if you were to make a playlist that embodied prayer, what would it look like?
please send them to me
Below is a piece I wrote years ago. It feels particularly important.
And here is the playlist I made for this month.
In 2010 and in his 70’s, Leonard Cohen stood on stage for three hours, serenading a sold-out Chicagoland crowd. My babushka, to the left of me, did not understand all of his words and yet she would say, in Russian, that his music is poetry.
As Jews, we are pulled to anything that sounds sad, as long as it has a story. We are a contradicting people, and it mostly comes from us perpetually escaping persecution since the beginning of our time. Over the phone, I first try to explain this intergenerational trauma to my mother. She says “psychology just wants to put a label on everything”, a deflection. I then try to explain it to my father and he says, “that means everyone is fucked, right?”
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