This is an essay I wrote in 2016 for Grassroots Jews‘ High Holy Days pamphlet. Nothing in the text has been changed since then. The updates are that I haven’t been to an Ultimate Power since before Covid, but I’ve been more and more invested in the shape note community and will be the (non-denominational) chaplain at this year’s London All-Day Singing – another time when we reach the sublime through communal singing. Additionally, I was cautiously agnostic towards the end, I think doubting that I’d be taken seriously as a scientist if I declared belief, based on having so many atheist and religion-negative friends who I felt would socially exclude me. Reflecting back, I actually am and have always been a believer in the Judaic God, and I should never have had to deny that part of my identity.
I have always loved observing the high holy days. I love the nigunim, the special melodies, the unique prayers, which continue to play as earworms for the days or even weeks afterward. I especially love the feeling that I get towards the end of Yom Kippur, where I look around and see that everyone in the community is experiencing the sublime. Everyone individually is lightheaded and faint, but together we are transcendent.
As I grew older, I became more scientific in my analysis. Why is Yom Kippur so affecting? What causes this feeling of sublimation? If it feels so good, why can’t I recreate this experience on a daily basis, or at least every Shabbat? In the course of my research, I’ve found three essential elements that make the yamim nora’im amazing: fasting, singing, and community.
Fasting has long been part of Judaic (and non-Judaic) ritual practice before anyone ever said the words ‘5:2 Diet’. It is frequently associated with meditation, healing, relieving oneself of earthly needs, transcendence, and fraternity with a fasting community. The lack of food and water results in dehydration, which after a day can cause disorientation or dizziness, a sort of fuzzy feeling in the front of your head (the fronto-parietal lobes, actually) causing you to feel like you’re working much harder than usual at everyday tasks and decreasing cognitive performance. Dehydration also increases skin temperature and heart rate, making you feel flushed and faint (Kempton et all 2010). Roughly 24 hours without water is classed as ‘severe dehydration’, resulting in an estimated 3-4% drop in body weight, much of which comes from the brain. Similarly, short-term fasting causes autophagy in the brains of mice: literally, the brain will start to digest itself. The effects on human mood in the short-term are unknown.
Research into music and the brain reveals an incredible amount about how our minds work. Listening to music can increase learning capacity, aid in memorization and motor skills, override fatigue signals allowing us to exercise longer, help to recover communication abilities in individuals with dementia, and enhance or even change mood. Music has been shown to “light up” not just auditory areas of the brain but whole neural networks on MRI scans. Vibrotherapy utilizes music’s basic component – vibration – to alleviate pain, and listening to music reduces stress and pain for some medical procedures. Singing is slightly different as it’s active rather than passive. Researchers have found that singing activates different neural networks than speaking, and in many cases people with speech disorders can communicate by singing. In one study, singing lessons lessened the effects of progressive Alzheimer’s; perhaps producing musical vibrations within one’s own body generates more of a protective autoimmune response than merely listening. Singing has also been shown to release oxytocin and endorphins, two hormones associated with general good feelings.
Third, communal singing. I’ve always found that a group can sing better than the sum of its parts. I’m not a good singer by any stretch of the imagination, but within a group we all find our place; we are each buoyed by the sound of multiple voices to create an overall harmony. The vibration you create is bounced back into your thoracic cavity at a different resonance. For millennia, communal singing was the only kind of singing. Now we tend to think of it as a solely religious activity, but it happens in many other contexts. Concerts are a big one, especially when they involve dancing and singing along: I frequently attend a rock night in Camden called Ultimate Power where literally everyone sings along to 70s and 80s power ballads, an experience the organizers describe as cathartic and near-religious, a “maelstrom of emotion”. People leave at 3am invigorated rather than exhausted. Atheist congregations have popped up in urban centers for people looking to sing together. Shape note singing, a form of Appalachian church singing performed in a square room and arranged by voice type, has been adopted by a number of non-Christian singing communities because of its amazing harmonies. At festivals and while camping we sing around fires with a guitar. With communal singing, there is also the added emotional element: these songs remind you of other times you sang this and the people with whom you sang. Music has an amazing power to arouse old memories – possibly explaining its use in fighting dementia – especially those that can’t be articulated with language.
The combination of the power group singing has on our emotions in combination with a feeling of working really hard against the dehydration headache, plus pride that I’m participating in a tradition thousands of years old, at least for me, almost forces me to feel awed. It can even be a mildly hallucinatory experience. I long wondered why the fasting, the standing, the singing: I think it’s because it forces us to feel. We physically put ourselves in a position where we are open to an emotional experience. We are short-circuiting the brain through hunger and thirst and then forcing it through a surge of emotions as we beat our chests and confess that we have made mistakes but will try harder, all as a community of people doing the same. We are emotionally vulnerable and force ourselves to think of whom we have wronged and whether we will live or die. I can glance around and see people in the throes of woe, remembering all the terror and wonder of the past year. I usually shed a few tears during Ne’ilah because I am overcome with feeling. As a scientist, I don’t know whether I am praying to a god who will hear and inscribe me in the Book of Life or whether we’re alone in the universe, nor does it matter. I only know that the catharsis I feel as the gates close is the purpose of religion and the only time I feel I have both risen above humanity and become more human.
Dedicated to Oliver Sacks.
Horn, S. 2013. Singing changes your brain. Time. http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/16/singing-changes-your-brain/
Novotny, A. 2013. Music as Medicine. American Psych Assoc 44(10), pg 46. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/11/music.aspx
Kempton, M. J., Ettinger, U., Foster, R., Williams, S. C.R., Calvert, G. A., Hampshire, A., Zelaya, F. O., O’Gorman, R. L., McMorris, T., Owen, A. M. and Smith, M. S. 2011. Dehydration affects brain structure and function in healthy adolescents. Hum. Brain Mapp., 32: 71–79.
Muir, K. 2010. Fasting for Mental Health: Does it Work? Mind the Science Gap. http://www.mindthesciencegap.org/2013/04/10/fasting-for-mental-health-does-it-work/
Vinoo Alluri, Petri Toiviainen, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Enrico Glerean, Mikko Sams, Elvira Brattico. Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm. NeuroImage, 2011
Lester, P. 2014. Ultimate power ballads: the anthems behind the club night. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/16/ultimate-power-ballads-club-night-bonnie-tyler-meat-loaf
Stacy Hackner 