Shavu'ot

The Jewish festival Shavu'ot means different things to different people. Coming exactly seven weeks after Passover, Shavu'ot is one of the pilgrim festival when people are supposed to visit Jerusalem. It is the harvest festival. It is also the time that Moses was presented with the ten commandments.

To my kibbutz, the festival has two meanings. On the evening preceding the festival (all Jewish festivals begin at sunset prior to the festival day itself), the bar mitzva class presents a short ceremony consisting of a few songs and dances, before being presented with bibles. On the evening of the festival itself, the entire kibbutz has a harvest festival featuring all the agricultural branches, along with songs and dances. The kibbutz movement is well known for such festivals, and those that hold them are often overrun by visitors from outside.

My son and his friends have been rehearsing a dance for the ceremony for the last week. As they are at an age where their bodies are betraying them on a daily basis, dancing is the last thing on their minds, and so there have been frequent rehearsals. As a few of the children are musically minded, I wrote a short arrangement of a song which frequently features in one or other of the Shavu'ot ceremonies. This was originally for trumpet, clarinet and saxophone; after I learnt that the boy who played the trumpet has ceased to do so, his part was amended for the flute. Last week, I learnt that the girl who plays the flute does not want to do so any more, so I had to rewrite the arrangement for clarinet and saxophone only.

For varying reasons, we haven't had much time to rehearse. We finally met on Tuesday evening, only to discover that I had transposed the saxophone part into the wrong key. End of rehearsal. The next day I went over the arrangement and changed the transposition. We met - by chance - at 10pm, and had a half hour rehearsal which went very well. The children told me that they carried on until midnight. We had another rehearsal today at 1:30pm, which showed that they had been working on their playing. This was very good, and my parting suggestion was that they put themselves into the freezer, to be defrosted this evening at 8:30pm.

At about half past three, just as I was preparing to take part in rehearsals of my own for the harvest festival music on Friday, we received a phone call saying that a member of the kibbutz had died (apparently of a heart attack) whilst on holiday in Russia, and so the ceremony for tonight was cancelled.

Apart from the shock and surprise (and also concern for the poor wife who had gone on holiday and was now faced with the unpleasant task of arranging for the return of the body to Israel), I admit that I had the ignoble thought that it was a shame that he picked today to die, and so waste all the hard work that the children had done. Why couldn't he have died yesterday or on Saturday? Or even better, not die at all.

The harvest festival will still take place, although obviously it will be tinged with a certain sadness.

There's one fiendish song with which I was having trouble in the rehearsals: it starts off with a few bars in 3/4, then alternating bars of 2/4 and 3/4, then a few bars in 2/4, then some more 2/4 and 3/4. And in the first verse, my guitar is the lead instrument! After a couple of floundering verses, I discovered that by counting aloud the beats, I could play the song without too much difficulty. As the song is being played in C minor, I then realised that I could put a capo on the third fret and then play the song with total impunity in A minor. What had been like a raging tiger had now turned into a pussy cat. I've heard this song many times on the radio and have never been able to figure out its metric irregularities (bits of it were clearly in 3/4 and bits in 5/4, but I was never able to parse it), so I'm pleased that I've also managed to put this long lasting question away.

As the Americans say, happy holiday.