Layla, Kenosis & the Blues

Dear Friends,

In an encore at the Hollywood Bowl, 87 years old, B.B. King welcomed John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi, and Derek Trucks to the stage, for a blues circle. The young players each did their thing at the foot of the old master, but when Trucks finished his solo, B.B. leaned over, put his hand on his shoulder and said, “That’s about as good as I ever heard it.”

Derek Trucks was a prodigy on the guitar, leading bands when he was just 12 years old, then joining the Allman Brothers, before forming his own group, and now a family band with his wife Susan Tedeschi. He’s an anomaly among performing artists of his stature. On stage there’s no showmanship, no squinting face or jiving hips when he’s tearing through the high registers, no bravado, no ego. I came upon the term for it in my research this week, kenosis. He empties himself to be a vessel for wherever the music wants to go. (The mystical hasidic masters knew the same move. Bittul Hayesh, material negation. Emptying out, so spirit can come in).

Over the course of this summer, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is releasing a 4 album compilation of material written and recorded during the pandemic. It was a season of so much spaciousness, timelessness, nowhere to go, nothing to do. But there was too much to feel. Shared experiences of fear, mourning, isolation, debilitation, pulling ourselves out of the muck back to the work. Walt Whitman kept a panel on his desk inscribed “Make the Work.” I’m inspired by artists who came together and pulled the time and feelings of the pandemic into a tremendous body of work. To have art, a record that soaked up and transformed the weight of those days into music, to return to and look forward from.

I Am the Moon – returns to the ancient Arabic folktale of bewildered lovers Layla and Majnun, that was the inspiration for the seminal blues record, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.” But this time, the songwriters read the story from Layla’s perspective and wrote tunes where Layla is not only the unattainable object, but a subject too, with a gaze all her own, and the voices of the lovers, masculine and feminine interchangeable, akin to the non-binary love poems in the Song of Songs. 

The lovesick Majnun, from the Arabic word “possessed,” wanders the desert completely bewildered, in search of his beloved Layla. But more than a love story, Layla and Majnun was written as an externalization of the processes taking place within the heart of the mystic. The lover is not bewildered by lust. She is bewildered by the mysteries of God and the world, the fleeting wonders of our days, the kismet that lands us in wondrous coincidences one day, seemingly benign situations the next. We are Majnun and Layla, and we should not cast aside our bewilderment so swiftly, for the cheap idol of reason.

So while Ara naps in the back, I’m blasting the new wails of the young blues masters in the front. Where 55 ascends up the farmlands looking over Lake Champlain, and the cascading blue hills of the Adirondacks come into view. There I am in love with music, the topography of a land that is strange to me, my baby, the sky, the stillness of naptime, the wind and all that’s yet to come.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Zach Fredman