The following remarks were given as the 2024 graduation address at the Mount Academy, a high school in Esopus, New York, founded by the Bruderhof.

I would like to talk to you today about a famous musical experiment that was conducted some years ago: the Stradivarius at the subway.

A writer for the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten, decided to ask the most gifted young musician in America, the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, to play a piece of music at a Washington, DC, subway station at the morning rush hour, and see if anyone noticed. Bell had already been acclaimed as a musical genius at a young age. The violin he would play at the subway was crafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari – bought by Bell for $3.5 million – a Stradivarius specimen that was one of the most exquisite and expensive instruments in the world.

Gene Weingarten describes how Joshua Bell, dressed in a very nondescript, casual manner, sets himself up at the Metro stop, takes out his Stradivarius violin, and begins to play. What happens? The crowd never gathers. Almost everyone rushes by, utterly oblivious to the fact that they have a free, front-row seat to an experience at a proximity that would usually cost thousands of dollars. One of the most famous violinists in the world plays on one of the most expensive violins in the world – and almost nobody notices.

Now here’s what’s interesting. Weingarten reports that, after he published this piece, letters poured in from people who were deeply affected by it – who had cried when they read it. But why? Most people aren’t all that interested in music, certainly not classical music, and if they are, they could buy tickets to attend concerts. But I think what truly bothered them was that they saw the story as symbolic. In Weingarten’s words, the story reminded us that “if we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written – if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that – then what else are we missing?”

The story reminds us that, for so much of our lives, we are focused on material achievement, on success, on getting to work every day, on earning a living. And that can be a very great good. But when that is the only side of ourselves, then we may be neglecting and not even noticing some of the most important aspects of life.

I’d like to take you back to one of the most famous “mounts” in scripture: Mount Sinai in the middle of the desert. There are two stories in the Bible that center on Mount Sinai, and the first is much more famous. That is, of course, the declaration of the Decalogue, when the biblical people of Israel gather around Mount Sinai as God announces the Ten Commandments.

At that moment, if you study the text carefully, you’ll see that God also acts as a musician, because he summons the Israelites to Sinai by sounding a biblical instrument (or at least creating the sound of a biblical instrument) known as the shofar – a ram’s horn. Now, I know that many of you have never seen a shofar, so I’ve brought one from my collection.

The shofar was utilized by Joshua at Jericho. It was used by ancient Israelites in biblical battles, in the marking of holidays, and in the coronation of kings. It’s essentially a biblical trumpet. It’s an instrument at which I’m somewhat proficient, but it’s difficult to sound. And it is loud!

There’s an old joke cited by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a piece he wrote explaining the significance of the shofar, which describes two friends talking late at night at one of their homes. At a certain point the guest asks his friend, the host, “Hey, it’s late. What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” the host answers. “I don’t own a clock or a watch; I don’t have a cellphone either.”

The guest says, “You don’t have a clock in this entire house? How do you know what time it is?”

“Oh, I tell time with that trumpet over there,” the host replies, pointing to a trumpet.

His friend is still confused. “I don’t understand. How do you tell time with a trumpet?”

“Like this,” the host says. He takes the trumpet, opens up the window, and plays a loud series of blasts.

Someone across the street yells out, “Are you out of your mind? It’s three in the morning. Stop playing the trumpet!”

Now, as rabbis note, that’s essentially what’s happening with the shofar in the deserts. God sounds a biblical horn in order to get the Israelites’ attention, to summon them to Sinai, because anyone would immediately be struck by its sound. Believe me, if I stopped at the Washington Metro and blew the shofar, people would stop. They would say, “Hey, what is that?”

And then a few might remember their Bible and would say, “Oh, it’s a shofar.”

And then if I continued playing, a few others might say, “Man, that dude can really play the shofar.”

And then some might say, “He’s the Joshua Bell of the shofar.”

So that’s Sinai; that’s the Ten Commandments. But many years later, the prophet Elijah journeys out to the desert, and he speaks to God at Mount Sinai, the same site but a different time. It’s an age of idolatry, of the worship of false gods. The Israelites are focused on earning a living in the field as they should, but many have turned to serving Baal, the pagan god of rain and thunder, a false god. Elijah has done many impressive miracles himself, but they have not had a lasting impact. And so there at Sinai, God causes Elijah to hear several great thundering sounds – of an earthquake, and of a great flame, and of a mighty wind. But we are told by scripture that this time, in contrast to what happened before, the voice of God was not to be heard amidst the great noise. Originally, we’re told that God spoke the Ten Commandments in a voice thundering above the call of the ram’s horn. But here, God was not in the great noise. Here, God speaks to Elijah in a still, small voice.

What does it mean for God to speak at Sinai in a small voice? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggested that a still, small voice is a sound you can only hear if you are listening for it. God was telling Elijah that great miraculous moments are not enough to sustain faith, that he had to teach the Israelites to listen for the voice of God in their daily life, because, like a Stradivarius at a subway, God’s guidance, the most magnificent sound in the world, can be heard, but only if we listen for it, only if we pay attention to it.

In life, we need to remember the moral instruction first announced at Sinai, the Ten Commandments. But in our own lives, God does not usually thunder forth, sounding a shofar, to get our attention. Rather, in our noisy environment, we need to listen for God’s guidance, for the sound that must be listened for in order for it to be heard.

As independent adults, you’ll be engaged in worldly pursuits, and many of them will be important, vital to the lives that you’ll be building. But in the adventure that is life, there are many distractions and temptations. It is quite a cacophonous world out there. And as you engage in earthly existence, you need to listen beneath the noise for the guidance of heaven.

At times, that ethereal voice will come as a small sound reverberating only through your own self, because in the end your soul is your Stradivarius. It is the instrument through which your conscience, the voice of God, is made manifest. If this is the case, then the story of the Stradivarius at the subway indeed creates a meaningful moment for all of us.

Many years ago, my mother and father went to a concert together at Lincoln Center in New York City. My father had actually never been to a concert before, having spent much of his life in a yeshiva, a rabbinical school where you study scripture and Jewish law.

At the end of the concert, the crowd stood up, applauded, and shouted, “Encore, encore!” until the musicians came out again and played another piece. My father was fascinated. He had never seen an encore before. He said to my mother, “No one ever says, ‘Encore!’ after a shiur [a lecture in scripture].” When a sermon or scripture class concludes, you don’t see the crowd get rapturously to its feet and applaud, “Encore! Encore! Five more minutes of scripture! We demand more word of God! We will not leave until you come back out!” It doesn’t happen.

But in truth, all of life is asking for an encore, for the voice of God, for guidance from his word and his voice. Throughout much of the Hebrew Bible, faith is described not as deriving from seeing, but from hearing. Thus, “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). This teaches us that faith is often like listening to music, like paying attention to a composition, because music at its best can remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, like notes in a composition, part of something transcendent.

Rabbi Sacks put the point this way. He said, “As music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age, in a timeless melody that breaks into time.… Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise.”

Faith teaches us to listen, in other words, for the voice of God in our own lives, which guides us precisely at the moment when we need it most. And this is what you all need to listen for, class of 2024, because there will be times in your lives when the noise of the larger culture will be urging you in one direction, but the sound of scripture will proclaim the proper path.

And that means you are not all that different from Elijah, for you too have been at a mount. Not a mount in the desert, but nevertheless a mount at which many of the distractions of the larger world have been removed. You have been removed – thank God – from the cacophonous climb that is outside. At the Mount Academy, you have been taught to listen for the voice of God. The question facing all of you now is: When you are out in the world, will you continue to listen for it beneath the noise?

This question becomes all the more important at this moment of graduation. The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once spoke at the graduation of his granddaughter. He commented that speakers who give commencement addresses often make statements that sound sophisticated – even inspiring – but are actually not true at all. They are platitudes. For example, we often hear at a graduation: this is not an end, it is a beginning. But this is false, Scalia said, because commencement for high school students marks an end to a certain part of their lives and, yes, the beginning of a very different one:

There is no more significant rite of passage in our society – no more abrupt end to a distinct age of your life – than the graduation from high school and the departure from home that soon follows. You have been living up to now in a moral environment that could be closely supervised by the people that love you most: your parents. They got to know your friends, your teachers, your school, and did what they could to change or improve them when they thought that was for your good. Most of you will be going off to college, which is not a place where your parents can any longer control the influences upon your character, and which is not, by and large, a place where anybody else seeks to exercise that control as well.

As you embark on your lives, what guides you, what you listen for, will impact how you choose to live. And how you choose to live will in turn determine who you will become and how you will be remembered.

After the story of the Stradivarius at the subway became famous, Joshua Bell started getting annoyed because he was now known specifically for this episode instead of for his musical career. Suddenly the most brilliant violinist in America became famous for being “that guy that no one listened to at the subway.”

So Joshua Bell announced that he would be holding a do-over. He would play his Stradivarius at the same site, the same Metro station, but this time with appropriate invitation and preparation. A massive crowd gathered to hear him play, reflecting the fact, at least for a moment, that many had learned to listen to the music beneath the noise.

Each one of you will shape your own legacy, and you will be responsible for how you are known in the world at large. You will be ultimately known for whether and how you made the voice of God, the voice of scripture, manifest in your life; how you listened in all the noise for God’s guidance in the choices you made; and how you impacted others by reflecting God’s call. As you embark on your adult years and advance in life, you will no doubt focus on becoming who you want to be. You’ll be focusing on everyday responsibilities, as indeed you should. But you will also have to choose whether you’ll be willing to stop and listen. This will define your lives and your legacies as men and women of faith. May you achieve every success, and may faith always lend a sense of meaning and music to your lives.

These remarks have been abridged.