Heading into the winter of my malcontent

It's been a wild ride here at Rancho Beth these last few weeks.

I've got hand issues that are making playing instruments painful. Doc suspects either osteoarthritis or carpal tunnel. X-rays revealed nothing out of the ordinary, so my next step is very likely cortisone shots in each hand, with the hop that only one round will solve the problem.

I HATE cortisone shots. They hurt like hell.

I've been formally diagnosed with ADHD, which I've likely had all my life and only recently guessed at. No one knew what ADHD was when I was a kid, and only recently have scientists figured out that it can affect adults as well as kids. I'm on a waiting list to see a specialist and learn what kinds of treatments are available for me. Medical options (such as pills) may be limited because of my age and other medical issues (such as rising blood pressure, and the meds I'm already on). But I'm in line and will have to wait 2-4 months. Having the diagnosis helps to explain quite a lot, and I am grateful for that.

I've been offered some additional opportunities for paid Jewish work at CST, a monthly prayer service/song session for kids one Sunday morning a month. It's early in the morning, so that will be a challenge logistically and medically; but if I can make it work it will be nice to engage in an education role again.

I spoke with my MIL yesterday, about the situation in Israel/Palestine and about my ADHD diagnosis. Having her as a gentle, non-judgmental sounding board was very helpful.

I haven't done much songwriting lately. I also haven't been worried about it.
Right now, it seems that my task is to sort out my health and figure out how much to take on at any given time.

Folks I know are gathered in Wisconsin for Shabbat Shira, the annual adult music conference that I've attended exactly once. I'd like to go to these conferences, as they are great for both musical inspiration and networking. But they cost a LOT of money, and when you don't have a synagogue contract there's no money for professional development. I spoke with my MIL about this reality yesterday and she wholeheartedly agreed with my assessment: When it comes to supporting front-line teachers and musicians, our people (MOTs) are cheap. The admins of Federations and the senior rabbis at large synagogues draw huge salaries, often in the six-figure range, while a religious school teacher or music specialist is lucky to draw a wage of $25-30/hour for a job that offers maybe 10 hours of paid time a month.

It's no wonder there's a shortage of Jewish teachers these days.

My own synagogue is implicit in this scheme: When I wanted to attend a music conference seven or eight years ago, the conference organizers offered me a very small scholarship of $100 (towards a conference that would cost me $800-900 to attend, including transpo and lodging). I asked someone on the Steering Committee how to apply for some assistance and was flatly told, "Members here are volunteers, and we do not provide professional development for this sort of thing." So I scrambled and hustled and managed to come up with the cost myself.
When I was at the shul for a meeting, a member of Steering congratulated me on being able to go to the conference, and added, "Of course, we hope you might find some great resources for our community."

I was livid.

I smiled and replied, "Well, since the shul doesn't support its musicians with professional development help, and since I had to hustle my ass off to come up with the costs myself, I'm going to this conference for ME. If I find anything that's useful for the shul, great; if I don't, I'm not going to worry about it."

The Steering Committee member was offended and walked away. Which I must admit was partly what I had intended. Sorry/not sorry.

Jewish communal organizations are structured along the same lines as the rest of the capitalistic landscape. So no one should be surprised by any of this. But the memory still stings a little even today.

What's next for me? I honestly don't know. I am taking time this winter to get my health sorted out. Beyond that, I don't yet know what lies ahead. But don't look for me anytime soon at another Jewish conference or large-scale gathering. I can't afford it, and I'm not ashamed to admit that.

There's no shame in being low-income in a system that is designed to keep a majority of people that way.

Perhaps that's partly a gift of my ADHD: the ability to recognize big-picture systems quickly, and to discern whether or not I can make any part of those systems more fair.

Shavua tov -- have a good week.

I crashed today. But it’s good to know where I’ll land.

When I restarted this blog, it was with the intention that I would speak truthfully about what it’s like not only to b an independent musician, but to be an independent musician who’s a 60-year-old woman with multiple medical issues and limited resources, trying to make it in the world as best she can.

It’s damned hard to function in the Jewish musical world, as I’ve chosen to do, when you are also older, low-income and medically challenged. When you don’t come from the deeply-rooted, materially comfortable world of the Jewish establishment, and yet you choose to try and bring your music to that world.

I’ve been, to my surprise, modestly successful, in that my songs are sung in synagogues from coast to coast and that, when I’m well enough, I’ve managed to eke out a tiny living as a touring artist and educator. I’m not materially comfortable, though I do have a roof over my head and food on the table. But in order to have those things I rely on Medicaid and food stamps (aka SNAP). I could never earn enough money to pay for better health insurance to cover all of my stuff, so I keep my income low enough to qualify to get what I need, and live without higher-quality healthcare. I get the basics — medical care, referrals to specialists; no mental health counseling or vision, and I don’t complain because I don’t have to pay premiums. If the healthcare system is going to make my life harder, I at least get to game it in such a way as to not work myself to death. Sorry, not sorry.

A decade ago, I entered perimenopause without warning, without even knowing I had entered it. I struggle without knowing that I was struggling. Between the brain fog, episodes of fatigue and wild mood swings, I had no idea what was happening. I just knew that I was unhappier than I’d been in years and didn’t know why. I attended a Shabbat service at the synagogue where I worked as a musician and teacher n order to say Kaddish on my mother’s yahrtzeit, only to find myself repulsed by the ostentatious wealth and privilege on display. I said Kaddish, snuck out early to sneak some of the fancy buffet into a ziploc bag for that night’s dinner, and went home. That night, I stared at my plate of bagel piled stupidly high with lox and got really angry at the state of affairs, and wrote a scathing blog post about it. I felt truly alone and isolated in the Jewish world and had no one to talk with about it, so I blurted out my pain and hit “post”.

A few days later, I was called in to speak with the rabbi, who had seen the post and was furious.

I had overstepped, I showed a lack of judgment and I had bitten the hands that fed me. I shamed the synagogue and reflected badly on my employer and my work. And I was in so much pain that I numbly nodded and said little.

I was “allowed” to keep my job — in hindsight, I suspect because they had no one else to hire in my place at the time — and ordered to get some help. I was also told that my employers had been watching me for some time, which led me to wonder why they hadn’t said anything at the time they first noticed. I had no agency to do anything else about the situation, so I walked like a zombie through the hardest year of my life, pretending for the students that it was all fine. At the end of the year they lined up at my desk to tell me their B’nei Mitzvah dates and made me promise that I’d attend each one — a promise I could not keep because I knew I’d be let go and made persona non grata at the end of the year. 

It was the last time I would ever work regularly on contract for a synagogue. After that, I was an independent, a total freelancer, reliant on my own hustle to find gigs. It was hard, exhausting work that sometimes paid off, sometimes not.

To this day, on the rare occasions that rabbi and I bump into each other in town, he turns on his heel and walks away quickly, avoiding me. It’s been a decade, and my presence still bothers him. I’ve gotten far enough past it, and gotten enough help and insight along the way, that I don’t worry about it anymore. Along the way, I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and quite recently, with ADHD. I am on a waiting list for help with the ADHD and might see someone in 3-4 months’ time. In the meantime I’m reading up on it and trying to be gentle with myself. If I had been twenty years younger, I might worry about it more; but at sixty I feel like I’m the downslope of whatever career I may have left, and with the help of a loving, supportive spouse, family and close friends, a great deal of the pressure is off.

If that sounds like the coward’s way out, Sue me. I feel like my life has been hard enough that I’ve earned some time to breathe a little. The current events have taken a LOT out of me, and I am exhausted.

I think it’s also been an interesting time for me to ponder my place in Jewish communal life, which feels greatly in question in some ways. A lot of that is owing to my mobile, disconnected childhood, the pile of medical issues that have influenced my thinking and actions along the way, and recent events in Israel and Gaza which are forcing a lot of people to take sides and wave flags. As a career isolationist, flag-waving has always been difficult for me. Choosing sides has been almost impossible for me, especially when it comes to deciding that one group of people has a greater right to exist than another group. 

As someone who has spent a lot of time on the social margins, it is impossible for me to ignore the feelings and experiences of anyone else who’s been marginalized in some way.

Which is why the current events in the Middle East have made me feel marginalized again, and unsure of where I want to stand. I know where I am expected to stand, but that’s quite different. Whatever I do or say publicly now has the potential to derail the small gains I’ve made since the pandemic. I don’t yet know how I feel about that, and I am hoping to find some help in processing that. Not just medical help, but perhaps social and communal help as well. I’m not sure what that will look like yet, nor what the outcome will look like. I just know that at this point in my life, I’m not willing to be someone other than who I really am, because I believe that the place I stand in, a place of sire for universal peace, is the right place for me to be. If that compromises my Jewish identity or my Jewish belonging, so be it. I can’t be anyone other than myself.

The side I choose is humanity. Blame my parents if you want.

 I’ve never been to Israel.

It seems likely I won’t make that trip anytime soon, if ever.

I was never taught to love Israel, or to see it as “my” land. 

My parents stayed true to their demographic and generational compass and, like many Jewish parents born in America in the mid 1930s, elected to raise me as a good American and let me sort out religion for myself.

(They either never got, or never read, the memo about Judaism being more than a religious practice, but also a way of being in community and in the world.)

I’ve had to sort out an awful lot for myself, to varying degrees of success.

After being bugged for years to write a song about Israel, I came up with this several years ago.

It’s reception has been mixed to good, depending on who’s in the room. Most people have liked it. A few have told me privately it’s naive. 

But it’s what I’ve got, and I came by it honestly so I stand by it.

I’ll add it to the current discussions and expressions of pain and love, and hope it reaches someone who needs it.

And I’ll go to sleep praying for peace.

FB Music page is gone. What’s next?

Thanks to getting hacked, and Facebook having no live people to help with solutions, and thanks also to my fatigue, Covid, ADHD and general inability to deal effectively with the electronica, I was forced to shut down my FB Music page.

This means that my only online outlets for communication about music are my primary FB account, my Instagram, and this blog.

I don’t yet know how I will deal with this in the long term. The lockdown, two years of living with Long Covid, and now a second round of Covid that I just got through, plus my overall health and now these online hassles, are all conspiring to make me reassess my future as a working musician. 

I know that to be a “working” musician, one has to have gigs. I have just a couple in the coming months, and have been working on finding more; but focusing for so long on playing in Jewish spaces has meant that I haven’t learned how to get my foot in the door on the local, secular scene. 

I know that “working” musicians have a strong presence on social media. And I admit that I do not. Sure, my stuff on FB gets read and responded to, but ultimately that hasn’t translated into a lot of gigs. When I was working more steadily I could go to at least one Jewish music conference a year, which is a big part of how one gets seen and heard in the Jewish world. But Long Covid put me out of regular work, and I have not recovered fully enough to hustle my way back to earn enough money to go to those. It is unlikely that I’ll be able to attend too many going forward.

This is not a pity party, so don’t get any ideas.

I’m just exploring the landscapes of the music business and of my own mind. Both have taken a serious beating in the last four or five years. And the only people who have survived, who have thrived, are the ones who are adept and healthy enough to adapt. I admit that I have not been able to adapt so well. While everyone else was running around buying new equipment to improve their online presence, I was filling food stamp renewal forms, queuing on wait lists for doctor appointments and mental health counseling and trying to write new songs just so I could remain relevant to myself. A once-a-month Shabbat gig in town was an emotional and financial lifeline that has continued to be a real blessing. But the strength and stamina I enjoyed before Covid are gone, and I am tired all the time now. There is no way for me to work a day job and pursue music on the side as I did for so long, and I cannot seem to hustle hard enough to make up the difference. The landscape has changed. So have I.

The awful truth is that I simply cannot produce enough new content to survive in the digital download world. Because online platforms do not care about music, or the artists who create it. Everything is content, and product. We’ve lost the ability to slow down and let things germinate and unfold organically, because we’re all competing with the New World Order of churning out product as quickly as possible, to compete with other artists (because there’s no way we can compete with the platform owners and hope to gain anything).

So, with the end of my FB Music page, Bandcamp being sold to a music licensing firm, and my inability to work enough to pay for a new web site, I am left wondering if this the time for me to wind down my time as a “working” musician and ooze my way to my 65th birthday, when I can collect Social Security, be on the Medicaid version of Medicare and live as simply as possible for the duration.

I am proud of what I’ve done. I created five albums of original music, and they are out in the world for people to enjoy and to share. I don’t care about making tons of money as a musician — that was never going to happen anyway, and never happens for 99% of the artists out there — I just wanted to make enough to pay my bills. Since Covid, I haven’t been able to do even that.

What happens now? 

I have a gig in Northern California in early December, and I’m working at a local synagogue two days a month. I’d like to do more, but don’t know how to make that happen with my health, at my age, and in the current landscape. So for now I am living day to day and trying to keep my costs down. On my good days, I venture out to open mics to be heard and t9 hear new music. The world does not wait for my good days, and I don’t have enough of those to string together a solid month of work. So here I am. 

This is not uncommon.

The majority of musicians age and deal with health and financial issues that wind down their careers. I am blessed beyond words with loving family and a remarkable spouse who all love and care about me, and whom I love as well. We live in a house, there’s food on the table and my spouse reassures me that we re in any danger of losing our home. Our country is not embroiled in a war that could embroil us all in harm’s way. So I already have so much more than a lot of people who don’t experience this level of security and love. And I am grateful for all of it, every day.

So now I’ll get on with my day. Small things, one at a time, so I feel like I got something done.

And I will hold the truth in my heart of how sweet each day is.

Bandcamp just got sold. Again.

 ANOTHER IMPORTANT MESSAGE for my followers here.

Please read to the end.

Bandcamp has been the sole distributor of my downloads for some time now. They got picked up by Epic about a year ago, and I’ve just learned that they are being sold to Songtrader, an online music licensing and distro company.

How does this change things for me and my music?

Nothing is clear yet. The sale is in process and some details have yet to become clear. But here are some differences.

Bandcamp is all about indie artists and distributing their music.

Artist who use Bandcamp get a higher percentage of download sale proceeds than on any other music platform. Membership is free. Using the platform is so simply that even I, a digital non-native, can figure it out. My time using Bandcamp has been fuss-free, and for someone like me that’s saying a lot.

Songtrader charges an annual fee for artists to use the platform.

They also charge a monthly fee for anyone wanting to download music from the platform (I.e., you need to be a subscriber). So far, I’m not thrilled about that. 

Nothing has been done about Bandcamp artists and their status as yet. Right now, the focus is on streamlining the workplace. To that end, Songtrader has just laid off about half of Bandcamp’s paid workers — with a decided focus on letting go of recently-unionized workers. That tells me that Soundtrader isn’t stoked about unions and would rather not deal with them.

The speed with which this has happened is worrisome.

And I don’t know what I will do if Bandcamp artists are summarily folded into the Songtrader platform.

So I want to ask YOU:

How many of you:

— Buy my music online?

— would be willing to do so if you had to pay to access the platform?

— Buy my music in physical CD form?

— would be willing to pay additionally for postag and handling (as much as $5-10 more) to get future CDs?

I’ve remained devoted to direct access as much as possible. I want to keep my music easy to obtain and enjoy, with as few middlemen as possible. 

I HATE middlemen in the age of “content,” because they make money from what someone else has created, and because music has been reduced to mere “content” in this model. I firmly believe that when the recorded product is finished, the artist should get the proceeds for what they’ve made. 

I’ve been willing to work with Bandcamp because they take the smallest cut for every download. But if Bandcamp goes away — and it sure looks like it might — then I will have few other viable options that don’t reduce my artistic work to a few bytes of online content. That’s a totally different vision of the artist’s creation than I like. And it reduces the amount of paid performance opportunities that will be available going forward, because why pay to hire a musician live when you can just punch up the recording for your listening pleasure?

THIS is what the preponderance of online streaming platforms has done to musicians trying to earn a living by their hard-won craft.

This all comes at a time when I am considering how much I will tour in the future, and how many more albums I might have still in me. So I am following these events closely, and I think you should too.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Thanks for supporting Jewish Music Made by Hand.

And then there was war. Again.

My idealism and hope have taken a beating this past week.

Hamas attacked Israel, killing hundreds and kidnapping over 200 civilians. Israel responded. Now there are over 3,000 dead in Israel and in Gaza. This is now a war. Jews everyhere are nervous, anguished. Even I, who has spent a lifetime keeping Jewish community at arms length in some ways, have been forced to reckon with my long-held idealism.

Here's a sneal-peek of a drash I'll be giving this Friday at an online Shabbat service.
We are reading parashat Noah, and I was asked to offer something that ties into the parsha.

**********

“Tie whatever you want to do into parashat Noam,” I was told.

My head was nowhere near Noah.
I was still recovering from my High Holy Days work.
Then I came down with a nasty bug.
Then, Hamas attacked Israel.
And I knew what I would bring here.

If each human soul is a whole world, and each human experiences a sudden, violent change and resulting loss — of home, of family and friends — then each soul is experiencing something very much like what happened to Noah.
The only difference is that Noah got notice, enough time to build the lifeboat that would save him, his family and the animals.
The Torah tells us that the preparation was hard. Noah’s friends laughed at him and his family.
Knowing what lay ahead for them only made him feel more isolated and sad.
But he carried on with the work, and just as the last seam was sealed with pitch and the last tiny window fitted in place and closed, the rain began. Everyone clambered into the boat, closed the doors and waited. And the rain grew harder. And it rained solidly for over a month. The world filled up with water, and while the boat was lifted up on the water everyone outside the boat drowned, people and animals alike.

The journey was hard, challenging, at times frightening. The inhabitants of the boat held on as it rocked wildly back and forth, Did Noah hear someone banging from the outside, begging to be let in? He never knew for sure, but the thought of that sound would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Still more time waiting for the water to recede enough to reveal someplace firm to stand on again.
Still more uncertainty: what would Noah and his family  do when they could leave the ark? How would they live?

When the ark finally landed and there was finally a piece of ground to step on, they found out.

Nothing would ever be the same.
The world they’d known was completely gone.
Nothing left but bare ground, with a little bit of waterlogged foliage here and there.
It may well have been more than they could understand, or even bear.
What would you do if you woke up one morning and the world you knew was gone, and in its place was — well, signs of devastation and emptiness?

That is the big question Jews have had to confront each time we’ve survived a crisis.
Something terrible has happened to our people.
We’re still here, though others are no longer.
How do we cope?
What do we do?

Noah, still stunned, no doubt, by his experiences, did what he knew how to do. He slaughtered some of the animals for sacrifices and for food. He set about creating some kind of shelter for himself and his family. They planted seeds and tended them until they grew. And little by little, their lives resumed a rhythm and a way and they moved forward.

But it was not the same rhythm as before. It couldn’t be. They had all seen and heard far too much. In the days before we talked about how people process trauma, Torah doesn’t tell us how Noah and his family dealt with their trauma and their grief, but rest assured they did experience both. (Our only real clue is when Noah drinks of his vineyard, gets drunk and is humiliated by one of his sons.)

Grief is real. Trauma is real.
What happened last week in Israel and Gaza has touched every Jew I know, including me. That’s a surprise because I didn’t grow up connected to Jewish community and even now I tend to hold it at arm’s length in some ways. But this week, I found that difficult to do. Between the postings and re-postings of the faces of Israelis missing and murdered, and the posts from my friends expressing their grief and anguish, I’ve been forced to admit that I, too, have been affected by all of this. The world I’ve lived in for so long has been changed. I find that I have lost at least some of my idealism, some of my hope. As a result, I’m walking through a different landscape than before. I am still figuring out how engage with this new landscape. I am still figuring out how to be in the world as a human being, and as a Jew. I don’t have many answers at this point. But I know that the hard tangibles of my Jewish life — prayer, companionship and a hunger for peace — continue to inform the way forward. I don’t know where I will end up, where any of us will end up. I don’t know how long the violence and warfare will last. I’m certainly a LOT safer here in Portland, Oregon, a place where really important things seldom happen. But am I really safer? I don’t know. All I know is that the only thing to do is to keep moving forward, with good companions and with as much hope as we can muster on any given day.

I must admit that my hope in humankind’s ability to create large-scale peace is pretty much broken right now. There is no cure for human nature, as much as I’d sometimes like there to be.
BUT — and it’s an important but — we can choose not to give in to our human nature so easily. We can, though it is very hard, choose hope over cynicism. We can find good companions with whom to do the demanding work. We can each play to our strengths to make our pieces of the world more fair, and more peaceful. And we can hope and pray that in this moment, it will be enough, or at least better than nothing.  

Because at the heart of each of us, the roof may be leaking and the walls cracking a bit here and there, but the house still has “good bones”, as they say. The wood is still fine, and will hold up for awhile yet. And while we're walking through whatever comes, I believe we won't be alone.

(Video: "Gam ki Eilech" by Beth Hamon)