Essay: Knowledge is the Beginning

The Walter Reade Theater in New York's Lincoln Center is not the sort of cinema where the audience typically reacts vocally to what's happening on screen. Then why the booing, applause, gasps, and tears at last night's screening? Because the movie being shown, Knowledge is the Beginning, is a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more specifically, about the heroic efforts of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said to counteract the ugliness of that conflict with the beauty of music.

Given the worsening situation in the Middle East, their vision is even more remarkable now than at its inception in 1999. Asked to provide music at Weimar, Daniel Barenboim, widely considered one of the greatest musicians active today, responded with a youth orchestra whose members consisted of Israelis and Arabs. Later, the orchestra would happen to make its regular summer home in Seville, a coincidence that was not lost on Edward Said, who emphasized that it was here in Andalusia, one thousand years ago, that tolerance between Muslims and Jews was at its zenith.

The orchestra takes its name, West-East Divan Orchestra, from a poem by Goethe, but does poetry work in real life? The two co-concertmasters sat in front of the camera for an interview, and in an interesting commentary on stereotypes, the one I thought was Arab was actually from Israel, and the guy I thought was Israeli was actually from Lebanon. The Israeli said that he was hopeful that there would soon be peace, and as he spoke, the face of the young man from Lebanon grew more and more tense. Finally, he exploded, "Stop, stop, stop! Can we not talk about peace? Can we just talk about music? I will not participate." He stormed off, and the camera stayed on the face of the Israeli guy, who gestured uncomfortably, swallowing a couple times as though about to speak, and then looking downward.

Another time, a group of Arab guys began discussing the new wall in Palestine with an Israeli girl. They were unanimous in their condemnation. The Israeli girl said, "But really, we have to think, is the wall good or bad?" They looked completely flummoxed that she would say such a thing. One of them, after a pause, said, "Well, of course it's bad because...the discussion must end." And with that, the film cut to the orchestra playing music.

And such music! In another context, Barenboim might be criticized for apparently choosing only warhorses for performance. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Beethoven's Seventh. Tchaikovsky's Fifth. In this context, his decision is exactly right. These musicians face enough controversy back home, and when they come to Seville in the summer, they play only music whose sublime greatness is undisputed.

Their unity in music was obvious. Those two co-concertmasters who couldn't even agree on the need for peace grinned at each other as their fingers ascended higher and higher on the fingerboard during one of Tchaikovsky's most ecstatically joyous climaxes. Barenboim said, "I feel strong, because after two hours of rehearsal, I reduce the level of hate to zero. Maybe afterwards, bang, something happens, but during those two hours, we have peace."

Indeed, the movie canonizes Barenboim, but this is not a criticism. Words do not explain his stratospheric musicianship. He listens to a Palestinian youth orchestra that sounds terrible. After he gets up on the podium, they don't suddenly sound like the Chicago Symphony, but during a couple of his giant, lunging cues, the youngsters' sound acquired a tinge of the stirring impact of the world's greatest orchestras.

His humanity arises seamlessly from his musicianship. He speaks with the same clarity and weight about the illegality of Israeli settlements as about a climax in the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Neither he nor his young musicians suggest that music is somehow frivolous against the context of this conflict. Given the way they cling to it, music has never seemed more important, and non-musicians clearly concur: the Spanish prime minister gave the orchestra Spanish diplomatic passports so that they could perform in the West Bank town of Ramallah in 2005.

If the movie encourages a reverential attitude towards Barenboim, it is no less passionate in its admiration for Edward Said. He provided much the same role for the orchestra as he provided for the Palestinians throughout his all-too-brief life: an intellectual conscience and what Barenboim aptly termed "moral authority." Barenboim's eloquence manifests itself most clearly in gesture and sound, whereas Said impresses with the force of his charisma and the brilliance of his speaking. His every word resonates with truth and profundity such that even speaking spontaneously to a group of students, his pleas for peace and understanding were more convincing and affecting than any lecture.

Yet the movie does not sidestep the controversy its two stars and their young orchestra inevitably generate, even as Barenboim and Said began to be recognized for their efforts. Upon receiving the Wolf Prize in Israel, Barenboim quoted a passage from the Israeli declaration of independence that guaranteed freedom for all, and then asked rhetorically if Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory were in keeping with the spirit of this declaration. Most in the room applauded, but not the Israeli President or a government minister, who took the microphone to chastise Barenboim for "using this podium to attack the state of Israel."

At this point, many in the audience at the screening booed, echoing the boos of some on the screen who fought to drown out the smattering of applause in the room that day. We were particularly horrified when a member of the Knesset quickly drew a cartoon designed to look like the gate of Auschwitz, but reading "Musik Macht Frei" (Music Makes You Free). His explanation to the camera was bone-chilling: "You do not make peace with people who are trying to kill you. You make war with them."

One can easily become discouraged by a political climate in which one Israeli compares another Israeli who reads from the Israeli declaration of independence to a Nazi. Yet Barenboim and his young musicians never let the flag of hope hang limply. For me, the most moving part of the film was during the 2005 concert at Ramallah, surely one of the most profound and dramatic occasions in the entire history of cultural diplomacy.

Before the concert, Barenboim told the camera that the young Arab oboist had broken down many stereotypes for the Israeli musicians, "who had no idea an Arab could play so expressively. A lot of Israelis think Palestinians are car mechanics or plumbers." During the famous oboe cadenza in Beethoven's Fifth, she poured so much expression into every note that I broke down completely. The arch of that soaring line resonated so poignantly that you wondered, in a world where Israelis and Arabs can create such beauty in Israeli-occupied Palestine, how can there not be peace? The filmmaker, Paul Smaczny, wisely cut at that point to Barenboim's address to the audience in which he states: "Of course we know that this concert will not bring peace. We hope to bring the patience, courage, and curiosity to understand the suffering of another."

After the concert came off so well, Barenboim remarked humorously, "The impossible is often easier than the difficult." As Israel and the Arab countries seek the impossible road to peace, I pray that this sentiment may inspire them as well.