A Hard Yom's Laila

In the spirit of trying to do things that I really enjoy on Shabbat - other than studying in the morning, napping in the afternoon, and treating myself to the occasional Treif McMuffin every once in a while, yesterday I had the great pleasure of seeing A Hard Day's Night on the big screen at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, one of my favorite destinations in beautiful Westchester County, NY.

It amazes me; after 44 years, the film was as fresh and vibrant as it must have seemed in 1964. Not that I would know, considering that I was born two weeks after the Beatles broke up. But The Long and Winding Road was number one on the Billboard charts, so I like to think that maybe that means I didn't miss the era entirely.

I do have to say that as much as I like the digital remastering of the songs, I really miss the old imperfections that I remember hearing on my old records (anyone here remember records?) and on AM radio during the 70s. For instance, on the original track of If I Fell, Paul McCartney totally chokes on the high note of the bridge (and I/would be sad if our new love/was in vain). Now that the digital recordings have replaced the old soundtrack, all of the old edges have been smoothed over; the clarity is as pristine and professional as if it had been recorded a year ago, instead of nearly fifty.

Which is kind of sad in a way. True, everyone indulges in their own revisionist history - heaven knows the Beatles are as guilty of that as any rock group that has survived into the digital age; since we have the technology to cover it up, smooth it out, hide it from view, so many people want their legend to be without blemish. But very often, it's our mistakes that give us character, and bring a sense of the unique to an otherwise bland vanilla treadmill of a song, or even a life.

I once knew someone who was so terrified of anyone seeing her mistakes that it cost her everything - her marriage, her relationships with her kids (whom she bullied to the point where they clearly couldn't make any decisions for themselves); her social life (of which she had none because she was always too busy staying late at work to cover her ass and give people the impression that she was working, when she wasn't, not in real life), and even her sense of personal security - so much so that the only delight left in her life was making sure other people took the fall for all the things she did wrong. And that person did a lot of wrong - not just in terms of making bad professional decisions, but just not being able to focus long enough to learn new skills or technologies. This, in essence, led to the fact that most of the time, she had no idea what the heck she was doing - which in turn led her to falsify documents and cheat her staffers and spin every mistake she made into either someone else's fault, or into an outright lie.

I think about that flubbed note in If I Fell and I can't help but be reminded of the time I spent observing this person and her fear; the insecurity that governed everything she did, said and acted on, no matter who it hurt and no matter what the consequences. As if the worst thing that would happen is that she would be wrong. Instead of doing wrong - which was undoubtedly the greater of two evils.

So I was sitting in the theater, thinking about how grateful I felt to simply have the free time to sit in a theater and see a movie instead of constantly having to answer a cell phone or an email and react and respond to the crisis situations that her insecurity always created, no matter whether it was Shabbat, or midnight, or even during my vacation time. Then something happened just before the film started: a group of about eight people rushed into the theater and took up the seats all around me. As it turned out, they were Israeli, so I had the great pleasure of listening to commentary about the movie and about the Beatles, all in Hebrew. Which was strange, and cool, and sad and beautiful all at the same time. It was the coming together of two lives - the life I had before and the one I live now. Because I think of the Beatles, very often, as something that belongs to a past life, the one before lots of bad things started happening. After 9/11, I couldn't listen to their music for months - none of it made sense to me anymore. And after my dad died, the only song I could bear to hear was The Ballad of John and Yoko. Why? Because only two Beatles (John and Paul) recorded it. To me it represented something that appeared to be whole on the surface, but once you looked really close (or listened), you knew that something that was once whole was broken, and somehow incomplete.

Watching my heroes - two of them now gone - and hearing the modern and ancient music of my heart's language at the same time was a transforming experience. Not only because of the music, and the imperfections that my own ear still hears intact, but also thanks to the experience of knowing that my own hard yom's laila is over. Because unlike others who still live in a world of fear and lies and covering things up, who persist in creating a culture of conflict and elaborate deception in order to hide their mistakes, I'm home, and everything seems to be right.