Heart beat

Like drumming, prayer takes discipline, improvisation, and a good teacher

October 9, 2008

Articles, Nu Magazine - October 9, 2008

When I first began playing drums six years ago, I had a lot of trouble with coordination.

I couldn’t hit two drums simultaneously, no matter how hard I concentrated. My right and left hand simply refused to cooperate with each other.

In my head I knew exactly what I wanted to play, but I was no good at sending the beat from my head to my wrists, and thus could not bring the music to life.

In despair, I bought a book of practice beats from the music store. I thought I would be able to simply whiz through the pages and immediately attain the skills of a professional drummer, but this was not the case.

All the circles and lines meant nothing to me. It was like a foreign language that I could not translate.

The confusion only added to my frustration and I heavily considered giving up my music career. On the brink of quitting, I hired a teacher.

He told me the first thing a drummer must learn, even before he learns how to hold the drumstick, is patience. Only then can he go on to become a skilled musician.

After the first lesson, he saw my biggest problem was coordination. He told me not to worry because coordination is the most difficult challenge for every drummer.

For my first ten or so lessons, he guided me through the book of drumbeats I had bought, and pretty soon I became an expert at reading the music. I was able to play beats perfectly after only looking at the music once.

I would play entire sections of the book, page after page, beat after beat after beat, so I developed a rhythm, a constant flow.

Coordination was no longer a problem.

I simultaneously beat the base drum with my foot and crashed the cymbals with one hand while striking the snare with the other.

However, a new problem arose.

A new challenge

One day, just as I was getting into the flow of the music, I looked up at the music stand and saw that there were no more pages left to turn. I froze for a long minute.

Not knowing what to do, I flipped all the way back to the first page of the book and began playing the beats a second time through.

Halfway through the book I realized that I was ridiculously bored.

I had become so familiar with the music that I no longer appreciated it. It meant nothing to me. My hands were moving, but because I did not need to concentrate as hard as I had to in the beginning, my mind was not in the music.

That is when I decided to write my own music.

I improvised my own beats and fills, and when I had trouble thinking up a new beat I used the beats in the book for structure and inspiration.

By improvising, I had turned drumming back into a meaningful experience for myself.

Then, in seventh grade I played in a band with some of my friends from the neighborhood. Aside from drums, the band included a piano, saxophone, guitar, and clarinet. Although I was getting pretty good at drumming, the music we played together sounded five times better than me playing by myself and the experience was so much more meaningful with other people.

Learning to pray

Like playing the drums, praying for the first time is difficult.

You cannot learn the skill alone. It is far easier to learn with a manual. Just as the book of practice beats was my manual for getting started with drums, the Siddur,or prayer book, is the manual for prayer.

However, a Siddur is not enough.

Just like the book of beats, a Siddur by itself can only help you to a minimal extent, if at all. You must also hire a teacher, or study the Siddur with other people, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the prayers. As you continue to study the Siddur, you will see that slowly but surely, you are getting better at davening, or praying, meaning it is becoming easier for you to connect with God and to self-reflect.

However, just like a drummer, you will reach a point of boredom. The davener’s boredom is a result of repeating the prayers so many times that they lose their meaning.

The monotony causes you to lose concentration. In order to put meaning back into your prayer experience, you must come up with your own original prayers that are closer to your heart. These new prayers are your improvised beats.

When you get stuck, you can refer back to your book of beats, the Siddur, for inspiration. Once you develop this balance between traditional prayers and your own personalized prayers, your prayer becomes far more meaningful.

Different drums in a drum set are like the four different types of prayer: repentance, praise, request, and gratitude. And just as you learn to coordinate the different drums and hit them with synchronization, so too do you learn to put together the four elements of prayer. Every time you pray, you should include them all.

While adapting the traditional text to your own values enhances your ability to connect with God and yourself, you can only experience the full essence of prayer when praying with others.

Like playing in a band, davening with a large congregation or even with just a small minyan makes the prayer experience more uplifting and inspiring. You become part of something bigger and your prayers echo in other voices.

By bringing prayer closer to your heart and by contributing to the prayer experience of others, you can add an infinite amount of meaning to your prayer so that it becomes more than just a hobby.

Gideon Grossman, 16, attends Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union.