play Kabbalistic melodies are few and far between. The difference between one who plays nicely and one who plays correctly lies in the extent to which one understands where the important things are. What’s most important lies not in the sounds, but in the tiniest symbols, in how the sound begins and ends. I had a wonderful student who played the violin. “I’m ready to play only on the condition that you will hold my hand,” he would tell me. And he was right—Kabbalah music is about conveying the right feeling, not the accurate note.