Yuval Ron: Music as a Path to Wisdom
Miriam Knight: That’s fascinating what you’re doing, in that you are creating with your music and dance a feeling of connectedness as opposed to alienation.
Yuval Ron: That school in India, it’s a unique school, they bring children from four different religions together, even though with great resistance from the families. Muslim kids and Christian kids and Buddhist and Sikh and Hindu kids are studying together. They had songs from the different four religions that are coexisting in that school. And that was wonderful. But, then I went on stage and gave my presentation with my ensemble, and I taught them a song in English about giving love, about sharing light, about teaching peace and leading to harmony. And then I took it a step further to a place that they normally don’t do. I taught them a song that is an old Israeli song about love which I recorded on my CD, Seeker of Truth. And we sing it as a prayer for peace. It’s a song called Erev Shel Shoshanim, but we sing it as shalom-salaam-As a prayer for peace. And originally it was just for Israelis and Palestinians.
But, I did it with the world shalom, salaam, Shanti, which means peace in Hindu, and hallelujah, which it’s a Hebrew word, but to especially engage the Christian kids. And so, it’s one song, one melody using four different words that are sacred words and core words for peace and faith for these four communities. And we got them to sing all together, and the one song brought the oneness, brought the variations together into one. All the dignitaries took notice of that. They noticed that it was something beyond what they normally do. They were very deeply moved, and they asked me if I could come back and if I could go with them to Kashmir. The center of conflict between India and Pakistan is Kashmir. They wanted me to come back next year and to do a big event in Kashmir to try to lower the tensions and encourage the peace.
So, that is the kind of music that we do, the kind of work that we do use music to bring people together.
Miriam Knight: I think that music has really proved itself to be a connector of across divides. And it’s astonishing to me that not more people are doing this.
Yuval Ron: That is one of the programs that we have created for the new foundation, the Inspired Sound Initiative. One of the programs that we are planning to do is once a year programs in Los Angeles where we would pay for people to fly and stay and be in Los Angeles for the training period.
We’re going to handpick talented young artists who are willing to do something with their music and dance. Train them on how we do it, how we program, how we do the business side of things, how we get a nonprofit organization together, how do we fundraise, how we coordinate, how we manage, and how we educate. We are interested in people coming and going out to the world with this training so we are not the only one who are doing it.
