E-Mail This Article to a Friend Promised lands Blurring the musical borders of the Middle East BY JOSH KUN

Music is one of the reasons I go to temple. More than Torah readings or Hebrew recitations, plaintive songs like "Hine Ma Tove" and "Adon Olam" are the melodic, minor-keyed superconductors that keep whatever is left of my spiritual charge connected to Judaism. On the night before Yom Kippur, I love hearing the cantor sing "Kol Nidre" while I try to block out the voice of Al Jolson (who took off his blackface long enough to belt it out at the end of The Jazz Singer). My cousins used to like Neil Diamond’s ’80s version better, and often, instead of heading to temple, they would observe the Day of Atonement by playing Diamond’s gruff cantorial impression on their living-room stereo.

At this year’s services, the temple’s choir (this is a Reform temple, so yes, there’s a choir and yes, it sounds like Ray Conniff in Hebrew) was joined not only by the usual electric piano and clarinet but by two instruments making their temple debut: an oud and a dumbek drum. Not one of the hundreds of congregates gathered in the banquet room at the Century Plaza Hotel in West LA seemed fazed to hear these two instruments synonymous with Arab music being played just feet from the Torah scrolls. Neither the rabbi nor the cantor mentioned them. Yet there they were, the Arab elephants in the Jewish room, their gorgeous, unmistakably Arab chords and rhythms the soundtrack for the holiest days of the Jewish new year.

Just days before Rosh Hashanah, a group of Israeli pilots had issued their letter refusing to fly into the occupied territories, calling the missions "illegal" and "immoral" and blaming the occupation for "corrupting all of Israeli society." Was the use of the oud and dumbek a quiet bid for solidarity with the pilots? Were they the temple’s way of acknowledging that a love for Israel does not equal a love for the injuries of Israeli nationalism? "O may violence give way to goodness," we read aloud, "Bless our country, that it may always be a stronghold of peace."

But on Kol Nidre night, these messages were lost on the rabbi. His sermon reacted only to the Haifa café that had been bombed earlier that day. He mentioned only the dead Jews, none of the dead Palestinians. Without saying it (and without mentioning the Israeli strike on Syria that had also just been carried out), he asked us all to recommit to Israeli safety, no matter the cost to anyone else.

As I sat there, I kept thinking of the line that starts "The Promised Land," a song on Lili Haydn’s new album Light Blue Sun (Private Music): "The promised land should be declared a state of mind. That way everyone can live there, free of the need to be free." The line, which was written by Haydn’s mother (and Lenny Bruce’s last girlfriend), the comedian Lotus Weinstock, is spoken solemnly by George Clinton. It’s followed by 12 minutes of ebbing tides, seagull cries, and Haydn’s moaning violin trading notes with the bubbling twists of Pharoah Sanders’s saxophone. The music itself is an ambient Semitic drone haunted by Jewish and Arab cadences, cadences that are, like the land that Israelis and Palestinians both claim, difficult to separate from each other.

The same thing happens when Ozomatli play a live version of "Cumbia de los Muertos" on their new EP Coming Up (Concord). What was originally written in the studio as a memorial to the gang-related LA death of the singer’s brother becomes a more worldly tribute on stage when it’s introduced by a lengthy culture-crossed clarinet solo from Ulises Bella. His meditative undulations up and down the register leave LA for the Middle East and come off as Jewish and Arab both, so much so that he’s not playing notes, he’s playing a political statement, the blurred musical borders belying the 347-kilometer reality of the road map’s "separation wall."

The Israeli writer Oz Shelach uses a similar tactic — critiquing Middle East politics through the creative fuzz of metaphor and suggestion — in his novel Picnic Grounds (City Lights Books). In one of the book’s many narrative fragments, Shelach tells the story of a Haifa botanist who gets banned from a Botanical Society meeting in Tel-Aviv because he finds Israeli anemones in which "long strips of white, blue, and purple anemones ran through the thick of the red ones, like veins." Every place and every person in Picnic Grounds are like these anemones, self-possessed entities interlaced with otherness, running on the blood from someone else’s veins.

It is a lesson I wish my temple’s rabbi had taken to heart before he spoke. To mourn a Jew is to mourn a Palestinian. This is what the botanist discovered, and this is the story that Middle Eastern music has long told: each is inside the other. Building a wall to keep your neighbor out also walls you in. Palestinian suicide bombers at least get that part right — they know that killing Jews is killing themselves. No matter what happens in Israel during this new Jewish year, I hope the oud and the dumbek come back for an encore, and that this time, we hear what they’re playing.