There was a musician named David Klein. He could play melodies that felt older than his hands. When he played alone, it was a little supernatural. Candles trembled. The cat sat still. But when he stepped onto a stage, even a small one, a strange collapse happened inside him. A curtain dropped between him and the song. Breath scattered. Fingers forgot.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he told Rabbi Berkal, a practitioner of Kabbalah who also taught niggunim. He listened, then poured tea.
“You are not broken,” He said. “There’s a shattering most people forget about, but you remember.”
David looked up and down. “What’s that mean, a shattering?”
He pointed to the tea. “Before creation, the vessels of divine light broke. Their shards are still scattered in the world. The soul recognizes this. Especially when it’s about to be seen.”
“That sounds nice,” David said. “But it doesn’t really solve my problem.”
“It does,” said Rabbi Berkal. “You are mistaking the fear for failure. But it’s your soul recognizing risk. When you play, you’re trying to restore a fragment. And the shards shake, they remember.”
David looked down at his hands, “so?”
“You bless the fear. And you play through the crack. Do you like to read poetry?”
“Not really, well maybe sometimes.”
“Try Howl by Allan Ginsberg.”
His next show was in a basement gallery. Twenty people. David stepped onto the stage, heart pounding. He almost turned back. But then remembered the footnote to Ginsberg’s poem, “The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!”
He whispered the blessing he had made up on the bus ride over. Blessed are You, source of echoes, letting broken sounds return. Then he played. Not perfectly. But something passed through the room like breath after holding. Afterward, a woman came up, “I don’t know why, but I started crying while you played.”
David liked hearing this, “maybe it was something you remembered.”