Q&A: Listening to Love Songs and the Composer’s Influence Through the Melody
Listening to Love Songs and the Composer’s Influence Through the Melody
Question
Hello Rabbi. Is there any prohibition against listening to love songs from a man to a woman? And is it really true that every composer invests his personality into his melodies in a way that also affects me, like the story about the Nazir Rabbi who was unable to listen to a melody composed by Wagner?
Answer
Hello Israel.
I don’t see any prohibition in this at all. Love is a topic like any other topic, and there is nothing wrong with singing about it. Personally, the dominance of this theme in our songs and popular music seems a bit excessive to me, but that is of course a matter of taste.
If we are talking about the love of a particular person for a particular woman, then perhaps there is some reason to leave that in the private domain, for reasons of modesty. But in any case I do not see any prohibition here. As I said, in songs that deal with love in a general way, I see no problem at all.
If there is a person for whom listening to these songs arouses forbidden thoughts, then perhaps there is room to discuss it. And even there, perhaps the rule of “it is unavoidable and not intended,” in Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 25, is relevant, but this is not the place for that.
As for the relationship between the composer and his songs, I don’t know how to answer. It sounds mystical to me and not really convincing, but you should ask music experts and composers about it (and take what they say with a grain of salt). In any case, you should think about what exactly is meant by the claim that the composer puts something of himself into the song. This is trivial in the simple sense (after all, the song is his product, so obviously his personality has some influence on it), and mystical if one interprets it in a broader sense. So the question does not sound very well defined to me.
As for the Nazir Rabbi, I would have been happy if they had done an experiment and played him music by Wagner without telling him that Wagner was the composer. That could also serve as a test of the meaning of this question about the relationship between the composer and his music (see my comments above). It reminds me of the joke about the Rebbe of Gur: when people told him that the Rebbe of Lelov would call his father (who had died long ago) up to the Torah for the third aliyah every Saturday night when he prayed the Sabbath afternoon service late, and that his father would answer after him “Bless the Lord who is blessed” and “Amen,” he responded: “A great sage — let’s see him give him hagbahah.”
In any case, even if they had done this experiment and the Nazir had found it repulsive, one could still say that this is simply a matter of taste (which is connected to personality, as above).
Discussion on Answer
He understood it as an actual prohibition, not as something permitted that may lead to prohibitions. So according to his view, “unavoidable and not intended” does not apply here. But I do not agree with him, and common practice is not like that either. See in section 307 some other rulings of the author that are not accepted. It may also be a matter of context and cultural environment, and not really a dispute.
By the way, I’m not sure he meant an actual prohibition. It is possible that he only wanted to say that these are improper things (in his opinion).
It is hard for me to understand that according to the Shulchan Arukh this is not an actual prohibition, since he wrote that even the printers cause the public to sin.
As for whether this is cultural or not so agreed upon even in his own time, there may be a bit of evidence from what the author of Seder Ha-Dorot wrote about Rabbi Immanuel: “He also composed a commentary on the Torah and a book of songs, although there were people who took issue with him.” And I also think that today one can say that this does not arouse so many problems (even though in many cases the listener to the song may project it onto, or imagine, women he knows), of course in the case of normal people and not people under psychological pressure because of all the stringencies that are added in these matters.
But — and this is a big but — it is hard to come and cast off the yoke of an accepted tradition of hundreds of years of halakhic rulings and reliance on the author, especially for a Sephardi like me, about whom it has been mentioned by all the halakhic decisors from his time until our own that we accepted his rulings.
Hello Rabbi,
If so, if it can be discussed under the category of “unavoidable and not intended,” why did the Shulchan Arukh write in Orach Chayim 307: “Poetic compositions and parables of idle conversation and words of desire, such as the Book of Immanuel, and likewise books of wars, are forbidden to read on the Sabbath; and even on weekdays they are forbidden because of the company of scoffers, and one transgresses ‘Do not turn to the idols’ — do not turn to your own thoughts; and in matters of desire there is also the issue of inciting the evil inclination. And the one who composed them, and the one who copied them, and needless to say the one who printed them, cause the public to sin”?