The Phish Show
Discovering Inspiration At My First Concert Since Tragedy
Last week, for about the 15th time in my life, I went to a Phish concert. But this show was different. It wasn’t the audience; still the usual folks dancing with careless freedom, puffing clouds of pungent smoke into the arena air, showering other fans with fistfuls of glow-sticks, screaming in recognition of their favorite songs, filling in the blanks of each lyrical pause. It wasn’t the music; the band still played as tightly as ever. Their mastery of music unfolding through gripping grooves, mesmerizing improvisations, tension, release, and all the makings of a legendary jam band. It certainly wasn’t the production; hypnotic lighting beamed through the haze and coated the stage with colorful coordination, illuminating it with a psychedelic aura.
While the scene was the same, the context was entirely different. What changed was the fact that just a week earlier nearly 3,000 people had their lives ripped away from them while enjoying a similar version of this experience in Southern Israel. They came together to celebrate peace and the divine power of music. To dance. Like the 20,000 people at the Phish show, they moved and swayed and vibed and lost themselves in another plane of existence. Then, in the blink of an eye, a form of pure evil descended to murder and maim and steal their normalcy forever. They became the heart of the largest Jewish massacre since the Holocaust.
In the week that followed, I watched the world react. On one side, an outpouring of support from those who understood the barbarity of the attack and that it was far more than a regional land dispute or some kind of retaliation. They understood that it was the implementation of an extreme, fundamentalist ideology that called for the destruction of an entire ethnicity, clearly written in its founding charter. Furthermore they realized it was an advancement of aims to destroy a way of Western life by any means necessary. It demonstrated the fact that a group of psychopaths was willing to do the things they always said they were going to do; that the threats they levied for decades were not merely rhetoric; that they had no desire for peace of any kind.
On the other side I saw the breadth and depth of hatred across all parts of the globe, cloaked in what-about-isms and arguments of moral equivalency. Wrapped in conversations and mistruths around land occupations and colonization. Rationalized as forms of resistance. Justified. Some voices quite explicitly proclaimed their perversions. Protesters chanting “Gas he Jews!” Calls for Israel’s annihilation backed by the ill-concealed calling “from the river to the sea!” These reactions were not limited to their usual homes in the Arab world or the Neo-Nazi factions, they came directly from America’s college campuses, some even being led by faculty members.
As the two sides shouted, facts continued to surface. Additional details of unspeakable atrocities committed against men, women, children, babies, elderly, disabled, and even pregnant women surfaced across headlines and social media. Horrors not heard of since the Holocaust. I watched the collective cognitive dissonance turn the self-proclaimed idealists into expert interrogators, cross examining every account of evil as if each one was part of a vast psyop (Jewish?) conspiracy. Then there was the bomb threat at a local synagogue and the call for a Day Of Rage and all the heightened security and sense of fear that built in every single Jewish institution now faced with indefinite threats of violence. From there community members shared stories of the taunting and harassment directed an Jewish children and teachers in public schools across our community (and beyond). A total accumulation of hate.
It was the weight of these events that altered my Phish experience. As thousands of people around me let go of everything, I could not stop the intrusion of thoughts. The uncertainties rushed in. The guilt. The sorrow. The fear. My mind went off. Was this how the attendees at the music festival felt just before their worlds ended? How can I enjoy myself after the torture and murder of so many fellow Jews? How can I be here when friends and relatives of so many people in our community are being summoned for a war that may have no end in sight? Will my children be safe in their Jewish institutions? In our synagogue? Will they one day enjoy music festivals and the rest of life's treasure? Will someone try and take that from them? I thought about my old college roommate (and fellow Phish lover) who had spent the past week running his family too and from bomb shelters and wished he was with me enjoying a show like we used to do in our former lives when everything was simpler.
I fought against these thoughts for some time, fending off the onslaught of distraction. I told myself that caving to them would be losing. That it would be letting Hamas and terror control me; they want to destroy this way of life by defaming beauty and hope and everything good. But as hard as I fought, I could not break free. Barrages of thoughts assaulted my consciousness like rockets from a densely populated civilian area.
The music continued while emotions and thoughts entangled my mind. As the songs passed, I wondered why I came. Even though I still appreciated the greatness of the music, it just didn’t feel right. The experience I wanted to have seemed so distant. Suddenly, it felt unfamiliar. I watched the crowd celebrating so joyously as I felt trapped, like a prisoner watching freedom from behind a barred window. It was as if I watched an old documentary from a happier time, stuck in dystopia. Like reminiscing.
As I resigned myself to this new experience, I just blankly watched the crowd, wanting so badly to feel like them. That’s when it caught my eye. Through the sea of bobbing heads and waving hands swayed a pink fluorescent sign, like the one you would see in a store window. But it didn’t say “open” or “Coke-a-Cola,” although the message was just as brief. This sign shared the simplest of messages.
“Love.”
That’s it. One word. One idea. “Love.” It blasted through the cacophony of chaos clouding my mind, blowing it all apart. It penetrated my soul and provided the only enduring solution to the evils we face. The sign reminded me about basic truth. It said to me: We cannot control the world around us. We cannot control the minds of others. We cannot control what the world chooses to believe or not believe as evil abounds. We only control what we put into the world. No matter how hard we try and convince ourselves otherwise, we cannot eliminate evil. But we can do our best to crowd it out with love. It sounds simplistic. Most truths are, in fact, quite simple.
As this message crystallized in my mind, I closed my eyes. I freed myself from the shackles of thought and I began to move with 20,000 other human beings who joined together to celebrate life and share the love of a great band playing great music. I absorbed the notes that rained down. I danced. And then I prayed that one day humans across our self-made divisions might share this experience - together. Rejoicing in humanity. Free from our imagined differences. I prayed that we might find a way, while stumbling around this spinning rock, lost in a great emptiness, to devote what little time we have towards acts of love; kindness, compassion, gratitude, beauty.
Suddenly, a new feeling took over. Not one of distance or disappointment or disillusionment. In that moment the show and the music transformed into something inexplicably powerful and pure. It was no longer about dancing or having fun or finding distraction. It became something much more. An illumination of truth. A blueprint for the fight between good and evil and its most critical ingredient. Love. It reminded me that at every moment, we all have the capacity to create it and insert it into a cruel world wherever we can find the space. And that’s when I realized that this Phish show was unlike any that I had ever experienced.
