A HERMIT'S TALE: Part Five

"Between the Keruvim"

עמד והתבונן נפלאות אל

Stand still and contemplate the wonders that G-d has performed

Iyov 37 14

The Gate of Transformation

There is an exceptionally  other-worldly moment in the Biblical account of the giving  of the Torah at Sinai when the experience of the entire nation of Israel becomes synesthesic.  The initial (and some say all) words of that prophetic revelation to an entire people were experienced not as something heard or seen  but as something  resembling yet exceeding the limitations of both those senses.

וכל־העם ראים את־הקולת 

And all the  People saw the sounds.

Shemot 20:15 

We experienced The Voice in a uniquely inter-sensual or supra-sensual way which was above  and beyond normal hearing. We were listening with our spiritual Heart.

   In 2003, I made a choice to focus on developing the activity of listening to that Voice anew. I was standing on the threshold of a metaphysical gate  and once I had summoned the courage to pass through it, my life would never be  the same again.

This was my epiphany:

 My auricular hearing was being taken  away so that I would be able to experience a much deeper level of spiritual attentiveness.  I accepted that it was not just a natural infirmity that I was experiencing, but also that it was a  supernaturally charged one designed to give me the biggest thump of my life to date—to drag me kicking and screaming, back into the dedicated contemplative life—a vocation from which I had fled when leaving the  Carmelite monastic order in  my youth.

  I began to pray at length again—with newfound kavanah (intentional focus) for the first time  in many years,and I ceased being “a semi-retired teacher experimenting with some studious and creative solitude” and became “a full-time intentional religious contemplative” again.

I have never had any trouble believing that prayer was a form of action or that contemplatives are as spiritually and cosmically valuable (and perhaps as necessary) as any other professionally philanthropic group.  But in my thirties and forties, I never imagined that I would be re-joining that contemplative work-force myself.

   What surprised me even more was that I was about to attempt to do this as a Jew—and as I have outlined in The Cave of the  Heart: Kuntres  Maarat HaLev and other writings— Judaism  is  a religion where solitary contemplative lifestyles are a fringe minority activity that has become  almost extinct. 

Furthermore,  single and solitary living is  also a Jewish practice which has many Jewish denigrators and few supporters in our own era.   Living and promoting  solitary contemplative practice gets me full marks for chutzpah, but  I have  always been cast (sometimes unknowingly and unexpectedly) as something  of  a pioneer in music education and  it  seems I was thus embarking on a similar project within Judaism.


Q:So how exactly had it all come about?

A: Ve-nahafoch hu—everything was turned on its head:

 

— I began to see my ‘curses’ as blessings.   My spiritual wilderness (midbar) was actually a  potentially productive vineyard (karmel)   It had been so all along though I had not seen it for what it was.

— Composing and  making music   had been a way of praying.  My hearing difficulties took music away, and I was left with the sound of silencewhich made space and time for a still small voice to be heard.

—Human relationships had been the motor of my life. Relationships had failed or, even worse, dwindled into acquaintanceships at a distance.  I was left with the One who had been waiting for me all alongthe One who may actually be my only intended life-partner.

—My music-teaching career was in shattered ruins, but in fact it had only ever been a preparation for something else.  I could not hear well enough to teach music anymore and I did not  know what other skills I could use.   I despaired trying to see what I had left to offer.  The answer  that had emerged was:

 

You can pray and give G-d your full attention.


Accepting that this truly was the answer I was  being given, and choosing to do it full-time was a risky choice which I fought against for a very long time.  It involved ascesis and it necessitated being self-supporting with limited funds—so it was far from being a  cushy number.

—During the period  that led up to this transformation, I had complained about my life-circumstances (to G-d  daily, and to my distant but long-suffering friends periodically).   I had spent so much time moaning on and on about my lack of purpose, my health, my poverty, and my needs that I bored myself silly, and the fire of that particular hell simply  burnt itself out.

   But the Hound of Heaven[1] is no respecter of denominational fences and it had been at my heels since the  day I left the Carmelites.  I finally accepted that I had been pursued and was now cornered in Judaism.   I began to see that the act of walking-out on G-d when  I left the monastery as a young man was a selfish mistake  and that I was being given a chance to prove my love for Him all over  again.

I turned my whole attention to G-d in  devekut by attempting to maintain a nebulous but near-constant awareness of Him.  That produced an unexpectedly dynamic move into prayerful  tikkun  olam as I found myself thinking about others for a change.  I  remember that— sometimes and  somehow — it felt  as though I was (as it were) seeing things through His  Eyes. 

And almost imperceptibly, in jerks and bounds over a period of around two years in almost complete solitude, it had simply clicked into place:

-Not lonelybut alone with G-d;

-Not alonebut united in spirit to all other G-d-Wrestlers;

-Not unfulfilledbut now seeking fulfillment in G-d alone;

-Not inactive or escapistbut actively praying for all creation, all of the time.

  

With this new perspective, I returned to the practice  of reciting the formal daily services. 

My current  place of prayer in Safed 2024

In the first three years of the twelve year cave-retreat I am trying  to describe for you, I focussed on the recitation of the Amidah[2] with the utmost kavanah and devekut that I could muster.  This  meant that the Shemoneh Esreh might often take hours. Though I frequently took editorial liberties with the other texts in the siddur, for the last eight years of this retreat period I davened every service without fail daily.

  I mention this not to score piety points, but because there are many who doubt that this  kind of  liturgical regularity can be  easily achieved without the support and incentive of community recitation in a physical minyan.  In my experience—within the context of an intentionally dedicated life of intimate prayer— the regular  recitation of the daily services can become  as reflexive as breathing.  To forget to pray the  daily services  in such circumstances is almost impossible.  

In those totally eremitic days in Spain,  although this performance of the liturgy produced  a major change in my routines, my return to regular periods of silent contemplative prayer was  of even  greater significance:  As a Carmelite monk, I had practiced two hours  of this kind of silent contemplative prayer each and  every day.  Then it had been done  formally, in community, and in a chapel.  As a solitary Jew I practiced it either on the roof, in the  garden, or in the cave-room itself. With its woodburning stove the latter was the preferred location each winter.

  I simply gave all my attention to G-d and sat or stood with Him (as it were) morning  and eveningsometimes words were involved, sometimes issues were considered, sometimes I just sat in His Presence. Sometimes these regular  periods of contemplative prayer lasted thirty minutes or so, sometimes they lasted three or four hours—especially the evening one.

This needs unpacking and I could  say much more about this  practice — but for now, I need to explain something  for  any non-Jews or Jews who are reading this who are unaccustomed to  talk of  ‘contemplative’ prayer.

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  For many observant Jews their most intimate contact with G-d is made through tefillah (liturgical prayer)  and Talmud Torah (shared Torah Study).  The most common approach of most Orthodox Jews is to regard liturgical prayer  as a duty of  Divine praise; a time for self examination and repentance; and a time  to recite set texts expressing love  and obedience. It is, for them, a time  when  one speaks to G-d using time honoured and fixed formulae recited in common and  at set times.

The silent Shemoneh Esreh allows for a small measure of personal silent prayer and  everyone is expected to  recite the whole prayer with  intense mental concentration on fulfilling the obligation to pray as perfectly as one  can.   But there is  usually no space in public worship for extensive  silent prayer during the  liturgy itself.

  Catholic Christians, for  example,  are very familiar with the  practice of sitting in silent prayer communally after receiving communion during the  Eucharistic liturgy  and also in visiting churches individually for  silent prayer sessions  when the building is almost empty.  In our days, the practice of silent communal prayer is almost non-existent in most Rabbinic Jewish synagogues.   This was not the case in ancient  and  classical times as we know from Berakhot 32b in the  Talmud.

As to the individual and private practice of meditation in a synagogue building—whenever I have  sat in silent contemplative  prayer in a synagogue outside of  the  formal service times, I have  invariably been approached and invited to join a study group on the  assumption I was a lonely would-be student; asked if I am “O.K.” on the  assumption such  a person,sitting alone at such a time,  must be  either depressed or distressed; or (on several occasions)  had a book thrust forcefully into my hands on the assumption I  was neglecting study and had fallen asleep!  

Torah Study—whether undertaken  ritually in the middle of Shacharit or the other liturgical services, or as a separate  activity—is almost always a communal or partnership activity. The latter often involves animated argument and even verbally aggressive conflict (for  the  sake of heaven) as differences of opinion are ironed out.  Together with the ritual reading of the Sefer Torah,[3] such study periods are regarded as being the time to ‘hear’ what G-d is saying.  Rarely is it something that is  done alone in meditative prayer or with extended periods of silent reflection.

 Yet  I believe  that it is possible to receive  direct and individual Divine responses during our solitary study, davening, and  in our contemplative  prayer.[4]  To assume  that a person sitting alone  in a place of worship in  silence, with eyes closed,  or without  a book in their  hands is either dozing or depressed is  a tragic commentary on  common contemporary practice. That such people are actually engaged in the  silent ‘study’ of the  Torah of the  Heart is often rarely understood or appreciated  these days. 

Suffice it to say, for the moment, that definitions  of what constitutes essential Prayer and  essential Torah Study are not so rigidly  clear-cut when  one looks at the various schools of   Jewish mysticism in antiquity, or at the Kabbalistic or Chassidic traditions—all of which have been unanimous in claiming that contemplative prayer in solitude is an authentic auxiliary to public worship and study. Some have  even  said it exceeds them in importance.   I am  most definitely and passionately aligned with this latter approach.

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I hope that the  reader will  appreciate that my choice to live  as a Jewish hermit was not merely to reinstate contemplative prayer or solitary practices into my life  because of  a nostalgic longing for my catholic-monastic past.  

I was consciously doing it  because I believe that silent contemplative prayer and solitary ascetic retreat practices  both have a legitimately Jewish history that is  in quite urgent need of renewal after a long hiatus.   (I outlined some of my views on this in an essay entitled "Solitude in Jewish Contemplative Practice") 

Once I had decided to be a full-time contemplative with a mission, my daily and  seasonal horarium became  similarly transformed as follows:

The week I divided quite simply into Shabbat and l’chol.  The weekdays (l’chol)  always seemed like one long day somehow.  Shabbat observance was a work in progress: in the  early years of the cave-retreat, I observed Shabbat according to Masorti/Conservative  principles and then in the last eight years I became (to this  day) fully shomer Shabbat in the  Orthodox manner.[5]   I was, as yet, unable  to attend any communal Jewish services as the nearest community was several hundred miles away—but  I united intentionally in everything I did with all Israel in spirit. 

 L’chol routine involved a morning of davening and hitbonenut (silent contemplative prayer) followed by a walk and snackand a Spanish siesta.  From the third year onwards, the walk was frequently skipped as I often remained in the cloistered enclosure of the house for three or four days at a time—sometimes for several weeks.   I spent a part of each morning in study, writing letters, checking world news online, and writing articles for this Jewish Contemplatives website. 

   The  afternoon became a period of manual work (housework, decorating, laundry, gardening, or sweeping the street by neighbourly rota). To paraphrase the Carthusian founder, Bruno of Cologne : each weekday afternoon was a time of  Quies[6]leisure which is occupied and work which is performed in tranquility—and as such, it was often my favourite time of the day.

 Throughout this period I rested in G-d. My hands and body in motion but with my attention on/in Him.  Ninety percent of the time I chose only tasks which enabled this, and I was well  aware that being able to do that, free from pressing family or career responsibilities,  was an enormous blessing in itself.

   In the evening I would  daven and make the  second (and usually longer) daily period of hitbonenut, most often  on the roof. This would  be followed by a main meal and an evening of text-based study, or writing.  I had budget internet access in the evening, and I made full use of it. The internet was my library and almost all of my surfing time was spent on Jewish sites.  I had no access to Jewish library books and could not afford to buy more than one or two books  per year, so the internet was gold to me.  

Inside and outside of the periods of liturgical prayer and contemplative  hitbodedut/hitbonenut—one way or another—my time was devoted to the cultivation of a ‘shiviti’ focus: keeping the Presence/Name of HaShem in mind at all times.

    For me, this did  not consist in the maintenance of a literal focus  on the written Divine Name, nor  was it a kabbalistic activity as  expressed in the beautiful Hakdamos to the siddur commentary Keser Nehora[7] by Rabbi  Aharon of Zhelichov.

  The shiviti text I refer to is a popular meditational text that may appear at the top of a siddur page: or on a calligraphic plaque  just above Tehillim 67 in the form of a menorah.  The text reads:

שויתי יי לנגדי תמיד

“I will set HASHEM  always before me always.” (Tehillim 16:8).


  Some take the shiviti graphic to be an aid to hold the letters of the Tetragramaton visually  in their minds, others regard it as a purely ethical statement. Some others regard the concept it represents  to be a description of the contemplative practice of maintaining  a more-or-less constant awareness of the Presence of G-d. This is  the way I attempted to practice it. 

For me it was a way of remaining attached to the Divine Presence by a sort of thread—sometimes verbal, sometimes conceptual—a thread somewhat like that which is attached to a kite or fishing line.  That is to say, it was sometimes taut and highly charged with activity, sometimes passively floating in the wind/water: yet always attached. This was a persistent  attempt to practice devekut rather than the conclusive attainment of it, but  I was blessed to have been given both  the time and the inclination to offer this attempt as my Service of the Heart.

Many years  after writing those  last few paragraphs I was excited to discover  that this is also a highly developed core Sufi practice known as dhikr. I hope to expand on that discovery shortly.

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Almost all  of what you  have  read here in this ‘chapter’  of  A Hermit’s Tale was actually written between 2010 and  2014.  I have  merely added and deleted a few passages. In the  very first version, I wrote:

“At first sight, it might appear that what I have described in this chapter is simply the record of a personal psychological solution to adversely changed circumstances: a possibly defeatist or quietist approach to accepting the vicissitudes of life with equanimity.  This  is  not so.   For intentional religious contemplatives, there is  more going on behind the veil.

The process of turning things on their head to see curses as blessings is a combative struggle which is anything but passive.   It is a process which produces an active mode of acceptance which needs constant renewal and reaffirmation. The process of purification seems  to be cyclic and lessons are repeated on a kind of learning spiral. The Teacher in this process is  not the individual standing alone, but the Divine One in whose Presence they stand.

Furthermore, I believe  that the quest for a state of hishtavut (equanimity) is, in itself, part of  the answer to many of our global problems and  not a matter of self-improvement.  I discovered, by experience, what the sages and mystics have been telling us for centuries:  Contentment is something to do with seeing things in a certain light not something to do with something that we lack or think we need—And the power of individuals being used to channel Divine Peace and Harmony is under-estimated.”

   Reading those words again in 2024 I am convinced that the perspective  I described in that passage is still the prime motivator of my perseverance and  development as an intentionally solitary contemplative. I did not realise it  at the  time, but—once again— I was experiencing and writing about concepts  that are central to Judeo-Sufic  practice. 

In  Part Six of A Hermit’s Tale, I hope to give you  an account of the way that Sufic encounter arose and  burgeoned to produce a new  experiment in contemplative community.

 

©Nachman Davies

Safed  March 12 2024

 

 

Previous chapters of A Hermit’s  Tale can be found here: 

Part 1,    Part2,   Part 3,  Part 4 .



 

 

NOTES

 

[1] Hound of Heaven: A reference to the title of a mystical poem by Francis Thompson (1859-1907).

 

[2] Amidah: (Standing  before G-d) The Amidah is the central prayer of the daily services. It is also called the Shemoneh Esreh (the  Eighteen Blessings) in reference to the original number of constituent blessings—there are now nineteen.

 

[3] Hand-written parchment scroll of the Torah

 

[4]  We also learn from  Midrash Tanchuma and from Rav Yisrael Salanter that one should actually consider Hashem to be one’s chavruta (study partner) when  studying alone…and regard the study as a personal and intimate conversation with the Divine.  I heard this from R' Boruch Lev in “Are you growing?”  ( Feldheim, November,2010)

 

[5]  In 2014 I had almost exhausted my private funds and was forced to sell the house and became a rental tenant. I relocated to live as part of the vibrant and supportive Spanish Moroccan Jewish Community of Torremolinos, where I studied and worshipped. I completed an Orthodox conversion in Madrid in 2016, made aliyah to Safed in 2019, and in 2020 returned to an intentionally solitary lifestyle.—but that is another story for another time.

 

[6] see ‘An Infinity of Little Hours’, Nancy Klein Maguire, page 161(Public Affairs/Perseus Book Group, Cambridge MA, 2006.)

 

[7] Rabbi Aharon’s prefaces (hakdamot) to this commentary contain instructions  for developing a ‘shiviti’ consciousness in davening. B’ezrat Hashem, these Hakdamot will hopefully soon be available  in an English  translation by Rabbi  Dovid Sears.

 

A HERMIT'S TALE: Part Four

The Hermitage in 2003


Parts  4 and 5 of A Hermit’s Tale are really one  (rather long) item because both are concerned with one subject: The transformation process that I experienced during an extended solitary retreat in Andalusia 2000-2014.  

Previous chapters of A Hermit’s  Tale can be found here:   Part 1,    Part2,   Part 3.


A Cave in Granada

The Cave of the Heart is my preferred name for the place or state of meeting in which the contemplative Jew encounters the Divine.  It was the title of a short  book (Kuntres Maarat Ha-Lev) that I wrote in 2005—in the early days of my twelve year residence as a solitary Jewish hermit in a cave-house in Spain.  In the following autobiographical essay (Parts 4 and 5 of this Hermit's Tale) I hope to describe  what happened in my ‘Cave in Granada’  in more detail.

My primary intention in doing this  is (i) to shed  some light on the way a disability or unexpected spiritual trial can ignite a process of transformation, and (ii) to give the reader a clearer impression of what a Jewish eremitical life might feel like.  One of my dearest teachers, Rabbi Lionel Blue, often pointed out that our lives are our own scriptures, and that—where spirituality is concerned—we should only write about what we have experienced ourselves.

My decision to return to life  as a dedicated contemplative did not happen overnight. It emerged slowly as my deafness progressed.  In 1999, once I had accepted that I was becoming so deaf that my life as a musician and a music teacher was about to end, I chose to take  some time away from full-time employment to develop and finish “The Song of Caedmon”— an orchestral-choral work  I had been re-writing.

  I  accepted a friend’s offer to stay as a guest in her vacant mountain home in the mountain-top village of Comares in Andalucia and soon afterwards,I took her advice to make a new home in Spain.  Her advice was pertinent because she had remembered my time  as a Carmelite (a monastic order reformed  by two Spaniards with Jewish ancestry: Teresa of Avila  and Juan de la Cruz) but  also  she thought that the climate might  be  suitable as I had spent so many years  living in the tropical climate of South East Asia.  She was right—I can still remember the shock of facing the late autumn British climate in London on the way back to Europe—nor had I forgotten the romantic but freezing years  living behind mediaeval stone  walls in Storeton on the Wirral. 

  Following the re-location to Spain, my intention was to compose  and to look for part-time work to make a living.  I managed the former but the later eluded me.  As with so many situations in my life, it seems  that Providence had different and quite unexpected plans for me.

In 1999, after a  few months living in Comares, and having no other property to tie me down in any way— I bought a small, unusual, and comparatively inexpensive home in Salobreña on the coast of Granada province. Shmuel (Ibn Nagrela) Ha Nagid had been encamped with his  army in nearby Almuñecar and  it is highly likely that he  will have  visited the   castle of Salobreña whilst functioning as a general in the army of the Sultan of Granada.

 The Phoenician name of this town was “Salambina” and  I like to think that its  name might  be related to the Hebrew “Shalom-Binah”. For me, it certainly proved to be a womb-like gestator of the  peace and wholeness  that comes from intuitive understanding.

Situated in the shadow of that Arab  castle, and in a pedestrian barrio of ten other houses whose Spanish residents were mostly members of one extended family, my new Spanish home was an old, traditionally-built house that nestled seamlessly into a dramatic rock outcrop in a cliff-face. Its site on Cuesta de GambullonCliffside of the Bubbling Spring— had been a Bronze Age settlement and to me and  to many visitors it had a strongly numinous atmosphere.

 The house was in the top left-hand corner of the barrio, a small pedestrian cul-de-sac that was set apart on a limb from the rest of the town, directly under the castle, on the western side of the casco antiguo (old village). The area was sheltered at the sides by tall trees and huge rocks. 

 


These features  gave it a rural feel even though the bustling town was only a few minutes walk away.  It was an ex-monk’s dream and it even came with a pseudo-cloister in the form of a small but private and  high-walled patio: ideal for  perambulatory or sedentary secluded meditations.

 

Patio cloister

  As a young Carmelite in the 1970’s, I had visited the rarely seen interior of the Carthusian monastery in Parkminster, and the layout of this little house with its enclosed garden  resembled one of the many hermitages there.  In fact that was the reason I chose it in the first place.

In those days, before property developers destroyed much of the municipality’s natural beauty, it overlooked a coastal valley filled with sugar-cane fields and countless wild birds. (I was once even visited by a hoopoe).  From its roof  I was able to sit on a bench before a Mediterranean sea-view that was crowned daily by an idyllically beautiful and  expansive sunset. 

View from my desk

In earlier  days, that bay of Almuñecar was the  point of maritime entry to Spain of the invading Islamic armed forces from  Morocco. Many of their soldiers were Jewish mercenaries.  In the later mediaeval era,  Almuñecar had a thriving Jewish quarter though little memory of it  survived the expulsion of 1492.

Two of the house’s four walls were actually part of the natural rock face, untouched save for being whitewashed with lime cal annually. The living room and dining area was thus a cave, lit by a small sky-light band of opaque glass bricks that filled the  enclosed space with sunlight—warm in winter, cool in summer— and the perfect place  for silent solitary encounter with G-d. It even came  with its own  "cleft in the  rock"  in the corner behind the pillar.

 


As I spoke very little Spanish and there were few English speakers in the town,  my idyllic domestic situation lent itself naturally to the development of a life  of solitude, and I was able to experience ‘expanded time’ away from the hustle  and bustle of the workaholic life I had left behind.

 I will admit—I thought I had entered my own custom-made Paradise, and I will remain  grateful for the rest of my life for the blessing I received in being able to live in such  a place  for fifteen whole years, subsisting solely on my own savings  until I was forced to sell it by encroaching poverty.    Storeton had been heavily mortgaged, and  this Spanish Hermitage  was thus the first and  only property that I have ever fully owned.

As one visiting friend remarked, the rock walls of the Salobreña hermitage seemed to envelop me  in a protective embrace. I certainly felt that way about it myself as I set to work on two fronts: to compose and to come to terms with the  loss of my hearing.

The routine which quickly developed went something like this: Occasionally I was visited by old friends from the  UK who stayed with me  for three or four days.  This would happen maybe once or twice a year.   For the rest of the year I lived alone, left the village about three days in a year, and left the house once a day on a regular, short walk up and down the hill: partly for exercise, sometimes for food shopping, and often for  a solitary and anonymous café con leche in a locally run and patronised cafetería where I was made to feel most welcome but was otherwise left in silent peace.

The entire  time was spent in almost total silence.The few Spanish words of business spoken on the shopping trip, or in a brief greeting with my neighbours as we crossed paths in the street were my only ‘live’ human contact. The rest of the time was spent in the house or in its small high-walled garden doing manual jobs, reading, studying, composing, writing letters—and eventually—praying.

At first, such silence and  solitude was not  consciously sought out, but slowly and surely it materialised as a path on which I was being asked to walk with full intentionality of purpose.

Little by little, as the rhythym of  that solitary silence  enveloped me, and as my  clinical deafness deepened — I began to examine  what was happening to me.  I was well aware that I had  landed in a comfortable home, in good general health,  with enough money in the bank to be self supporting  without income for a few years. I have never for one moment forgotten that enormous good fortune.      

But at the same time, I found myself stripped of the character-supportive motivation and prestige that a job-title or job-description brings; saddened by the hearing loss that now drastically limited the musical and educational activities which had been my life; far from old and dear friends and  from the comforts of hearing and speaking English—my own first language—and I found myself set down thus psychologically exposed on a spiritual mountain top.  On a ‘bad’ day I became increasingly lonely and self-pitying.

 My response was to spend most of my time working on the completion of  a composition entitled  The Song of Caedmon. That project  took a little over one year of daily work to complete.  I am not a technically gifted composer, though I think I was an imaginative and hard working one. I lack the intellectual capacity to compose works  of anything  approaching genius, even from a great distance.  As a composer (and performer) my reach has always exceeded my grasp.  One of the skills that I simply never possessed was the ability to hear complex music in my head. I could hold one line of melody there easily. Simple counterpoint was just possible but  multi-layered orchestral textures have  always been beyond my mental grasp without the aid of a keyboard or an audible notation program, both of which I was using to compose and revise my work.

 

The Song of Caedmon

   The story behind the  text of the Song of Caedmon is the reason I chose to spend  so much time and effort working on this particular composition. It had a message  for  me  personally  and  I wanted to share that with a wide audience through music.

   The original story is to be  found in Bede’s  Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum written in the  early eighth century C.E.  and it recounts the dream vision of a cowherd at Whitby  Abbey on the  Yorkshire coast. In the  dream he heard the  Voice of G-d asking him to sing.  Being untrained and uneducated he demurred but, on being pressed by the  Voice, he produced the following song:

 

Anglo-Saxon original

Nù sculon herigean heofonrìces Weard,

Meotodes meahte ond his mòdgeþanc,

weorc Wuldorfæder,

swà hè wundra gehwæs,

èce Drihten, òr onstealde.

Hè ærest sceòp eorðan bearnum

heofon tò hròfe, hàlig Scyppend;

þà middangeard monncynnes Weard,

èce Drihten, æfter tèode,

fìrum foldan, Frèa ælmihtig."

 

Bede’s Latin:

Nunc laudere debemus auctorem regni caelestis,

potentiam creatoris et consilium illius,

facta Patris gloriae.

Quomodo ille,

cum sit aeternus Deus,

omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit,

qui primo filiis hominum caelum pro culmine tecti,

dehinc terram custos humani generis omnipotens creavit.

 

Modern English:

Now let us praise the Guardian of heaven

The Maker’s might and His mind’s thought

The work of the Wonder Father

How of all the wonders that are,

the Lord Eternal, laid the first stone.

He shaped the earth for earthy man

He made him a heaven,a heaven for roof, Holy Shaper

Ruler of Middle Earth, Mankind’s Guardian

Lord Eternal, when all else was created

He made him the earth, Lord Almighty.

 

 

   He reported the event  to Abbess Hilda—whose monastery was unusual in that she presided over both male  and female monastics on one site—and  he  was given every encouragement to continue composing poetry and music.  He eventually became  a professed monk in that establishment.     

   The  story  bears a message of encouragement for all those who doubt their ability and underlines the effectiveness of encouraging  support from one’s mentor or spiritual guide.

   Here is  part of my setting of the Anglo-Saxon text as it appears at the  start of the  composition, to be sung by a boy soloist and then taken up by a solo soprano:

(click on graphics  to enlarge all scores)



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    Many readers will note that the autobiographical sketches I have presented in this “Hermit’sTale” have  been just that: sketchy. This is  because the Tale is written merely to provide some outline  background to the texts I have written on Contemplative Prayer and lifestyles. In these sketches therefore, I have tended to leave out all references to personal relationships except for my relationships with my formal teachers. Of course we learn  from everyone  we encounter, and in recounting the story of the Song of Caedmon I must make an exception, and honour a special person who was not one  of my formal teachers. In fact she was my ‘Hilda of Whitby force’ par excellence

Here is the  tale:

   In my youth, as a student at St Anselm’s  Sixth form College, I had a close friend at school,  Thomas—and very soon his family became my adopted family. Quite unexpectedly (for both of us) his Manchester-born mother, Claire Machell (née Ockleston) became the closest friend of my adolescence.  I was seventeen. She was in her fifties. She  was a Roman Catholic, training to become  a religion teacher, and a person newly discovering the comparitive freedoms of  Vatican II, Focolare, and Liberation Theology. 

   We spent many evenings, sitting in the corner of her ever-active kitchen while  the rest of the family watched the television, argued politics, or made music in the  front room. We often discussed the spiritual writings of both classical and modern theologians—but  our discussions  were most especially focussed on a person’s relationship to G-d in contemplative intimacy and prayer.

 She also  'believed' in me (and the musical and religious creativity  she  thought I had  been blessed with) one hundred and twenty percent and— just as St Hilda encouraged Caedmon to write poetry— she encouraged me to write  “spiritually active” music for fellow spiritual seekers. For this  reason, the first (1977) and all subsequent versions  of the  Song of Caedmon score bear  a dedication specifically to her. 

   In later years when I lived in Storeton and  could  not  afford to heat my home during  the winter, I returned to her centrally heated home for some  physical and  spiritual warmth and comfort.  By that time, most of her children had moved out and so  the piano was largely unused.   I composed the  second draft of the Song of Caedmon in her front room—sustained by her food, drink, and overflowing kindness.  She  was always there for  me. May her soul have  an aliyah.

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Earlier versions of the Song of Caedmon had been performed by school orchestras in my places of work both in UK and in South East Asia, and all versions of the  work featured orchestral and vocal parts for professional players and also elementary parts for raw beginners.   As had been the  case with the 1979 composition entitled  Sinai (described in A Hermits Tale: Part Three)  I saw these  performances of the  work as a kind of place-holder in time  and  space, designed to generate  a prophetic experience in both the  performers and the   audiences.

  I particularly wanted the  orchestras and  choirs  to be  composed of adults and children; gifted professionals and struggling amateurs.  This   produced a rather strange  score in which some  orchestral parts included sections that were  within the  grasp of elementary level students; some quite  basic but with challenges; and  some   only possible by virtuosi. Here is  the  moment when the full choir enters.

 

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   Here is an extract from the  score which is intended to represent  a celestial gamelan. (The  crotales need to be played by several players and dampened as in gamelan....ideally they should  be homemade as are the  bells used in the  composition)

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     After completing the  score in 2006, I approached several well-connected academic and professional contacts in a quest to obtain a performance of the work...but to no avail... and I was not really surprised by this: The unusual mixed ability scoring and extensive resources  required were daunting.  Also, there may well have been errors in the score which I was unable to detect once the deafness had progressed beyond the red-line, and I may well have overworked the  material to the point of its structural collapse. 

During the period I was working on the Song of Caedmon, I lost the ability to hear most of the upper frequencies and harmonics of the music I was writing.  When using the playback features of the  Sibelius notation app that I used, it became impossible for me to distinguish a tone from  a semi-tone or the timbre of a voice from that of a flute, violin, or trumpet. In despair, though I finished the work as far as I was able, I gave up trying  to  proof-read and  edit  it. 

 I still have a digital copy of the  score of the Song of Caedmon, and  I have  a hope that someone with greater ability might  recast  the melodic lines  and general concept of the work as I left it, regarding them as building blocks  that they might  craft into a totally  new and more perfect work.

For every Mozart there are myriads of  Salieris and  realising after so many years of work on the  project that I was a “Salieri” was painful but a great exercise in ego-control. Travelling through the  labyrinth of the  seven or eight versions  of the Song of Caedmon that I had worked on I had emerged to realise that the  real lessons  learnt  were extra-musical:  The  power of inspiration;the  value  of being encouraged by a loving mentor;the determination that can produce relentless perseverance; and that we do not always  attain the completion of our projects ourselves.   As  Pirke Avot has it:

 

“It is not your duty to finish the  work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it”

Pirke  Avot 2:14

 

This seems  to be  the principle lesson I am so often invited to learn...both  throughout my life and  to the  present day!

Here are the  closing bars  of the  score, which features an offstage choir:

 


 



 


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In Spain, my newly eroded and  transformed opinion of my worth as a composer had produced a brutally honest assessment of my technical limitations, but the onslaught of clinical deafness really put the  lid on the  process.

Deafness had presented me with a challenge in self-esteem, with an obstacle to finding employment, and with a deterioration in the social and communication possibilities  left open to me.  It then precipitated something  much more serious:  a loss of  trust (bitachon) in G-d though not of faith (emunah) in His existence.

 I remember many solitary walks  in the desolate and barren paths through the unkempt and plastic-greenhouse filled outskirts of the town of Salobreña .  Unable to bear the claustrophobia  of my seemingly  pointless confinement I would cast myself out of the house seeking wide open space.

 As I walked further away from inhabitated dwellings a  repeated silent scream emerged, playing over and over  in my head: “Can you see me! Can you hear me!?”     This was my only prayer at the time.

For the first two years in Spain when I was struggling with this acute religious alienation I really felt more alone, deserted, and self-pitying than words here can express and  I had no sense of anything approaching a conscious connection with the G-d I was screaming at.  But to this  day, I believe G-d was watching and listening even  if I was unaware of it and feeling unable to link-up.  G-d was, as it were, watching and listening for me to stop wriggling in anguish and see the path that He had prepared for this moment and was  about to reveal.

The musical, aural, social, and spiritual experience that I have just described was almost overwhelmingly depressing.   At the time  it seemed like tragedy, but I am well over all that now.  Hindsight—seeing the back-view as the Divine Glory passes by the cleft in the rock[i] — now makes the whole thing seem like a blessing in disguise.   Any trials I had during those years, I now see in proper perspective and I am not looking for sympathy. I have written about them  here simply because they turned out to be the door which opened into the positive experience of contemplative  prayer which has been my  life and its source motivation ever since.

Being hard of hearing or deaf or disabled in  any way is not necessarily a nisayon (test) from heaven.  Everybody has their own burdens and difficulties in life and they are not necessarily perceived as being negative by the one who experiences them

Our response to difficult experiences is dependent upon our personal capacity for equanimity-in-adversity (hishtavut) or upon the possession of a cheerfully optimistic perspective, whether we posess it by nature or by nurture. It is true that painfully depressing situations can sometimes result in a spiral of negativity that may even lead to self-destruction; disabilities and obstacles are not always the generators of personal enlightenment or positive change. But they are often just that.

 Furthermore, in the religious life of a wholehearted spiritual seeker, perseverance and fortitude in the  overcoming of obstacles  is almost a standard benchmark  of  genuine progress and development.  On this  the  mystical and philosophical sages of all religions agree.

Those who embark on a search for intimacy with the Divine often  encounter a  paradoxical change in their spiritual perception along the following lines: On the one hand they will  temporarily lose any sense of intimacy with the G-d they seek, even  in some  cases to the  point  of rejection and divorce; and  on the other hand, if they persevere, they will allow themselves to be found by Him when the time is right. 

That appointed time may seem long in coming and  we are counselled to remember that  G-d may not always choose to grant it— but if we are blessed,  we only need to make one step towards Him—once such a time has come — and He is with us in a flash. 

   This  Divine-Human dance is often  repeated on a kind of spiral of learning. With the passage  of time and with maturing experience  of the process, G-d seems simultaneously more distant and yet somehow closer; our love for Him is purified by awe at His otherness as we travel upwards and inwards to meet Him. That is  a journey that never ends, and while we are on it we become aware just how little  we know, or ever could know—despite being aware that we are progressing in intimacy and nearness with Our Source.  There is a profound hope that we may experience Union with that Source and  many share  my own  thirst for that. G-d alone  knows if  and in what manner that might be possible.

  Something of this perceptual paradox is described in Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s tale of the  Heart of the World—a parable which appears within the Tale  of the Seven Beggars:

The mountain with the stone  and the spring stands at one end of the world. The Heart of the World stands at the opposite end  of the world………When it (the Heart) stands facing the mountain it can see the peak upon which the Spring is, but as soon as it comes close to the mountain, the peak is hidden from its eyes.[ii]

   It is also, as I discovered quite recently, a key concept in the profoundly Sufic mysticism of  Rabbi David ben Joshua Maimuni (1335-c.1415). He was the   last of the great literary descendents of Maimonides who formed the Judeo-Sufic movement known as the Egyptian Pietists/Hasidim.   In his “Guide to Solitude” (Al Murshid)  written in Arabic—  Rabbi David ben Joshua described the  contemplative’s paradoxical malaise and he quotes an unnamed [iii]  Muslim  poet’s refrain to express it poetically:

 

When  He is  distant, He torments me,

And when he draws near, I retreat in fear.

When I disappear, He appears,

And  when He appears, I disappear.[iv]

 

 For this poet, the experience is transformed into a statement on bitul hanefesh (the Sufi concept of fana). The cure for the anguish of separation from the Divine is thus contained within the experience of alienation itself, for Rabbi David,  it is only through the anihilation of the  ego that the mystic can experience deveykut and  begin (as it were)  to be obliterated into the Divine Ocean, and then (as it were) see through G-d own eyes.

  Almost all contemplative mystics have produced written or quoted intimations  of such  (often repeated and cyclic) dark nights of the soul and their transformed break-ups and re-unions with the Divine. Neither are they the exclusive  experience  of the great and holy alone: All of us  seem to have  to go through  this process if we are to grow up spiritually.

 Durch diese hohle Gasse muss er kommen.

Es führt kein andrer Weg nach Küssnacht

Those words come from Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell where Küssnacht is a village. The word also means ‘Kiss-Night’ in a literal sense. The line can thus be read as “through this narrow mountain pass he must come, there is no other way to kiss-night.”


For me it describes the gate of transformation before whose threshold I was standing and which I will describe in  Part Five.

  

©Nachman Davies

Safed 

 March 5 2024



Part Five of A Hermit's Tale is    HERE



NOTES

[i] Shemot 33:22

[ii] FromThe Seven  Beggars , trans. R’Aryeh Kaplan in ‘Rabbi Nachman’s Stories’ , page 34 ( Breslov Research Institute, Jerusalem/New York,1983)

[iii] The poet quoted may have been Ahmad b. Mohammad an-Nuri (10th Century), Dun-Nun, or Abu Hamzah as-Sufi all of whom wrote almost identical versions of this  text.

[iv]  see  P. Fenton, Obadiah et David Maïmonide, Deux traités de mystique juive ,Lagrasse, Verdier, 1987, page 233.