The great healing power of musical instruments - The Jewish Chronicle

It is not often that an advert elicits a feeling of horror. But that’s how I felt on watching Apple crushing everything from musical instruments to sculptures in its new iPad Pro advert, which breezily imparts the idea that a 5.1mm-thick piece of machinery can unapologetically erase the need for the likes of pianos, trumpets and paint. Anything, basically, through which human beings express themselves creatively.

Creative expression is a way to heal ourselves from everything from heartache to unspeakable trauma. And that advert got me thinking about the freed hostages, some of whom have needed those very musical instruments to help them in their recovery after months in terrifying captivity at the hands of Hamas terrorists.

One of those hostages – a musician who had before played in a conservatoire – could not live normally until she was reunited with her instrument. Music had been a part of daily life from which she was torn, and a process to draw her back to it allowed her to function once again.

“R feels very alone, rarely talks to others and even to me,” her loved one recounted so devastatingly to the music therapist who helped her. “I have no words to describe to you how much I thank you for returning her to playing and music. I think she secluded herself as part of the post-trauma and the music is really a therapeutic tool for her that gives her motivation to be part of a social group, to open up again and trust others. I believe that returning to part of the routine that was before, especially the music that was a daily part of her life, is the way to treatment and recovery.”

To help children of Israeli kibbutzim who had been evacuated, Galia Biton was one of several music therapists called to gather musical instruments. The children were being treated by a therapist who hadn’t been able to touch his own guitar since he was displaced on October 7.

Once Galia had gathered guitars and keyboards for the children, she observed those who had been evacuated from the south “craving” musical instruments. “It was a saviour for them,” she says.

Songs we hear at significant times of our life have a habit of sticking with us, and Jewish and Israeli music is for many of us an unequivocal part of our identity. For Galia’s elderly displaced patients, such music has powerfully offered “the feeling of a home, even if they’re out of their home” and enabled them to renew and strengthen their sense of Jewish identity.

“They still crave to come back to their kibbutz, and I pray with them that they will come back, but the Israeli and Jewish music really gives a sense of roots,” says Galia, who recommends the brooding and deeply emotive Lament of Be’eri, written by Yigal Harosh and performed alongside the East & West Jerusalem Orchestra.

Nizan Sternbach has been working in a psychiatric ward for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to military service or terrorist attacks, including two survivors from the Nova festival. Her music therapy has involved encouraging patients to bring the songs that they love and connect to, to both sing them and discuss the memories that they bring up. Nizan also encourages patients to improvise with her on musical instruments, before they discuss the experience and whether it has opened up any memory. “This usually brings people to talk about stuff that they either don’t want to talk about or that they fear talking about,” she says. “This defence mechanism is a big hurdle that they have to overcome.”

One of her most unforgettable experiences was with a soldier whose service in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank had broken him. Unable to open up at first, it took music to break down that barrier to healing. “He immediately started crying,” Nizan recalls. “And he started talking.”

When she asked him to let himself go and play the hand pan, a soft-toned percussive instrument that you would typically use for gentle meditative music, he played with an enormous amount of pent-up aggression. “It was obvious that he was still holding all this anger in him. Music-playing really involves all your senses.”

And that’s something that should never be crushed.

Topics:

Music