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April 13, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Tazria
Listening to Beyonce in a Time of War
April 13, 2024 — 5 Nissan 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Within the last few weeks, something has happened to give me a new lease on life. A new glide in my stride. We are all looking for hope and energy, and I got mine from an unexpected source: the release of Beyonce’s new album of country music, Cowboy Carter, in particular one incredible song, a duet with Miley Cyrus called II Most Wanted. I have listened to this song easily 100 times in the last few weeks. I listen to it in the kitchen when I am doing dishes. I listen to it in the family room when I am folding laundry. I listen to it in the gym when I am working out. I listen to it in my bedroom when I am getting dressed. Shira thinks that listening to the same song 100 times is excessive. Can you believe that? Every time she walks into a room where the song is playing, she says: again?
I love this song for so many reasons. Beyonce’s voice is beautiful, Miley Cyrus’s voice is beautiful, and their voices together are beyond gorgeous.
I love this song because the melody is also gorgeous.
But mostly I love this song because of its message. Many of the songs in Cowboy Carter are in dialogue with other songs, from Dolly Parton to the Beatles. But II Most Wanted is in dialogue with one of my favorite songs of all time, Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, which came out 51 years ago, in 1973. Landslide raises an important and universal question, to which II Most Wanted is a response.
The question of Landslide is: how could there ever be such a thing as lifelong love? How could there ever be lifelong love when we and the ones we love all grow older and change and evolve. We are not in later years who we were in earlier years. So how could a 20-something or a 30-something possibly make a lifelong commitment when both people will be so different in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? Here is the heart of Landslide:
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I’ve been afraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older too…
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills,
Well, the landslide bring it down
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide bring it down
Oh-ohh, the landslide bring it down.
What does the song mean? Obviously the message of the song is tied up in its title, and leitmotif, the word landslide. What does landslide mean? What does a landslide have to do with the question of how getting older changes people and therefore our relationships?
Fortunately, we have a good source, namely, the songwriter, Stevie Nicks, who shared the meaning she intended in her own words. She wrote the song in Aspen, Colorado, at a time when her relationship with her boyfriend was uncertain, buffeted about by change. One day, looking at the mountains, she found her metaphor. She explained:
I realized…that everything could tumble, and when you’re in Colorado,
and you’re surrounded by these incredible mountains, you think avalanche.
It meant the whole world could tumble around us and the landslide would bring
you down. And a landslide in the snow is like, deadly.
In other words, the song Landslide is about how a love for the ages might just not be possible. A love for the ages succumbs to aging and changing and illness and life’s ups and downs, especially the downs. The landslide is the force of life’s accumulated changes which brings down young love.
If you know the song Landslide, you know its distinctive haunting melody. And it is precisely that haunting melody with which Beyonce and Miley Cyrus begin their song, cuing in the listener that their song is in direct dialogue with Stevie Nicks’s plaintive song. Beyonce and Miley Cyrus fall in love young; they fall in love hard; and they know well the problem of aging and changing, which they name immediately:
Know we’re jumpin’ the gun, but we’re both still young
One day, we won’t be
Didn’t know what I want ‘til I saw your face
Said goodbye to the old me…
And I don’t know what you’re doin’ tonight
But I
I’ll be your shotgun rider ‘till the day I die.
Both characters sing this line—I’ll be your shotgun rider ‘till the day I die—to each other multiple times.
Which raises the question: what is a shotgun rider? A shotgun rider is the person who rides with the driver, in the front seat, through all the ups and downs of the journey. The shotgun rider protects. The shotgun rider changes the radio station. The shotgun rider answers the phone. The shotgun rider gets snacks. The shotgun rider makes pleasant conversation when the driver gets sleepy. The shotgun rider and the driver are in this thing together. In the song II Most Wanted, what each wants most is lifelong love. That is why Beyonce and Miley Cyrus say to each other: “I’ll be your shotgun rider ‘till the day I die.”
In other words, love for the ages, eternal love, is possible.
Landslide gives us an avalanche, where young love dies. II Most Wanted gives us mutual shotgun riders, where young love lives and grows old together.
Now what does this have to do with Judaism? What does this have to do with our life? And the answer is literally everything.
We are the sum of our eternal commitments, of our commitments that make it through the years, of our commitments that do not get buried in a landslide under the rubble of the changes of time. The value of our lives is based on who or what claims us throughout the course of our lives, not only when it is easy, but when it is hard; not only when it is popular but when it cuts against the grain; not only when the weather is warm and sunny but when it is cold and miserable and unyielding. Can we be a shotgun rider for all seasons? This is not only about finding a life partner. This is about finding people, places, purposes, causes to which we want to devote our lives—and not give up on when the going gets tough?
Landslide energy is real. There is always a reason to say that a commitment that we used to have we can’t have anymore. We’ve outgrown it. We’ve changed. We’ve evolved. We’ve moved on. But there is a cost to the landslide.
In a recent column, about why marriage matters, Nicholas Kristof shared something that was so profoundly sad, and I quote:
Perhaps 100,000 or more dead bodies in America go unclaimed each year, often because there are no loved ones to say farewell. It’s a topic explored in another recent book, “The Unclaimed,” by sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans.
What is buried in the landslide is not just the commitment we used to have. What is also buried in the landslide is the connectivity we used to have with the people with whom we used to share that commitment. When nothing claims us anymore, we are unclaimed. And to be unclaimed is all too often to be lonely.
So what claims us? What people, what places, what purposes claim us?
We want to be claimed–claimed by people, places, and purposes that we love, that we are willing to work for, that we are willing to fight for, that we are deeply invested in, our welfare is tied up in their welfare, we lose sleep when they lose sleep, we are happy when they are happy. And yes, time changes, and it gets harder. But if we want to be claimed, to use the language of the Torah, if we want to be party to a covenantal love, to a brit that lasts for our whole life, we have to resist the landslide. Can we turn to the people we love, can we turn to the places we love, can we turn to the purposes and causes we love, and say: I am your shotgun rider till the day I die. That is a song we need to play every day. Shabbat shalom.